Zoe Carter, Lulu Grant and Liv Reis interviewed Mary Steyer and Natasha Jones, who work at the Center. Unfortunately, the fourth member of our group, Sam, was not able to attend the interview. We introduced our class project and then conducted the interview, asking the following questions:

Lgbtq group: How do you create a safe environment for LGBTQ?
Natasha Jones: “Well, we are a drop-in center, anyone between the ages of 13-21 can come to us for support. They find us through the Internet, from their school, or they’ve been referred to us. Once they are here they do an intake, a 30-40 min session speaking to the staff and getting to know them.
We ask them what brought them here and what are they looking for.
We support them with health, housing, counseling, and mental health.”

Lgbt group: When someone finds your organization needing help for housing or medical care what do you provide?
Natasha Jones: “We aren’t a housing program, we provide drop in counseling, just a short chat. Also, we parter with other organizations, and when we feel that they could treat this person better than we could, we refer them to one of our partnerships and they can provide mental health, or a school transfer.”

Lgbt group: On average how many LGBTQ do you help per year?
Mary Steyer: I would say 1,000 unique, individual intakes. We have around 6,000 people a week just for direct purposes, they may just want a place to hang out where they feel comfortable and a sense of community.

Lgbt group: What inspired you to help LGBTQ and work for the Center?

Natasha: “I did youth work for over 10 years prior to coming here, I was a preschool teacher, but the school didn’t acknowledge LGBTQ families at all. I tried to bring up programs in staff meetings but their was a lot of resistance. I ended up leaving and realized every place with youth there was always has to be protecting lgbtq programs. So I came here to really work close up with helping the LGBT community.”

Lgbt group: How many volunteers work for your organization and what jobs do they do?
Mary Steyer: “Anything really, graphic design, photography, anything that is needed. Right now we’ve made a lot of cuts because of our renovation so we have 50-70 active volunteers.”

How does this topic affect NYC, specifically?
Natasha Jones: There is a large number of Homeless lgbtq and minimal resources. 40 percent of homeless youth is lgbtq. Youth suicides are pushing people to realize what a big deal this is. As corny as it is, our youth are our future, they are important. Many young people are coming out online, not voluntarily, so it’s easier to be isolated. Young people are stuck in social media.

We are very thankful that the Center took the time with us to help us understand how they work and we hope to work with them again. They work very hard to help the community and it stuck with me how much they care about each individual member and work to help them no matter their faults.