Black Trans-led and Black Trans-serving organizations and initiatives
With the convergence of Pride Month and widespread protests against white supremacy and police brutality, it’s important to elevate, donate, and support Black transgender leaders at this time. So often these frontline freedom fighters and liberation seekers aren’t given their just due. Let’s change that.
This is an evolving, community-sourced list of organizations and initiatives that are led by and/or predominantly serve Black transgender, gender nonbinary (NB), and gender-nonconforming (GNC) people. If you know an effort that isn’t included in the list, please comment below.
ABOLITION + CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM
BreakOut!: seeks to end the criminalization of LGBTQ youth (13–25). (New Orleans)
Solutions Not Punishments Collaborative (SNaPCo): builds safety within the Trans community through building up collective embodied leadership and political power. (Atlanta)
TGI Justice Project: challenges the human rights abuses committed against transgender, gender variant, and intersex people in prisons, jails, detention centers, and beyond. (California)
ADVOCACY
Black Trans Advocacy: works with communities in the U.S. and across the globe to foster diversity, inclusion, and equality for all people and is lead by the Black Transmen, Inc., Black Transwomen, Inc, and Black Trans MX
MPJI: organizes, advocates, creates an intentional community to heal, develops transformative leadership, and promotes collective power.
My Brother Too: enhances the quality of transmasculine lives, develops educational panels and safe spaces for the entire transgender community.
Next Generation Men of Transition: provides community, support, and visibility platforms to minority men of transition.
New York Transgender Advocacy Group: advocates for more inclusive gender-based policies that benefit Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming/Non-Binary (TGNCNB) individuals through building community leaders, educating practitioners, and influencing policy makers.
Queer and Trans People of Color: STL: strives to gain equality, accessibility, justice, compassion, understanding and a safe space for all those who identify as QTPOC. (St. Louis)
R.O.A.D. (Reuniting of African Descendants): a grassroots initiative invested in equity, collective growth, and healing for LGBTQIA+/SGL people of African Descendants.
TAJA’s Coalition: provides services that identify and fulfill the immediate needs of transgender women of color through the lens of social equity by increasing education and understanding of the transgender experience to the general public, eliminating violence, creating employment opportunities and a leadership pipeline, and supporting existing programs that provide services to transgender women.
TAKE Resource Center: focus on issues such as discrimination in the workplace, housing advocacy, support for sex workers, providing trans-friendly services, and working to alleviate the many other barriers. (Birmingham, AL)
TQPoC Charlotte: connects, centers, and lifts up trans, queer, gender nonconforming folks of color in Charlotte.
Trans Masculine Advocacy Network: uplifts trans masculine people of color by providing extensive networking and referral services that address the needs of its members through weekly gatherings, special events, and directed activities. (Philadelphia, PA)
Transcending Barriers: empowers TGNC community through organizing with leadership building, advocacy, and direct services so that lives can be changed and a community uplifted. (Georgia)
WeCareTN: offers advocacy, outreach, and programming. (Tennessee)
ART, CULTURE, & MEDIA
Black Trans Femmes in the Arts: creates spaces for the production and preservation of Black trans art and culture by building community with Black trans femme artists and providing them with the resources and support necessary to thrive.
Black Trans Media: addresses the intersection of racism and transphobia through community, education, and media.
Garden of Peace Project: centers black trans & queer youth, elevate and empower the narratives and lived experiences of black youth and their caretakers, and guides revolutionary spaces of healing and truth through art, education, and mentorship. (Pittsburgh, PA)
House of Pentacles: a film fellowship program and production house for and by Black trans youth ages 18–35. (Durham, NC)
Music Freedom Dreams: partners with organizations, individuals, and movement builders to develop art, spaces, products, and campaigns through strategic education and interventions on Black queer-, trans-, and woman-identified experiences.
Southern Fried Queer Pride: empowers Black queer and QTPOC centered communities in the South through the arts. (Atlanta/Southern U.S.)
TransLash: uses the power of personal narratives to address the ignorance at the heart of trans erasure. TransLash’s goal is to shift the cultural understanding of what it means to be trans and help end anti-trans hate.
DIRECT SERVICES
Baltimore Safe Haven: provides compassionate harm reduction and upward mobility services, advocacy, and community engagement that is respectful, non-judgmental, and affirms and honors individual power and agency. (Baltimore)
Brave Space Alliance: creates and provides affirming, culturally competent, for-us by-us resources, programming, and services for LGBTQ+ individuals. (Chicago)
Casa Ruby: the only bilingual LGBTQ+ non-profit community resource center the provides social services and programs catering to marginalized communities including immigrants. (Washington, D.C. metro area)
Southeastern Transgender Resource Center: connects our trans community with housing, to providing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, to providing school supplies to trans families and youth. (Hampton Roads, VA)
Transgender Awareness Alliance: assists trans people with getting a legal name change, gender marker change, provide support for healthy living, and seek equality and equity through activism. (South Carolina)
ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
The Knights and Orchids, Inc. (TKO): builds the power of the TLGB community for African Americans to obtain our dream of justice and equality through group economics, education, leadership development, and organizing cultural work. (Rural Alabama + South)
The Transgender District: stabilizes and economically empowers the transgender community through ownership of homes, businesses, historic and cultural sites, and safe community spaces. (San Francisco)
The Next Generation Project: distributes resources to Black and Brown Trans folks in need. Through donations and crowdfunding campaigns, it raises money to provide trans people with access to self-care and mental health services.
FOOD SECURITY
FrootFly: founded to create a fresh fruit distribution resource for BIPOC, individuals with health immune deficiencies, youth, elders, and everyone open to embracing and honoring the natural goodness the Earth provides.
The Okra Project: a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home-cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources to Black Trans People wherever we can reach them. (NY + NJ)
FUNDS
Black Trans Fund: the first national fund in the country dedicated to uplifting and resourcing Black trans social justice leaders.
Black Trans Travel Fund: a grassroots collective, providing Black transgender women with financial and material resources needed to remove barriers to self-determining and accessing safer travel options.
For The Gworls Emergency Relief Medical Fund: raises money on behalf of Black trans people to help them pay for rent and gender-affirming surgeries.
Trans Justice Funding Project: supports grassroots, trans justice groups run by and for trans people in the United States, including U.S. territories.
Trans United Fund: combines strategic planning, organizational development, and technical assistance to support trans-inclusive efforts at the local, state, and federal levels.
HEALTH + WELLNESS
Alexander Shelton Yoga: the community yoga practice of organizer and social entrepreneur Alexander Shelton. (Cincinnati, OH)
Black Trans Circles: develops the leadership of Black trans women through healing justice spaces to work through oppression-based trauma and incubates community organizing efforts to address anti-trans murder and violence. (South + Midwest)
Decolonizing Fitness: a collective birthed from the need for folks (i.e. fat, trans, queer, people with disabilities, people over 65) who have historically not felt welcomed in fitness spaces to have better access to inclusive services.
Flower Boi Support: a peer support group for masculine folks to unlearn toxic masculinity in order to uplift and empower each other. As well as to better love and support the femmes in our lives.
Griffin-Gracy Educational Retreat and Historical Center (House of GG): creates safe and transformative spaces where members of our community can heal — physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually — from the trauma arising from generations of transphobia, racism, sexism, poverty, ableism and violence, and nurture them into tomorrow’s leaders. (South)
Liberation Medicine School: a movement to build an autonomous healthcare system that supports Afro-LGBTQI+ healing and liberation.
The Mahogany Project: cultivates multi-intersectional spaces that center the Black diaspora while decreasing social isolation, stigma, and breaking barriers of social injustice. (Houston)
SpiritWerks: the healing practice of multi-disciplinary artist Spirit McIntyre, who uses original music, intuitive Reiki work, and compassionate facilitation to provide healing, entertainment, and self-empowerment to individuals and communities.
Thrive SS: offers support, advocacy through community mobilization and improved health equity to those living and thriving with HIV. (Atlanta)
HOUSING
Gays and Lesbians in a Transgender Society, Inc. (GLITS): advocates and educates to ensure health, wellness, and inclusion of transgender people in our society and address the stigmatization and criminalization of trans people because of anti-prostitution and anti-sex work laws.
House of Tulip: an initiative to provide zero-barrier housing to trans and gender-nonconforming people in need of a safe place to stay while growing the supply of affordable housing. (New Orleans)
My Sistah’s House Memphis: fosters sustainability and security for the most vulnerable of the transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (TLGBQ) communities — providing emergency housing, advocacy, and multipronged resource assistance delivered by and for gender non-conforming (TGNC) people of color. (Memphis, TN)
Princess Janae Place: helps people of trans experience maximize their full potential as they transition from homelessness to independent living. (NYC)
Trans Housing Atlanta Project: provides safe housing and appropriate supportive services to TGNC individuals who are homeless or seeking intermediate or long-term housing. (Atlanta)
Trans Housing Coalition: establishes long-term housing for trans people, particularly Black trans women, who are experiencing chronic homelessness, and ensures they have the wraparound services necessary to thrive. (Atlanta)
MIGRANT JUSTICE
Black LGBT Migrant Project: builds and centers the power of Black LGBTQIA+ migrants to ensure the liberation of all Black people through community-building, political education, creating access to direct services, and organizing across borders.
Caribbean Equality Project: empowers and advocates for Caribbean immigrants and undocumented asylum seekers. (NYC)
