Stonewall Youth

Your donation: 

*Supports rural queer and transgender youth

*Ensures access to weekly services for hundreds of young people throughout the year

*Enables youth to attend our free and enriching programs like our yearly Queer Rock Camp and quarterly Stonewall Activism Saturday School (SASS)

*Invests in the leadership skills and employment of young LGBTQQIA leaders

*Brings together youth and elder queer community members in solidarity and connection

*Helps keep LGBTQQIA youth accessing the services and support they need to stay housed, fed, healthy and in school.

Recently while recording stories with youth and community members for our Queer Oral History Project, one of the youth who accesses our regular services was asked to share about a pivotal point in her life. She said it was the moment she found Stonewall Youth and Queer Rock Camp. Finding this space to be and celebrate herself with other community members helped her to strengthen her voice and deepened her connection to her queer identity and herself. For just $25, you can sponsor a young person like this to access our crucial community space and services.

Stonewall Youth envisions a community in which all queer, gender variant, and gender non-conforming youth have a full spectrum of choices regarding their bodies, self-expression, and legal rights.

At Stonewall Youth we are working to be more and more youth led at all times, including currently developing a strategic plan for our youth leadership over the next 3 years. We believe in the strength of client led services. A 19 year old designed our outreach, two high school aged youth sit on our Board, our last hiring committee was mostly youth and we pay our youth employees the same hourly wage as our two directors.

We are a stand alone nonprofit with a 22 year history of service and are rare in the landscape of LGBTQQIA youth services as a grassroots independent organization that is mostly serving rural queer youth. Because our organization is small and independent, most of your dollar goes directly to services with very little supporting adminstration or overhead costs.

We offer weekly drop and support group activities for youth in SW Washington and offer seasonal programming for youth all over the state and even country. Some of these programs include:

Every week youth come to our space twice a week or more to create art together, get social services resources and referrals, participate in workshops or leadership development or get the peer support they need during our weekly support group.

Our youth Speaker's Bureau collective are our training and education wing who go out into our community to educate other youth, educators, social service providers and community members about oppression, queer history, competent service and community issues.

Every summer for 4 years queer youth have come from all over the country to participate in our weeklong Queer Rock Camp summer camp where youth join together in amplification of identity, self and community!

Our yearly Drag Show is a local favorite with our youth writing, designing, directing and starring in flamboyant and fabulous stage shows. It has been a yearly success for almost 15 years now and this year is scheduled to be about childhood stories remade, such as "Horton Hears a Homo."

Three times a year we host Stonewall Activism Saturday School, a youth led day of collective education and activism. Our last theme was "Bodies behind Bars" about LGBTQQIA community in the prison industrial complex and our upcoming May SASS will address Between Borders: colonization and identity.

These are our values:

Social Justice – Social Justice is a process, not an outcome, which

1. seeks fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities, and responsibilities
2. challenges the roots of oppression and injustice
3. empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential
4. builds social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action.