The Aged Care Act 2024 promotes high-quality residential aged care, which includes “kindness, compassion and respect” for each person’s “life experiences, self-determination, dignity, quality of life, mental health and wellbeing”. For gender and sexually diverse people this requires a deep and intersectional understanding of both the adversities faced across the life course and the strengths and resources that are sustained. It also requires a critical examination of the structures, cultures, processes and relationships that facilitate inclusion in residential aged care. This presentation shares initial findings from the five-year Rainbow Inclusive Aged Care Project, funded by the Medical Research Future Fund. The participatory research project is staged as an Appreciative Inquiry and, in this presentation, we report on Stage 2: Discover, focusing on what enables inclusive care for gender and sexually diverse people in residential aged care. This stage included fieldwork research (100 hours of observations in 12 residential aged care communities and 51 interviews with residents, staff and visitors) conducted with LGBTQ+ co-researchers, as well as a national survey of 648 aged care workers, volunteers, professional visitors and students on placement. Early insights include the need for broad intersectional inclusion strategies, including cultural safety, as well as specific rainbow-inclusive strategies such as understanding stigma and discrimination, navigating disclosure and safety, visibility and leadership, being an ally, training and awareness, and conveying respect for our shared humanity. Implications for the development of a rainbow-inclusive model of care are discussed.