6715 Autumn Ridge Dr. Unit 2

Trans Youth Channel

6715 Autumn Ridge Dr. Unit 2

Fort Collins Colorado, 80525

307-274-5516

Program Proposal:

Support Group Programming

This proposal is intended to inform and introduce a program to the Board of directors, management, grant makers, and to the public a new directive at Trans* Youth Channel called the support group program. This is not by any means a legal or final representation of the program but this document is intended to be a very detailed and intricate look at the program as a strong and developed idea for consideration by the board, funding and hiring of personnel for, and implementation for the benefit of the public community that Trans* Youth Channel supports. At this point in time much of this document is subject to change and should be debated on in relevance to the mission statement of Trans* Youth Channel, the board’s vision of the organization, the capacities of funding and hiring for this program, and the long term repercussions of implementing it.

Any considerations, questions, or concerns regarding the support group program can be directed to the program developer (yet to be chosen at this time) or the CEO Samantha Logan at or directly at 307-274-5516.

This proposal is broken down into several parts relevant to the board of directors and higher management in order educate all parties involved on this program. It will start by explaining the vision and structure of this program, and then detailing each step of the programs structure, and finally it will discuss program limitations and later implications of the program in the long term.

Section 1 part 1: Introduction

The Support group program, is at the heart of it an on line program intended for 'closeted' transgender and LGBT+ individuals to meet for support online in a safe, hurdle free environment where the user has complete control over what information is needed and how they will interact with us. This caters to our organization’s main target community (the closeted, under-resourced, stealth, and online LGBT+ community) and offers support group training programming to other organizations by training their volunteers for free in exchange for their time as a facilitator. This program provides live communication with facilitators for the community in a 2 way fashion and in this way it differs largely from TYC’s other programs. This has a lot of benefits for the organization including but not limited to, a larger more personally connected community, a larger volunteer pool, more chances of long term contributions for the organization, a mainstay audience market for the closeted community, focus groups, and more. Additionally by teaching other organization’s volunteers to be professional support facilitators we will open trans* Youth channel’s doors to better partnerships that will permeate ultimately into our partner organization’s target markets and bringing more support group resources to small local communities that need it.

Part 1.2: The Need
Every out and proud LGBT+ individual for better or worse at some point in their lives, for any one of a million reasons has been closeted; unable to express their gender, sexual, or physical identity as they internally identify. This threshold so to speak is typically seen by the 'out' community as someone coming out of the closet and it is a choice, or right of passage in the LGBT+ community. But for many people, youth and Trans* people especially, the closet is much less a threshold you step over, and much more a cliff you have to climb, with hurdles littered across the landscape. The reality is that finding resources to get over those hurdles is hard for 'out' individuals let alone for those still questioning their identities, or those who can’t come out. Trans* Youth Channel wants to receive funding to assist in a major gap or rift in the LGBT+ movement based off of this "closet" misconception that is in desperate need of a solution, but has thus-far been invisible to current LGBT+ organizations. This gap is the invisible community of closeted, stealth, under-resourced, and questioning individuals who can't easily access community resources for a multitude of reasons.

Identifying the need for the invisible community can be routed in the results of those who have failed to come out, in the reasons they are not coming out (their hurdles), and in the anxieties caused by those hurdles. In the Trans* community for instance, disparities in health-care like finding allied and competent doctors or therapists who are qualified to prescribe medications or surgical treatments is unequivocally difficult. In fact according to the national Transgender discrimination survey published by the Transgender equality center, 50% of trans* people surveyed have reported having to teach their medical providers about Transgender care meaning they already had to know more than the medical practitioner about transitioning in the first place(Grant). According to another health report by Tia Zeno, only one in three (34%) LGBT adults with incomes below 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (middle class) were uninsured in 2013 (Zeno). This causes a lot of trouble for access to important medication, psychological treatment, and processing of a Transgender persons through the medical system. The issue compounds itself based on minority identities such as Trans* People of color who experience further discrimination in the health-care, legal, social, and other identity arenas. Trans* individuals under the age of 18 who are in un-accepting families face hurdles regarding religious acceptance, the parent’s right to control medicinal control of their child, and the requirement for therapists to have their parent’s consent to see them. This predicates they must come out to their parents, their parents must be accepting, their parents must agree to the therapist, and hormones have to be issued through the parent’s insurance. Issues of class become a problem when considering the amount of money an average Transgender transition costs (I’ve personally spent a little under half a million over the past 5 years on my own.) and so many more factors will prevent a person from expressing the way they identify.

Because of the disparities and hurdles mentioned above it’s a common story on online trans* forums for someone not to “come out” because they feel it’s impossible. Who could blame them with the cards stacked against them that much? As a result loss of life has become horribly present among the LGBT+ community and I would even go so far as to term it a genocide of LGBT+ people; teens and people of color specifically. According to the national Transgender survey, a staggering 41% of Transgender respondents reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6% of the general population, with rates rising for those who lost a job due to bias (55%), were harassed/bullied in school (51%), had low household income, or were the victim of physical assault (61%) or sexual assault (64%) (Grant). Another study of 350 LGB youth in Canada, the US, and New Zealand found that over 4 out of 10 had considered suicide, and 1 in 3 had attempted suicide. 65% of those who attempted were male youth and 45% of female youth considered their attempt to be related to their sexual orientation (D'Augelli). Even if Suicide weren’t a factor however, LGBT+ hate crimes in Canada have more than doubled (Margaret), the United states has exploded with hate crimes perpetrated by police officers toward the black community (trans people of color put right in the middle of it), Russia has openly outlawed and caused a real genocide of LGBT+ people in the country, and globally we are losing people due to their gender or sexual identities left and right. The inability for the united states to provide health-care, education, accepting communities, open familial systems, religious tolerance, and more is causing obscene fatality rates due to homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths that could easily have been prevented; many of these people hadn’t come out at the time of their deaths such as Leelah Alcorne who was barred from coming out and committed suicide as a result. The invisible community is seen not so much in statistics by way of their lives, but by their death counts.

To combat these statistics many organizations such as all the LGBT+ and Gender Identity Centers, counseling services, the Transgender rights law center, the human rights campaign, GLAAD, and thousands more have sprung up to provide these health-care, legal, social, and community resources as a solution and are largely successful, but one major factor has still been ignored; these organizations are not paying attention to the invisible community. They are not facilitating anonymous contact, nor are they seeking to cater to the closeted community’s needs. While their method is a boon for the communities who can access their resources, their method is simply setting up shop in local areas that are accepting enough to allow an LGBT+ building, putting up a flag, and waiting for LGBT+ and questioning individuals to walk through the door. They are setting up websites, providing resources, and considering this enough to help, but they are directing all marketing efforts towards an already existing and visible community of LGBT+ individuals only.

Much of the way that this is done is for good reason and we do not wish to fault the work of those organizations. The solution 'works' and many of their decisions as to how they will interact with the community involve grant funds, public interest, where the need is, and more. A grant funder would rarely opt to fund an organization whose marketing plan does not involve a community needs assessment, or solid target market statistics so the organization's work with the out community. Grant funders are in fact funding them precisely because the work of these organizations are vital, it is changing the world we live in to be more accepting and it is saving lives. Organizations receiving grants would not go through the trouble of incorporating and advocating for something if weren’t for a readily identifiable need and that is clearly seen in the out community.

The problem we at Trans* Youth Channel see with this approach to solving the large number of suicides and the severely lacking resources in the LGBT+ community, is that setting up shop and waiting for people to cross the threshold to your building is like setting up a coast guard that only searches the close shore with a beaming lighthouse and fishing those you see out of the water. If you’re not sending out rescue boats you are not seeing the millions of invisible people in the dark deep waters who are drowning without help. These LGBT+ organizations are doing little to support the invisible community as the world is now and we as a society are losing many lives who can’t simply swim to shore. We only see the bodies washing up and call it a tragedy.

Understanding why these invisible members remain invisible and what hurdles keep them from coming out is vital to understanding why these statistics are so high because one doesn't kill themselves out of their own internal anxieties but out of the harsh realities around them; the hurdles they face. These hurdles that LGBT+ individuals face in the first half of their journey are many. They largely have to do this alone and any one person could be caught up in anxieties for any one of a million reasons including but not limited to race, religion, their family, financial circumstances, age, class, technological access, cultural standings, ignorance, private emotional issues, public services being revoked, bullying, discrimination and even disability. Not to mention the sheer anxiety of whether they truly understand their identity when making the decision in transitioning or coming out as gay. These anxieties the invisible community face are what leads to those ever-present statistics above and to keep it from happening the invisible community requires resources and support that are not afforded to them where they are. And for a closeted person the search for resources necessary to overcome those hurdles is also far more anxious an endeavor then those who are out.

As it stands in our Internet capable society, every search a questioning individual inputs to Google, every conversation they have on social media, every password or username is recorded and inspected by Internet companies and then those companies seek to publicly cater to those needs. One false step can 'out' a person in the Google “suggested ads” portion of their search query and should they be a youth on a family computer, or friends see that screen, it can be fatal. Because it’s difficult to search for what you need to know to make a proper choice, and you have to risk yourself to learn it when you are in the dark, many fear attaining what is necessary to get over 1 hurdle out of 20. While resources are waiting on the other side in all the LGBT+ brick and mortar organizations, crossing the threshold, either ethereal or physical, is a huge hurdle on its own that many don't, or won't ever make.

This is the invisible community’s catch 22: being unable to attain resources because of the hurdle those resources are needed for. Trans* Youth Channel as an organization has recently decided to make the change from an online resource organization for trans* youth, to bridging that gap between the out LGBT+ organizations and the largely unsupported, under-resourced invisible community. We are committed to identifying hurdles and lowering the anxieties of the invisible community so that identity negotiation becomes easier for them and they can make their choice without external factors holding them back from being themselves.

Trans* Youth Channel has lined out throughout 3 main programs a method of achieving this mission and catering to the invisible community.

1. Our first program, for this proposal is the weekly digest program which seeks to establish a safe and secure, anonymous 2 way communication channel between us and the invisible community, via email, and then provide LGBT+ vetted resources, youtube videos, advice, and content from established partner LGBT+ organizations.
2. A strong support group program is the best way to learn more about the invisible community, while reducing anxieties, allowing them to speak for themselves, and helping their mental health when the health fields can't. While signing up for the support group program is on its own a hurdle, the way in which we will implement this program (also by anonymous email) will drastically reduce the hurdle of contacting an organization for resources, and allow people to beat those hurdles without so much at stake for their perceived or actual identities.

Lastly, we will seek to elaborate on the invisible community's needs while supporting them with a content creation program intent on shining a light on this gaping issue in the LGBT+ movement and educating the public on issues related to it. This will include original content created by Trans* Youth Channel on all relevant subjects and each endeavor will be a fully established project such as a 52 week video series on transitioning.

The need for programs like this is self-evident in the extreme amounts of suicides due to people's hurdles, their anxieties, and the resulting depression when they can't get over them. There is NO currently existing support group platform that seeks to work on a weekly basis, is not simply a chat box, and allows for organizations and the closeted community to interact anonymously over an inter personally competent platform as video. If Trans* Youth Channel moves forward with this program we would be the first to do so, and the very necessary services would be welcomed in our community. We already have a quarter of invisible community survey respondents subscribed to the email digest, and 4500 subscribers to our YouTube channel for the content creation department so the demand is equally strong as the need. Funding our support group program, would bring never before seen support, to the power of the LGBT+ movement.
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References:

D'Augelli, A. R., Hershberger, S. L., & Pilkington, N. W. (2001). Suicidality patterns and sexual orientation-related factors among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youths. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 31 (3), 250-265.

Grant, Jaime M., Lisa A. Mottet, Justin Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody L. Herman, and Mara Keisling. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Washington: National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2011.

Margaret, Robinson. "Fact Sheet: Because LGBT Health Matters." (2013). Rainbow Health Ontario. Web. 18 July 2015. < LGBT Youth Suicide.pdf>.

Zeno, Tia, Katherine Warren, and John Snyder. "Outreach and Enrollment for LGBT Individuals: Promising Practices from the Feild."ASPE Research Brief(2015). Web. to an external site.)