Our Impact

Youth and Families:

When we moved into our new building in downtown Albuquerque last year, we opened our first ever youth drop in space that has a place to hangout with games and activities, gender affirming clothing items, and a dedicated youth case navigator to support our youth and their families. We even started a new support group this year for our young adults, ages 21-24, and the participation has been incredible. We have been taking our youth on field trips and they recently went to the Santa Fe Opera, the Natural History Museum, and rented a private pool for a Trans Youth swim event. Our families continue to be great supporters of their transgender children and our parents support group recently designed a new clothing closet for our youth. It has brought a lot of joy to everyone to see the youth pick out their own clothes in a safe space free of judgement, where they feel safe enough to be themselves. 

Pride Events and State-Wide Reach:

In June of this year we went to fourteen big pride events and countless community events throughout the corners of our state. From Farmington to Portales, Navajo Nation and even the first ever Sandoval County pride, our staff showed up to make sure our transgender communities throughout the state know we are here to support them. We have begun sending satellite support funds to people engaging in our work in Las Cruces and Clovis too! It’s important that we do what we can to keep New Mexico one of the safest places for LGBTQ people in the country!

Harm Reduction and Eggstravaganza:

In April of this year, we hosted our 2nd annual Punk Rock Eggstravaganza. This was an all-ages punk show at our center along with a youth egg hunt, raffles, community resources, and HIV prevention work conducted by our Harm Reduction team. We had so many people come out and it brought a lot of joy to our community to see transgender people of all ages come together to celebrate music and HIV prevention in such a creative way. Some of the punk bands were transgender youth who wanted to perform for the very first time! We were also able to hand out Narcan, an overdose reversal drug, to over 40 people and help support overdose prevention here in Albuquerque. We believe that all people, regardless of status, deserve kindness, dignity and respect and do what we can to keep our community safe. 

Community Power Building

We have started hosting “Pizza and Power” events every couple months as social gatherings for our community members. In the last couple of years, our federal political climate has become increasingly hostile towards members of our trangender community and people have been asking for social opportunities to meet together to increase our feelings of community safety and belonging. These events usually have around 50 people in attendance and the feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive. At our gathering in June this year, we collaborated with ORCA, the Older Rainbow Community Association, to begin building bridges between the older and younger generations of our community members. We plan to continue hosting these “Pizza and Power” events every month, so maybe we will see you at one of them!