Have you ever wondered about the inner workings of a non-profit organization? In this fascinating episode, we tackle the hard truths about the Trevor Project, an organization that has made an outstanding contribution to LGBTQ+ youth by providing suicide prevention and crisis intervention services. Stemming from an Academy Award-winning short film, the origins of this organization are inspiring, yet its current state raises some serious concerns. From lack of diversity in leadership to employee mistreatment, we delve into the complex issues that often plague rapidly growing organizations.
Buckle up as we take you on a journey through the tumultuous times within the Trevor Project. We shed light on the story of Amit Paley, the former CEO, whose leadership, while expanding the organization, fell short in valuing its employees. The narrative then steers towards the hopeful yet eventually disappointing shift in leadership, pointing out deep-seated systemic issues within the organization.
Finally, we pivot to the pressing concern of diversity, or lack thereof, in the Trevor Project’s executive team. The repercussions this has had on the LGBTQ+ community they serve is hard-hitting. Yet, amidst these issues, we remain hopeful. The partnership with the 988 LGBTQ+ section of the national suicide prevention hotline, although leading to layoffs and longer call times, signifies a step forward. We also highlight alternative resources such as the Rainbow League, HUD Exchange, and Daisy, reinforcing that the mission of supporting LGBTQ+ youth in crisis continues, even if the Trevor Project struggles to fulfill it. Listen in, and let's continue the vital conversation around supporting our LGBTQ+ youth in crisis.
Have you ever wondered about the inner workings of a non-profit organization? In this fascinating episode, we tackle the hard truths about the Trevor Project, an organization that has made an outstanding contribution to LGBTQ+ youth by providing suicide prevention and crisis intervention services. Stemming from an Academy Award-winning short film, the origins of this organization are inspiring, yet its current state raises some serious concerns. From lack of diversity in leadership to employee mistreatment, we delve into the complex issues that often plague rapidly growing organizations.
Buckle up as we take you on a journey through the tumultuous times within the Trevor Project. We shed light on the story of Amit Paley, the former CEO, whose leadership, while expanding the organization, fell short in valuing its employees. The narrative then steers towards the hopeful yet eventually disappointing shift in leadership, pointing out deep-seated systemic issues within the organization.
Finally, we pivot to the pressing concern of diversity, or lack thereof, in the Trevor Project’s executive team. The repercussions this has had on the LGBTQ+ community they serve is hard-hitting. Yet, amidst these issues, we remain hopeful. The partnership with the 988 LGBTQ+ section of the national suicide prevention hotline, although leading to layoffs and longer call times, signifies a step forward. We also highlight alternative resources such as the Rainbow League, HUD Exchange, and Daisy, reinforcing that the mission of supporting LGBTQ+ youth in crisis continues, even if the Trevor Project struggles to fulfill it. Listen in, and let's continue the vital conversation around supporting our LGBTQ+ youth in crisis.
I think it's very easy to say that this organization could very well be guilty of that, when you realize that the entire executive branch of the Trevor Project is made up of cis, straight white people. There's not a single queer person, not a single BIPOC, not a single Latinx, not just. It is cis, not. No trans people, no non-binary people.
Speaker 2:
They are cis straight white people, to the point where the CEO had to be taught about trans people when she came back to the team, the Trevor Project, a non-profit organization that focuses on providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning LGBTQ plus youth. We're going to take it back to the beginning of the Trevor Project. The project was founded in 1998 in West Hollywood, California, by Celeste Lacesny, Peggy Roggeski and Randy Stone.
Speaker 1:
It began with the creation of their 1994 Academy Award-winning short film Trevor, which was a dramedy about Trevor, a gay 13-year-old boy who, when rejected by his friends because of his sexuality, makes an attempt on his own life. When the film was scheduled to air on HBO in 1998, the filmmakers realized that the programing's younger viewers might genuinely empathize with Trevor in a very dark and scary way. So they wanted to have some type of hotline for these youths broadcasted along with the showing, only to realize that that hotline did not exist. So they set out to create one themselves.
Speaker 2:
So just a clarity point Trevor Wilkins, the 13-year-old gay young man, he actually did die by suicide right after struggling with his own sexual orientation.
Speaker 1:
I believe so. Yes, I am unsure if Trevor was based on a real person or was just a character in this movie, because the movie was described as a dramedy, which doesn't make it seem like a documentary.
Speaker 2:
Right, because I think it would be categorized as a memoir.
Speaker 1:
Or as a docu-series of some kind, but it's categorized as a dramedy, which in and of itself leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Personally, I feel like whenever tackling the discussion of suicide, you should never have the word comedy in the same sentence unless you yourself has experienced those ideations and you're making, you know, like one of those like poking at my own bruises kind of jokes, I don't know. It feels wrong. It feels like the wrong way to frame a story like that and I understand that for the time period that's probably how that story needed to be framed in order to get the attention it got. You know, people of that time were not socially conscious or socially aware of queer people, unless they were queer. But it also still just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I agree. I totally get that. This was an Academy Award-winning short film and this was the birthplace of what we now know today as the Trevor Project. As you said earlier, there were no hotlines for teens struggling with maybe potentially taking their own life.
Speaker 1:
Specifically LGBTQ teens. I know there was nothing Exactly.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, thank you for that clarification. When they discovered that no help lines existed, they dedicated themselves to forming the resource themselves. But I think it's for me it's unclear who started it. Was it Celeste Lesesny and Peggy Rodschke and Randy Stone?
Speaker 1:
Correct. Randy wasn't necessarily too heavily involved in the starting of the Trevor Project itself. He was more involved in just the movie and the short film aspect of it. He was involved in creating the film Trevor more than the organization, I believe, because if you look at Trevor's history it says that the two co-founders are Celeste and Peggy. Randy is not mentioned as a third co-founder.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's what I thought, because I don't remember seeing Randy's name. But anyway, just to say they dedicated themselves to forming this resource for the LGBTQ plus youth.
Speaker 1:
And, unfortunately, they've been having some difficulties with keeping to their mission as of late, specifically in respecting their work staff, respecting their mental and physical health and well-being, respecting their time and what that time is worth and how difficult the job of being a crisis counselor is. I mean, mind you, these are people who are talking to, most likely children, who are either contemplating one of the worst things that a person can do to themselves or they are in the act of doing it while on the phone. These are moments that these people will live with forever and unfortunately, the Trevor Project is not providing the resources to allow these people, who are also queer, to live the best lives possible while also helping other queer people through their organization, and that's what we're going to talk about.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's wild how this organization itself its mission is to provide these resources to struggling teens, but then their own employees, which are basically all mostly made up of the queer community they don't get the resources that they need to actually be able to help those in crisis.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, and in an article that we'll be referencing was published by the Blade. They're a amazing LGBTQ news network that has been working very closely with people in the Trevor Project and ex-employees current employees to try to get the right information out there about what's actually happening in the organization. So that's the article that we'll be referencing throughout this discussion. I heavily recommend going and checking out the original source, because they are phenomenal.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, there was an anonymous employee with an interviewer that basically said quote much too fast and came at a cost of service the Trevor Project. Referring to the Trevor Project, and you see that oftentimes, where people will have an idea, they're in creative mode. They have a mission, a vision and they want to get to executing it as fast as possible. And the organization grows too quickly and they can't keep up with the amount of demand and it's both a good problem to have and a bad problem to have. The good part of it is that there is a demand for what you're offering. That means there's a need, and it's not so much a good thing in this case.
Speaker 2:
Right, obviously, we're talking about teens that are contemplating suicide. So I'm not saying that that is good. I'm just saying that there's a need for that thing and there's a service to provide and meet those needs. That's a good thing. But if you don't have the resources to keep up with serving that part of the population, that's not very good. I mean, you're advertising help for these people who are in crisis. They're in the worst state of their lives and, like you said earlier, some of them are in the act of actively committing suicide and to have wait times of 40 minutes or more is just completely unacceptable.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. Yeah, that's one of the major issues they've been having is incredibly long wait time. Sometimes people have been getting hung up on and people haven't been getting calls back. They've been messaging their chat service and just never getting a response. It's egregious. Every person left unhelped in situations like that could be a person no longer walking this earth, and that's just the reality. And, unfortunately, a lot of the times, absolute power corrupts absolutely, even with the best of intentions. The idea of all of this money, this growth, this incredible thing, having your organization's name plastered on everything as the one can corrupt. The original purpose of being the one was that original message can get lost under just becoming the one.
Speaker 2:
And we're going to unpack a little bit of that.
Speaker 1:
One mid-level employee that was interviewed for the article was quoted as saying, quote a lot of us were joking that it was the most corporatized nonprofit that anyone had worked for. It was very money driven, very growth, growth, growth. That's where challenges can come in.
Speaker 2:
I'm always skeptical these days where big business is concerned. I feel like wherever there's big business, there's opportunity for big scandal Always, even in the nonprofit world. Absolutely, especially in the nonprofit world.
Speaker 1:
It's just devastating because, like this, was meant to help people.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think in the nonprofit world it's easier to hide things, because the road to hell is paved on good intentions, if you will.
Speaker 1:
People look at it and they're like oh, look at their mission statement, Look at all they've done, Look at all the people they've helped. But you go behind the scenes. There's also a lot of people being hurt.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, crisis workers can no longer take time between calls to regroup without having to take sick leave or personal time, meaning that many are even still taking calls in a back-to-back format, which I think is super unrealistic. It reminds me of a factory setting with slave labor conditions, low pay, no bathroom breaks, no time to mentally and energetically recuperate from being on with somebody who is potentially about to take their own life. How long can that realistically go on? How can people function well in that environment in the long term? Is that really sustainable?
Speaker 1:
Exactly. It's entirely unsustainable. You could never expect people to be able to go through that. Even trained professionals need time in between dealing with horrific crisis situations.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, many of these counselors are helping people through the darkest moments of their lives, and the job's heavy. It requires doing it in a way that needs a lot of support, because if their job is to support LGBTQ plus youth in crisis, then they themselves, like we said earlier, they themselves are going to need the support to be able to do so.
Speaker 1:
And not end up in crisis themselves. Employees tried to discuss with management how this was a horrible policy shift, how they need breaks between these calls, how this was not going to benefit anyone specifically the people who need help, and in response, they were sent an email on September 2nd 2022. And within this email there was an excerpt that read we are building structure and accountability so that we have counselors available when youth call. That means putting structure around when and how crisis workers are spending time not interacting with youth.
Speaker 2:
So what do you make of that?
Speaker 1:
I say it's a very flourishing way of saying if you're not doing this, people are going to die, it's, it's. And then a month later they took away the flourishes and sent another email and in that there's another excerpt which said given our current call per hour metrics 1.2 calls per hour per crisis worker September's call outs and partial shifts would equate to 470s LGBTQ youth in crisis. We were unable to support.
Speaker 2:
Wow, those numbers are staggering. First of all 470 and then also 1.2 per hour is in crisis her counselor. I mean we got a lot of work to do.
Speaker 1:
Oh, absolutely for one. That is a huge sign that we need mental health support for our youth and we need it now, we needed it yesterday. And Also it just goes to show how callous that is to just email a crisis worker who, whose whole job is helping people, and say oh, just so, you know, 470 people didn't get help because you weren't quick enough and In addition to that, while those who sent those emails and three others in the department were fired, the policy actually remains the same to this very day.
Speaker 1:
So they understood that being so blunt about it was wrong and the policy itself is in a sense wrong. I mean, you don't go back on things if you didn't think you've done something wrong, but everything just stays the same. Now, just six people are out of a job right.
Speaker 1:
At this time in 2022. The CEO is a mit-pilley and he is the one who spearheaded a majority of this growth Occurring at the Trevor project. He was the CEO for about 10 years and he took this company, or nonprofit, through the roof, like he helped them grow exponentially. They had 55 million in assets by the end of 2022. They were doing very well for themselves, the Trevor project. So a lot of this stress and overall Nonsense within the company of just counselors being mistreated, people being underpaid, people being undervalued, and it all comes to a head in October of 2022 with the results of the staff climate survey and in these results it was found that two-thirds of the staff said they were not happy with how decisions were being made at the Trevor project, 55% said they had not seen positive changes within the company and a majority were unhappy with leadership or had no opinion.
Speaker 2:
So, just for clarity, he did well from a business perspective, but in terms of the workplace environment, there were lots of complaints. And this is like as in almost a year ago, today, so like toward the end of 2022, say about October, november. When you build a company like that, there are so many different layers and aspects of building a successful business slash Company. So you build it and it's doing really well financially, it's, it's healthy, it's growing, and then it's at the expense of the workers and nobody's paying any mind or any attention to the workplace environment and climate.
Speaker 1:
The way people are being truly treated on the ground. Yeah, and when you're running a nonprofit, that's so important, because the way people are being treated on the ground Directly affects the services being provided the communities that you're trying to help exactly.
Speaker 1:
It feels like a very top-down failing. This was not a bottom-up kind of problem. This was a top-down failing, as many of them are. So All of this comes together and brings on what has colloquially come to be known as the Trevolution or the Trevor Pocalypse, depending on who you ask. If there's one thing you could say about queer people is we know how to come up with good names. True, we do. And as a result of the Trevor Pocalypse and Trevor Lucian, where staff are just getting matter and matter and matter the CEO, amit Paley, is ousted. So after about ten years at the company, he is no longer the CEO and they end up rehiring as a they say temporary, but as of now, she has not had a replacement, so she is still the CEO. They bring back Peggy and they, so they bring her in as CEO to replace Amit in November of 2022, and at first, it seems like a good thing.
Speaker 2:
But there were red flags from the start, with Peggy who was fired from being the Dean of the School of Film and Television at Loyal Maramount, ooney, after only three years.
Speaker 1:
It's one of those things where I can't why would they hire her after she? Just that blows my mind, you know, like she just got fired for not being able to interact with people. Well, and then the Trevor Project's like hey, come back here.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly. I've seen, actually, other situations where that was the case. Look at what people do, not what they say, as an indication of their behavior and their merit and what they stand for. That is. There's so much truth in that statement, because I think that you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and my dad used to say that all the time he had a signed company and he would be like you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. So you either need to really work hard at redeeming yourself, because you are repenting for what you did and you're outward about it, but if not, then I feel like that's that person's true, their true self.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So yeah, first, you know, things were okay. She started out by going on listening tours and organizing them throughout different departments with different employees, figuring out what their complaints were, what their grievances were with the Trevor Project and how to solve them. And she was even appalled and sympathetic towards staff for what the old CEO had put them through without call breaks and things of that nature. But it was very short-lived. It didn't last very long. Unfortunately, the wind went out of those sails real quick. She began describing staff who would speak out against you know things that were occurring within the company as rude and arrogant, or even worse. She was known to be combative and made everything about herself, even when she would miss gender employees and that would be brought to her attention. She was very much one of those like, oh, what was me? Oh, what was me? Let me throw myself a pity party because I got your pronouns wrong.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, how do you misgender somebody in that environment? It's not acceptable, you know. And the fact that she came in and started interviewing all the current employees, I mean that's what a new, that's typical of a new CEO, that I mean I've seen that in other organizations I've worked in, where you get a new executive director or a new CEO and they sit down with every single employee to figure out what's under their purview, what their projects they're currently working on, etc. So that they can get a better understanding of how the organization's inner workings are laid out. So the fact that she did that is like it's cool, because it's like it gives people hope that, oh, maybe things are going to turn around, but then they don't.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that's very interesting. I didn't realize that was kind of like CEO, like across the board, like just kind of a thing that's done. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean anybody who is a good leader will do that.
Speaker 1:
That is fascinating.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So, unfortunately, things at the Trevor Project very quickly went from bad to worse, and it wasn't even Peggy's fault by any means. This is something that most likely can be traced back to the previous CEO, amit Kali. They realized that there was a hole in the Trevor Project's budget and no source has really been honest about how big it was, though some estimate it was between four and seven million. But considering the 55 million in assets they reported, you would think they would be fine, right? But apparently not, because they didn't have that 55 million anymore and no one's really sure what happened to it to this day. It's just kind of a mystery, mostly, yeah that's alarming.
Speaker 2:
It's alarming that that amount of money just poof, disappears and nobody can locate it, nobody can trace it.
Speaker 1:
There's accusations, there's, speculation, there's, but we're not going to comment on any of that here because that's a whole rabbit hole, but 55 million just poof. So because of that, the layoffs have to begin, because they don't got the money. They have to make up that seven million somehow. So they end up cutting three separate departments, basically gutting them. It was the, the recruitment, the payroll and the training teams all got a 67, 96, and 31% cut respectively. That's insane.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's huge.
Speaker 1:
They cut their payroll by 96%.
Speaker 2:
Like how, how? I don't understand how you can stay in operation when you cut 96%.
Speaker 1:
How is 96% not necessary Exactly?
Speaker 2:
Exactly it's going.
Speaker 1:
96% of anything, you're going to have a problem. Not a single executive has really said a word about what happened with this 55 million that ended up with so many departments getting gutted and so many people getting laid off. It's just an air of mystery, but a lot of employees speculate it has a lot to do with wasteful spending in the early days of their boom of growth. You know there wasn't exactly a tight cap on what was being spent where, but the Trevor Project vehemently denies that. They claim that they had their books very in order, very in order. 55 million dollars would disagree, but that's neither here nor there.
Speaker 2:
Exactly I was gonna say if you open those books up and they're supposed to be in order, then how does 55 million just slip under the carpet?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, let's go around that. I'm like all right, you all get that. Take it with a grain of salt if you will. I'm not saying you did something. I'm saying there's 55 million dollars missing, that's it. It just seems like one of those situations where people wanted to do so much good and then it just got very cloudy, which is so sad.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, as one past executive put it, I think Trevor became so bogged down in the minutiae of money, of notoriety, of power, that it lost all ideas of responsibility to the LGBTQ plus people.
Speaker 1:
Especially its workers, especially the LGBTQ people that they need in order to help other LGBTQ people.
Speaker 2:
It actually sounds like one of those cases where companies are more interested in profiting from the LGBTQ plus communities purchasing power than in making meaningful contributions to the LGBTQ plus causes or advancing that community's rights. I know we were talking before a little bit about Target and stuff, but there's actually a term for that. I don't know if you've ever heard of the term rainbow capitalism and or pinkwashing Rainbow washing yeah, it's like these terms are used to criticize the commercialization and exploitation of the LGBTQ plus identities and causes for profit, especially during events like Pride Month or LGBTQ plus awareness campaigns. But I feel like this can happen during other non Pride Months of the year, like right under our noses, and still cause the same level of damage.
Speaker 1:
I think it's very easy to say that this organization could very well be guilty of that, when you realize that the entire executive branch of the Trevor Project is made up of cis, straight white people. There's not a single queer person, not a single BIPOC, not a single Latinx, not just. It is cis, not no trans people, no non binary people. They are cis, straight white people, to the point where the CEO had to be taught about trans people when she came back to the team.
Speaker 2:
Well misgendering just in and of itself.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and it feels very much like if you genuinely want to help, step aside and let the people who know how to help help. The queer community has evolved from a 13 year old gay boy named Trevor. We have evolved from there and it needs to be shown that we have evolved from there.
Speaker 2:
Not only that, the executive team should be diverse just because you have more lenses. I think it's a little bit more appropriate and relevant to have those different lenses on the exec ward who's governing a queer team that are helping queer teens. It's very difficult for an all white cis male exec team to understand those needs and while they might be decent at running it from a business perspective, there's a lot of things that they're going to miss in being able to run that business well.
Speaker 1:
In the care aspect.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 1:
Something is lost.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, there's, no, there's. The ability to be compassionate or empathetic is not there. You're right, it is lost because they don't know what it's like to be in crisis or to be in the queer community.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. And even Trevor. The Trevor project started working very closely with 988's LGBTQ sect of their national suicide prevention hotline. For a while the Trevor project was the only organization running their LGBTQ sect of that hotline. Call times got so long that vibrant, the organization who owns 988, had to reprimand the Trevor project about this fact and make sure something be done. And something was done and that something was adding seven other organizations alongside the Trevor project Once this sect of the 988 became more than a pilot program and really became a part of the national suicide prevention hotline. So now it's the Trevor project and again seven other organizations which meant that Trevor had to split the funding that they were getting in order to run this section of the 988 hotline, and that led to them laying off between 85 and 200, depending on the sources you ask contract counselors.
Speaker 2:
I mean, what does that mean for today? There's the Trevor project that's supposed to be offering all these resources to teens in crisis. They're having all these internal structural issues and the problem is rising in teens in crisis. Where do we stand? Where does the Trevor project stand now and what does that look like for teens in crisis?
Speaker 1:
I think an ex-employee of the Trevor project really did put it best when it comes to how to interact with and how to view the Trevor project after all of this. He said his name is Weaver. I did not get his first name. My deepest apologies. He said it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to see Weaver said but what can you do? The one lesson that I learned was that, at the end of the day, you're the purpose, it's not the organization. The mission sticks with the people, and so if the Trevor project is not going to do it, somebody will. There's always going to be someone. There's always going to be something. There's always the rainbow league, something with a rainbow.
Speaker 1:
They're another youth support organization. They have helped hundreds of LGBTQ youth that were homeless get off the streets. There's the HUD exchange. Hud exchange If you Google that, you'll come up with a bunch of different resources for if you are in a mental health crisis, if you are in a financial crisis, if you are in a housing crisis, if you are in a safety crisis any kind of crisis like that. There's Daisy. Daisy is a pretty good resource, even for queer people. Even though they mainly help women, daisy has been known to help queer people in domestic abuse and violent situations. Daisy is the domestic abuse survivors initiative. I believe is what it stands for. They have safe houses all over the country. All you have to do is get in touch with a Daisy agent and they will help you get to a safe house. There are options. There are always people wanting to help. Just find them. They're there.
Speaker 2:
And we're going to wrap up this episode, but I just want to make a note that we're going to end on a fun fact. But we also want to say that suicide is a very serious topic and we don't take it lightly and we encourage you or any family members that you have or know of that may be struggling to reach out, utilize some of these resources.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. Please remember that you're loved. This world is so much better with you here and if I could, I would reach to the screen and give all of you a little hug and a little kiss and tell you that everything is going to be okay, and then I would jump in and give you a hug right after kit. All right now let's do our fun fact before I weep on camera more.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 1:
So archaeologists have recently found that the first piece of prose or poetry that was written was most likely written by and about trans people and gender nonconformity in general, the act of living with two separate souls in one being and being able to understand the intricacies of the masculine and the intricacies of the feminine in one. And yeah, I think that's pretty cool.