Elevated Access

Over half of states have severely restricted or banned healthcare for trans kids, so many families find themselves having to cross state lines to get their kids the healthcare they need. But there is a group of unlikely heroes, dedicated to the belief that access to healthcare saves lives and that access to that care is a right. Elevated Access is a network of volunteer pilots who use their wings to protect bodily autonomy and dignity.  Today, Sara talks with Mike Bonanza, the executive director and founder behind this quiet, radical form of care that is making the impossible possible—one flight at a time.

Links From the Show: 

• Visit Elevated Access
• Get help from Elevated Access
• Get involved with Elevated Access
• Join Mama Dragons today

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Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here. 

With 27 states that have severely restricted or banned healthcare for trans kids, so many families find themselves having to cross state lines to get help and healthcare that their kids need. And because we're all concerned about the attacks on healthcare that continue to come from the federal government, so many of us lie awake at night wondering if getting that healthcare will get even harder. But there is a group of unlikely folks dedicated to the belief that access to healthcare saves lives and access to that care is a right. I'm talking about pilots. This is the work of Elevated Access, a network of everyday volunteer pilots who use their wings to protect bodily autonomy and dignity. 

Today, we get to sit down with the Executive director and founder of Elevated Access, the person behind this quiet, radical form of care, and talk about how they're making the impossible possible one flight at a time. I'm honored to introduce Mike Bonanza to our Mama Dragons community. Mike, welcome to In the Den. It is so good to have you with us. 

MIKE: Happy to be here, Sarah, thank you. And thank you for the kind words. I haven't cried today so maybe that's a little bit. 

SARA: Okay, well, we can cry together because the work that you're doing is just truly extraordinary and so very impactful. I was just delighted and amazed, really, to read about it. So, as the founder, can you tell us what was the moment or the story that sparked the creation of Elevated Access?

MIKE: So as a pilot, I had been kind of on a journey to find a social justice cause that I could put the skill and resource that I have to work. And it was really a long journey. And it was finally in 2020, 2021, after George Floyd's murder, my wife and I were trying to figure out what we could do to resist racism and fight against racism, because voting didn't seem like it was moving the needle enough. Protesting wasn't moving the needle enough. Donating, all those things are things we need to do, but it also, there are people being harmed every day, and so she had done an anti-racism workshop with one of her cousins was a facilitator, facilitating groups of white folks to talk about our role in white supremacy and then racism and really to get into what we could do to break down some of that stuff. And she said, “You should do this workshop too.” You know, we were trying to find other avenues, and this is really when anti-racism was starting to enter a lot of vocabulary for white folks. And so I thought, “Yeah, I'll do this.” And it was in that space where I learned about reproductive justice, which is a social justice framework that says that every person has the right to control their own body and their own future, the right to have children, the right to not have children, and the right to raise children in safe and healthy environments. And it was created by a small group of black and brown women, in the 1990s to really get past this – for them – it was getting past the pro-choice conversation, because it didn't really capture all the issues that people might face. And so this is these four principles are what they came up with, and seen in those at the time, kind of the first thing that came to my mind was abortion but also within that framework, you can see trans rights and gender-affirming care within those too, whether you're a trans adult or you're parent of a trans kid, because safe and healthy children, controlling your own body, your own future, still fits within all that. But I reached out to an organization that does practical support to help people travel for abortion that's been around now for over 10 years. And I said to them, “I'm a pilot. I think I might be a helpful resource. I'll volunteer to do IT security and privacy work for you. But I want to have this conversation about pilots, so you can tell me if it's a good idea, bad idea, lame idea, boring idea, dangerous idea, whatever it might be, or to tell me, like go do something.” And I took their executive director and another board member for a flight. And “Okay, it sounded like a good idea when we've talked about it before, but now that we've done a flight, like please go do this, make this organization happen.” And here we are, about 4 years on from that flight that we have in an organization now that's flown 3,000 people with approaching 500 volunteer pilots on our roster all over the country. 

SARA: That's incredible. And so when you really took off with the organization in 2021, it's interesting that this is also kind of right at the beginning of the early fight around healthcare for trans youth. Like, that was really kind of a flashpoint in a lot of state legislatures. It was really starting to take hold. At what point did your work really reach to kind of expand into that community?

MIKE: It was around November or December of 2021, I was still working on the planning for the organization at that point. And my wife, she has an online presence, and she's kind of informally accumulated some trans kids, so to speak, from folks who maybe weren't being as received by their parents as they would like to be. Or maybe had lost a parent, or something like that. And so she was offering support with them, and she was thinking about this bigger, broader perspective. And she was like “You should do gender-affirming care too.” And in 2021, I actually – every time people are like, “Oh, we're not sure how we really feel about trans rights; this seems like such a new thing.” It's like, any restrictions around gender-affirming care, none of them existed before 2021. There were zero before 2021. And I think that's an indication that this was purely about discrimination and hate, not about healthcare or anything else, and so yeah. After she brought it up, I was like, it still fits in this framework, and people are already having to travel for care. And so I was like, “Let's do it.” 

SARA: So for that community, for trans folks, for families with trans kids, can you tell us a little bit about the nuts and bolts and how it works? 

MIKE: Sure. Yeah. So for most people we always find what works best is when people are coming through one of our dozens and dozens of partner organizations that we've onboarded – and that includes local organizations, everything from, like, a PFLAG chapter, or an LGBT center, to a little bit bigger organizations, like Campaign for Southern Equality and others who are supporting, families with trans kids' tent down in Texas, others – and so they'll send us a referral for somebody that they're working with, that they're supporting. But for also, I should add in there too, we also work with a number of orgs that are doing relocation work for folks that are trying to move to safer spaces. And so they'll send us a referral that we'll work with them to get the person where they need to go. But we do also, recognizing that, again the ecosystem around abortion has had decades to build itself out and around these issues for gender-affirming care, especially for trans youth, it takes time to build that kind of infrastructure of organizations and interconnected and stuff. And it's coming along, but it's still not where it is with abortion. And so, we do have a self-referral process that we use with folks that have a doctor's appointment scheduled and need support to travel to their doctor's appointment. 

SARA: Yeah, I was curious, again, I'm hung up on the logistics a little bit, because I'm thinking about the parents and families in my own circles, some of whom are traveling great distances to get their kids care out of state, like, 8 hours or more in the car. But these are repetitive appointments, right? Unlike abortion care, which is a one-time, one-and-done kind of appointment. So do you work to support ongoing care for folks? 

MIKE: Yeah, we do. Certainly because we know people go through different circumstances and stuff. And one of the things I always tell our partners when we onboard them is that we trust them to recognize that we're a finite resource, whether it be our pilots or whether it be, we do buy airline tickets, too, for the longer distances, or to back up our pilots around maintenance and weather and those kinds of things. And so our partners understand that we're not an infinite resource. But we also tell them when they ask us, like, “Well, how many can we send you in terms of referrals?” And we'll say, “How many do you think it might be, like, in the first month?” And then they'll give us a number, like “That's no problem.” We've only had one partner where we had to have a conversation, like, “Hey, this is a little bit too much all at once.” But it was a conversation, not like a, “Hey, you're done,” kind of a thing. And so we just try to do as much as we can with the resources that we have. And certainly when it comes to the way our process works too, is about, I think the last time I looked, about 25% of the requests we get don't turn into a flight, and that might be because the passengers change their mind about traveling. Maybe they decide to go with another means of travel. Maybe something got rescheduled. There's any number of reasons. Also includes, though, if we can't get a volunteer pilot and a small aircraft travel’s the only way they could have gotten there. But we have certainly people that we've flown multiple times, even around abortion, we've had somebody – I had a passenger tell me once, like, “Oh yeah, this is actually my second time flying with you all.” I'm like, okay, here we go. 

SARA: That's incredible, and it sounds like you've built out a nationwide network of pilots now. 

MIKE: Yeah, we have pilots in every state except for Wyoming and Vermont. And we've done flights into, out of, and over all 50 states, including Alaska, even Wyoming, where we don't have any pilots and we've also done, some with some of our airline support, done flights with Puerto Rico as well. 

SARA: Wow, that's amazing. So I imagine in all of this, it is just so very emotionally fraught for people in these heightened moments when their healthcare is threatened, when it's so hard to access it and all of the sort of attacks from state legislatures and the federal government feels really fraught. I'm curious, how are your pilots prepared to help and support passengers, and maybe create some sense of safety and support during their trip? 

MIKE: So, as you can imagine, if people are needing support to get travel for care, there's a good chance they probably have never flown on an airplane before, definitely not on a small airplane before. And so with our pilots, the first priority, of course, is safety. So if there's something they need to do in order to keep the flight safe, that maybe is a discomfort for the passenger they'll unfortunately have to make those kinds of decisions. But, like when I talk with my passengers, I'm asking them, like “Have you ever flown on a small plane before? Are you nervous at all about flying on a small plane?” And if it's they're worried about turbulence, so I'll ask them like, “Do you know what turbulence is or would you like me to explain what it is to help you feel a little bit less fear of not just the unknown from it?” For other people, they'll say they're afraid of heights. And I say, “I'm afraid of heights too.” And then they wonder how a pilot can be afraid of heights. And so really just doing everything we can to support folks kind of make sure they feel safe. I even had passengers, too, typically I'll ask them if they would like to sit next to me in the front seat and maybe fly the plane a little bit, too, just so they can again, see they have a little bit of control there, too. The vast majority of people that we've flown, what we see most often is just a sense of relief, because they've already overcome so many barriers to get to the point that they're actually on their way to care finally that, the kind of, we don't see a lot of the stress around the thing that they're traveling for. Now that said, I've had passengers that certainly were feeling a little bit more, and I'm not there, like, as a pilot, I don't know what they're traveling for. Our pilots don't know why they're traveling, and so it's really if somebody just says something. And so we just tell our pilots to meet people where they are. You know, if you have the capacity beyond operating the flight to talk with people, by all means, please do so. And we just see pilots just going above and beyond. Like, we had a passenger, once they were traveling halfway across the country, and had taken a relay of multiple flights to get them where they needed to go because of the distance. And they realized when they got to their final destination that they had left their cell phone on the second pilot's airplane. And they didn't know where they were supposed to go, who they were supposed to call, those kinds of things. And so the pilot says, “Don't worry about it. I'll get in touch with Elevated Access. We'll get it figured out. But for now, if you want, you can come with me. My wife's cooking dinner. You can have dinner at our house and then I'll take you wherever you need to go.” And that's the kind of thing that our pilots do is just really sticking up for people, and making sure that they feel supported, and even if they don't know what the person's what kind of care somebody's going for, help them to feel understood that they shouldn't have to go through all this just to get healthcare. 

SARA: Yeah, that's true. And I read on your website that you do some training with licensed social workers to help your pilots negotiate what can be a really fraught moment for people. 

MIKE: That's something that I actually expected when I started Elevate Access to be a much more common thing that pilots would need, or want. I think we've had just 2 or 3 pilots over the course of those 3,000 flights that were like, “Hey my passenger was upset about some things that they were going through, and not related to the flight, and just the pilot just wanted to have somebody to talk to, to work through with their own feelings about the situation. So yeah. 

SARA: That's lovely. I love the story about the cell phone, and I got a little teary with the pilot who invited their guest over for dinner. That's really sweet. Any other meaningful stories with the privacy owner that you can share that really kind of captures some of what you and your pilots do? 

MIKE: So one flight I did for a trans woman, it was an early morning flight, and I didn't know how anxious she was, or anything like that. And I didn't know what the weather was necessarily going to be like. So I was like, why don't you sit in the back seat, and I'll sit in the front seat and we just chatted along the way for the flight. And it was the same day round trip where I flew her back home afterwards. And on our way there, though, she said, “Oh yeah, I play Flight Simulator on my computer at home for fun.” I'm like, “Oh, really, on the way back, you're going to sit up front with me, so you can fly the plane a little bit.” I actually had the opportunity to fly with her again a couple months later for a follow-up visit. And once we took off and got to cruise altitude, she flew the hour-long flight herself all the way over to where we were. And then I did the landing and stuff. And so it wasn't just traveling for care. But it was also like an opportunity for joy. We have passengers, we had one passenger just say they felt like Beyonce after their flight. We didn't get this going to really be a fun thing, it's really just the practical side of getting people where they need to go. But if we can give people some joy along the way, even better. 

SARA: I love those stories. And I hadn't really thought about that, because of course, I'm picturing, right, the stress, and the emotion, and then getting on a small plane, and that feels very different than flying in a commercial plane, and all of that. It didn't even occur to me that actually there could be some real delight and joyful experience in that moment. And including, I love that feeling like Beyonce on your way to your doctor's appointment. 

MIKE: And actually, I'll even add, too, is that a lot of people that are nervous about air travel, and they've been on airlines before, the things that make them nervous about airline travel, like the heavy acceleration on takeoff, or the extreme braking that they do when they land, our small planes don't have that kind of power, so it's actually most of the time when I land, I don't even use the brakes, I just let it roll to a stop. And so those things, like, just make it that much more enjoyable, too, for folks that maybe have an airline experience but have never flown on a small plane before, in a lot of ways, it's even better. 

SARA: Yeah, it's beautiful. How do you find pilots, or how do pilots find you? 

MIKE: So in the early days, there was a lot of social media and media coverage, and so we kind of had, one of our main reasons that we would do media stories in the first couple years was that every time we would have a story published, we'd see 20 or 30 pilots would sign up after they'd read that story. As we go on, of course there's a lot more things for people to be concerned about and worried about in the United States right now. And a lot of people, too, I'm sure, are like me, where it's like, need to take breaks from the news cycle. And so what we do for a lot of our pilot recruitment these days, what we get most of our new pilot recruits from, is there are some big national events that we attend. There's one in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which has half a million people attend there every year. And almost one in eight of all small airplanes is at this event in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during the year. And so we go there. And I think we recruited 30 or 40 pilots there over the course of the week. Plus met a lot of other supporters and other folks. There's a similar event in Florida. But then we also go to, we call them kind of affinity group conferences through the course of the year. So we go to Women in Aviation, the National Gay Pilots Association, which is broadly LGBT. We also do the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals, Latino Pilots Association, all these different organizations that focus on different segments of aviation to try to recruit as many pilots as we can. And those have been pretty effective, that we always walk away with renewed energy plus a good list of pilots that started their process to get volunteering for us. 

SARA: I love that, that's great, and a good reminder that there are so many related organizations out there that are invested in this kind of work, but in each independent field, too. I really appreciate hearing always about the LGBTQ Aviation Association and real estate agents and in all of the various sectors of life and work. That's really fantastic. So, I'm going to do a little PSA for a moment to our Mama Dragons community here. If you, if our families, have a pilot in them, or if you know some pilots, we'll make sure to put the links to Elevated Access in our show notes so you can send some folks directly there. 

MIKE: Yeah, please do. Yeah, and I think it's, when we talk to our pilots, a lot of people get kind of anxious about, “Oh, what am I signing up for?” Because they feel like it's like an expectation. But one of the things we tell our pilots, like we have pilots that have been on our roster for three years, have never done a flight, and they might feel some shame or guilt about that. And I'm like, “It's okay, it's you still signed up to do this and support us, and so the fact that you haven't done a flight is not a problem, and we know that someday the stars will align with your schedule, airplane availability, weather, all those kinds of things, and you'll be able to do a flight, and we'll celebrate that, whether you've done one flight, or done 20 flights in that same time. And so just know that we see you for the capacity that you have and the opportunity that you have, and we'll just meet you where you are.” 

SARA: That's beautiful. It's such a good reminder for all of us who are involved in advocacy work, in whatever form it is, that, both taking breaks and taking care of ourselves. We've been so focused on building these networks of support and just making sure they're there. And inevitably, it's going to land. But you're also keeping that network together, just by having said yes, you're part of, like, making sure there's no gaps. And that's a really important reminder, I think, for so many of us. I think sometimes we volunteer for things, and we don't hear, and just remembering that it's important that we said yes in the first place. 

MIKE: And I repeat to people, especially this year, is that resistance during times like this, one, starts with community. But, two, every little thing that somebody can do is meaningful. And so, like, even getting signed up but not doing a flight yet, that's meaningful. Subscribing to a newsletter, donating $5, resharing something on social media, going to a protest with a good sign that gets some laughs and thumbs-ups from people, whatever it might be, and just telling people you see them and understand that they're going through some stuff, and you wish they weren't, but you're doing something to try to make it different. And so that's how we survive times like this, is with community. That's how we make change in the long term is staying together like that. And eventually all that stuff will add up, and they won't be able to stop it anymore. 

SARA: Yes, thank you. Yes, that's amazing. That is exactly what I try to remind myself and my community about all the time. Have you noticed a shift either in demand or in the way that you have to operate with all of the sort of shifting laws and restrictions and things that continue to come out of the federal government? 

MIKE: So, as you can imagine, we constantly monitor what's going on with the legal landscape and we have attorneys that we work with to help us do that. And we've done – when I said about how I started as doing IT security and privacy work for that other organization, as you can imagine, security and privacy really are important to me, and are really baked into our culture and process. And so when we get a referral from a partner, one, we don't ask for any information about the passengers at that stage. All we get is like where they're going, when they need to go, how many of them there are, any times that are important. But we don't want to know why they're traveling, because we don't need to. And then when we get a pilot lined up, then we'll just ask for a first name and a phone number, and get people lined up so they can get connected with the pilot and do their travel. And so, the pilots don't know who the partner organization is. We don't have the information about why somebody's traveling to give to them, so they also don't have that. So really, it's more like an Uber or a Lyft, just knowing that imagine Uber or Lyft only did rides for gender-affirming care and abortion and that's it. 

SARA: That'd be great, too. 

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah. And so from working with our attorneys, and when the first time we met and took them through our process, they're like, “This is really good because a lot of the laws that are out there, the ones who have been passed, because there's a lot of them that haven't been passed, they've just kind of used for propaganda, to make people scared, and think that they can't do anything, or make them feel powerless. But the ones that have passed this structure that we have, this privacy that we practice, the legal risks are minimal to zero. And really what they come down to is the Ken Paxtons of the world, or those kinds of folks that are just going to try to make an example of somebody or send a subpoena halfway across the country to try to get some data about something. And so we just have got to keep on doing what we're doing, and keep monitoring the laws. If one does get a little bit more direct, then we might have to shift gears a little bit in some ways, but, as I said to, or say to our partners regularly, “If you have a logistics, travel logistics problem, and you want to be thought partners together, try to figure out a solution, we're here. We'll figure out a way to do it.” 

SARA: That's amazing. And you work with a lot of organizations so I imagine you vet organizations. Does that keep you from then having to vet individual clients? It made me think about like plants and doxing and all that stuff that the far right is often kind of trying to do to upend work like yours. 

MIKE: Yeah, and that's part of the reason why we prefer to work with partners, because especially on the abortion side of our work, and if the gender-affirming care side, if the infrastructure builds out more – and I'm sure there's already a little bit of it, especially if people get word that there's a way to get cash grants and things like that – there are people trying to scheme some money out of organizations and stuff. But having more people to do that kind of gut check, like, “Hey, something's not adding up here. Something doesn't make sense, “ and going to ask some of those questions. One of the reasons why we prefer to work by referral from our partners, but also we had, when we do the self-referral process, we had somebody that, even though we asked them, “You have your lodging figured out, you have food, you have your care paid for, all those kinds of things?” Sometimes people get ahead of themselves and we had a passenger that got to LAX, to the big airport and, “Hey, I made it to my destination. I'm going to sleep in the airport tonight before my appointment tomorrow.” And we're like, “No, you're not. We're going to find you some resources so you don't sleep in the airport.” We found some asking around some of our allies and partners and found an LA org that would be able to get them some place to stay and some food and that kind of stuff to make sure that they were going to be safe and taken care of. It's why we prefer to use our regular referral process to make sure people have everything they need. 

SARA: I mean, that's beautiful, though. So that's a little bit more than an Uber or a Lyft. You're asking questions about people's needs and care being met as a full package. It's really beautiful to know that you're taking care of the whole person, not just the travel need. 

MIKE: Yeah. And we, sometimes, not too often, every once in a while, a foundation we talk to will ask like, “What would you do if you had if we gave you a blank check?” And one of those things is because it just doesn't exist around the country, is that the kind of one place services all around gender-affirming care, practical support, because you might have to go to one organization to help pay for your care. You might have to go to another organization to help do your transportation. Another organization, maybe to get, like, a small grant to do lodging or food or something like that for while you're traveling. I mean, there's so many different things that kind of come up with that, and so if somebody out there wants to write a big check to make it happen, we've talked about that being one of those scenarios is that maybe we build out broader support for that transportation to go beyond – I should say, go beyond the transportation part of travel, but to also include like the lodging and the food and all those kinds of things, too. 

SARA: Yeah, that is a beautiful vision. And I agree, I think we've all been scrambling to try to meet all these needs in all of these different ways. And perhaps the next piece is sort of how can we bring more together and integrate them a little bit more to help people more smoothly through the process, instead of having to jump around to so many different orgs and partners and spaces.

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah. 

SARA: I imagine in this work you have a sense now of the barriers that people most often face when trying to access healthcare. I wonder if you would reflect on that a little bit. How do you see those? 

MIKE: I mean, it wouldn't be from our passengers that I'd know that, and really even from our partners, other than, kind of broad-brush kind of statements. And so, obviously we see restrictions in different states and places where people are having to shift gears. Maybe they had a doctor that was seeing them, and then state legislation changes, and their doctor decides that they're no longer going to provide that care. And we see that happening with the state executive orders and things like that, where organizations that were pretty reliable in terms of standing up for the, in particular, the trans kids. And now they're kind of backing away from that because they're worried about other funding, which I get. I get kind of that concern. But also, you can't leave people out in the cold either. And so that's the hard part. But there are some online resources around abortion where you can put in the state you live in, or where you need to go for your care, and it'll list out all the providers that are available in that place. It'll list out the organizations that will help with travel, or lodging, or for paying for care, all those kinds of things. And we actually talked about could we -- because the folks that developed that site said they would certainly be willing to share that for gender-affirming care. And as we started to talk around a little bit, is that with the climate that it is in the United States right now is we were starting to hear from a lot of providers that do gender-affirming care that they're not listing that publicly anymore, anywhere. And so it makes it really kind of rough. We still maintain some of our own sort of lists, so that people, somebody does ask like, “I don't know where to go.” We at least have somewhere we can point them; it might not be comprehensive. But like again, going back to that community point, is find the other families with trans kids, or other trans folks, because I can tell you that they probably have figured it out already, and they will have that support for you to at least tell you where you need to turn. 

SARA: It has been an extraordinary gift. I mean, the beauty of communities of support, like Mama Dragons, and like all those parent support circles there is the wealth of information sharing that happens and referrals for everything from, in my own parent group, speech therapy, and therapists, and what about this? And it's just such a gift to be able to have that conversation together. How do you see this work changing lives beyond just meeting immediate healthcare needs? 

MIKE: So a few different ways that we've seen it is one of the organizations we worked with, one holiday season, we had some families that, where one parent moved with the kids to live with us in a safe state while the other parent still – they start to pay bills, and find a new job, or whatever the case may be – and so we flew the parent who had kind of been separated from the rest of the family, flew them to go spend the holidays together, and so they wouldn't have to be separated from each other. We've done flights for somebody who's going to testify against their abuser in court to do that kind of work. But we've also, the thing we've done probably the most of is just the relocation work, where we work with the Transcontinental Railroad of Colorado. There's a couple other organizations around the country that are helping people move to particular places and make sure they've got the support they need to help them get set up and everything. And when we think about our gender-affirming care work, and I know listeners can't see me do air quotes around that, is that to us gender-affirming care by itself is already a pretty comprehensive term. You know, it's everything from talk therapy to surgery to voice coaching. I mean, there's so many different things there. But we really also see being able to spend the holidays with your parents or being able to live somewhere, move and live somewhere, that you'll feel safer and can be your full self, those things are a part of gender-affirming care for us, too. It’s like if a partner reaches out saying, “Hey, we've got this trans kinfolk who's struggling with this thing, or needs help in this way, and transportation's needed.” Like, “Okay, just send the referral, and we'll get the flight set up.” 

SARA: Oh, that's beautiful. It's just really lovely. I really just really appreciate hearing, again, more about the whole person orientation, instead of just what is the specific need that we're filling? How can allies support people who need your services, even if they aren't pilots? I'm sure you've had a lot of time and work in thinking through that. 

MIKE: Yeah. And so there's a number of ways. Of course, we are a 501c3 nonprofit, so the first thing I always say is there's a donate button right on the website, elevatedaccess.org. And what we use those funds for, there's two main things when it comes to delivering these services. First is the flight coordination team. We have a team of four flight coordinators that are taking in the request and evaluating to make sure we have all the information we need, looking at logistics, finding pilots that are going to be a good match in terms of where they're positioned, doing the communication with all the pilots and the partners to make sure, do we have a plan? Does the plan work for everybody? Is everybody now talking to each other once the plan is finalized? And so there's a lot of overhead that goes with that to make all that function, as you can imagine, when you've got 500 volunteers all over the United States and over 100 partners that you've onboarded to refer cases to you. Another part of it, we're on track this year to spend around 400 grand on airline flights which we use to really back up the volunteers. So if it's more than 500 miles, it's probably going to be cheaper for somebody to travel by airline and likely faster, once it gets beyond that distance. And so, if somebody's got a real ID, or is okay with going through it. We know for trans folks, the TSA is its own special kind of pain. And so if somebody's willing to travel by airline, has the capacity to, we'll ask for that distance if they want to travel by airline. But we also have airlines available for those times when we've got a pilot lined up, and they get sick, or there's a maintenance issue, or bad weather, or those kinds of things. And so, we use that kind of as our backup for those distances, as well as those circumstances. And so, as you can imagine, when you're buying airline tickets for somebody, you have to get more information from them, which also then means flight coordinators have more work to make all that stuff happen. And so that funding is really a big part of making all those things happen, not to mention all the other things that it takes to run a non-profit. Other things that people can do is, you already kind of hit on one in terms of everybody has a good chance to know a pilot. Maybe not everybody actually knows a pilot, but good chance of it. There's kind of a joke in the pilot community, it's like, “How do you know if somebody is a pilot? They'll tell you.” It will never be a secret that somebody is a pilot, and so you don't have to make assumptions about people to think they're a pilot. So you can tell pilots about us to get signed up. There's also, on our website, you can buy merch and kind of show solidarity. One of the things we've heard from people, especially in some of these general aviation kind of spaces is, like, we had a pilot who had seen us at a Florida event, like, our booth there and didn't say anything to us there. But then talked to us at the Wisconsin event, and she said, “Just seeing that rainbow-colored logo for Elevated Access, just seeing that made me feel safer.” And so that means something too, just a little bit for folks. And then also, for the people who really want to go deep, there is a list of about a dozen different ways that people can help. There's a section on the website just for that. Everything from posting signs up at the local airport where the pilots kind of come through when they come through those airports, to help us recruit, to volunteering for other roles that we might have available for ground support roles and that kind of stuff. And so, there's definitely ways that people can get involved, for sure. 

SARA: Oh, that's great. Thank you for that. That sounds like so many opportunities. We'll make sure to share with our community. Our Mama Dragons community are mostly parents, probably exclusively parents – maybe a few grown kids listen to the podcast. But certainly our whole social community and support community is all parents. And it's a really painful time to be a parent of a queer or trans child right now. There's just so much anxiety and so much fear, and it seems to just be escalating every day. So what advice, what wisdom, do you have to offer parents of queer kids in this moment?

MIKE: So I think I would say you're not alone. It is frightening and challenging in a lot of different ways. Especially if you're a cis parent, you don't know what it's like to be trans. And your kid also doesn't really know a lot about what it means to be trans either. And so I think it's really, listening to your kid to what they're telling you, and get them the resources that are going to help them navigate that. It's not necessarily giving them the answers, but it's like help them figure out that journey. And so I think there's that. And then also know that there are groups out there to help. And it may be that we're all having to be a little bit underground in some ways because of concerns about the attacks that might come and other things. But just know that there are people ready to take pretty bold action to help you and your kid get through this, get the care that you need, be safe, all those kinds of things, that the people are out there. And it's not just people you might expect. It's a lot of other folks, too. The thing that I hear pretty regularly from folks is like, “Nobody expected the cis, white, middle-aged men to be the ones out there helping women get abortions, or trans men get abortions, for that matter, or help trans folks out there to get care.” We have a pretty bad reputation – and deserved in a lot of ways – But also there's still a lot of people out there that can be surprising, and just look out for those resources and get connected to them. 

SARA: Thank you, yeah, I appreciate that. That's beautiful wisdom. What gives you hope in this work? You sound like a very hopeful person. And all of the stories you've described are really rather hopeful in this really bleak time we're living in. So how do you maintain your own hope? 

MIKE: So I'm like, and again, I know people aren't – being audio recorded, people aren't going to see my background, but there's a lot of Star Wars in my background, and I don't know if you're much of a Star Wars fan, but the last series, TV series, people that have watched Andor may have picked up on some of my language that I've taken from Andor. And with the idea being, basically, it's a precursor to the original movie where Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star and all that kind of stuff, is that rebellions, resistance, all that kind of stuff, it happens not by one hero. Now I'm going to make myself cry. So it is that it's not one person we see in the movies, we see heroes, superheroes, and all this kind of stuff, but that's not how resistance actually works, that's not how navigating these dangerous times, that's not how it works, where there's one person that's going to save us. The only person that's going to save us is us. And so every person doing their own little bit. And little bit might look different between different people. And I think that, that's the hope that I see. Like I'd mentioned how this air show in Wisconsin, we keep kind of a tally sheet of the engagements we get over the course of the week, each day kind of how many pilots were recruited, pilots that expressed interest. But we also keep track of  negative interactions, and also supportive interactions. And in the town itself, Oshkosh, is not a big city, by any means. But our average for days for negative interactions, was like one or two, like literally one or two people each day, maybe, and some days, even zero. But for the positive interactions where people are just like, “Oh my gosh, this is incredible. This is amazing. How can I support you all? How can I get involved?” We're talking about 50 or 60 people every day. And that's not counting the pilots that signed up. And so I think that's where, and you see this even around abortion kind of conversation, too, is like when you look at the actual poll numbers and look at what people say about abortion or say about gender-affirming care, a lot of people really think like, “No, I don't want the government involved in my healthcare decisions. It's not their business, it's not anybody else's business, but me, my family, my provider and maybe even a smaller circle than that.” And I think that is just a sign that, again, by all of us doing our own small part that one small thing that's going to help somebody navigate the situation they're in, or that all those things that we see around the country, there are those signs of hope that yes, I recognize this is going to be probably, some form of this, is probably going to last through the rest of my lifetime. But I know that in time, things will be way better than they even were before. 

SARA: Well, that's a beautiful message of hope. I appreciate the Star Wars reference. It made me think about, isn't it in Rogue One where one of the characters says, “Tesistance is built on hope”?

MIKE: Yeah, rebellions are built on hope. 

SARA: Yeah. Rebellions are built on hope. Well, there it is. 

MIKE: We’d make a good Star Wars trivia team. 

SARA: That one I clung to. I remember that from some years ago now, and really held on to that because it is, unfortunately, really easy to fall into hopelessness in these times. And to just remember that hope is the fuel that keeps us in the fight, is really helpful. 

This has been a really beautiful and extraordinary conversation. I'm just so glad to be able to share your work with our community, and so glad to know that you're out there doing the work that you do and trying to serve as many people as you can. We're going to put links to everything that we can in our show notes so folks can find you and ask questions and connect with you and all of the different ways that that is possible. We have two questions that we like to ask all of our guests at the end of every episode. And the first question has to do with the Mama Dragon's name. Mama Dragons came about out of this sense of fierceness and fierce protection for our kids. So we like to ask all of our guests, other than the topic of the episode, what is it that you are fierce about? Star Wars is a good answer, too. 

MIKE: So really, and this is something that I've talked about with my therapist, which I think everybody should see a therapist, by the way. It's not about just waiting till you're depressed or upset or sad or angry all the time, or whatever. Everybody should go to a therapist, just like you go to the gym or work out, that kind of thing. But really just fairness and justice are such core parts of my being that there is no other pathway that I could have taken to where I am today if not for this just fairness and justice being such a core part of me. So, that's what I'll say. 

SARA: Beautiful. The second question is, what is bringing you joy? Where are you finding joy right now? In part because also to get through these times, we recognize that we all need to cultivate as much joy as possible. 

MIKE: Yeah, so for me, definitely, I could say flying, but that's probably the easy answer because like there's two pilots -- I like to make the joke there's two things that pilots like to do. One is to fly, and the other thing is to talk about flying. So I'll avoid the easy answer, but I'll just say my wife and I have been, we're of the age that you apparently get a pair of binoculars and go birding. And so, yesterday, I picked up a bird that I'd never seen before at a random airport. And I heard a bird sound I'd never heard before. And there's a little app called Merlin you can get. You can have it record the sound and it'll tell you what bird it is. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's a bird I've never heard before or seen before, and I couldn't see it because a little tiny sparrow-type bird, but definitely, birding gives me joy. 

SARA: I was going to ask you if you had the app. That's fantastic. I love that. Mike, thank you so much for your time, and thank you so much for, not only the work that you do, but for bringing this work into the world. 

MIKE: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. It's been difficult and it will continue to be difficult. But there is no other thing I'd rather be doing in this place that we're in. 

SARA: That’s good because we need you. Thank you so much for joining us here In the Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at Mamadragons.org/parachute or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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