LGBTQ Shelter Housed in NYC Church
It’s been three years since Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed, thirty-seven years since Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and forty years since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The LGBTQ community’s fight for equal treatment and societal acceptance is decades old. Yet today LGBTQ youth comprise around 40% of America’s homeless, with up to 8,000 LGBTQ teenagers and young adults living on the streets of New York City alone.
Fortunately, there’s Trinity Place Shelter. It’s a non-profit 10-bed, transitional shelter that provides bedding, food and various services to LGBTQ young adults from ages 18 to 24 who have nowhere else to go. And, as the statistics would suggest, it’s in high demand.
“We get hundreds of call and e-mails every month from people trying to place residents in our shelter,” says Trinity Place’s director and founder, Kevin Lotz.
The inspiration for Trinity Place Shelter was born from a New York Times article published late in 2005 that exposed “the epidemic” of homeless LGBTQ youth and called upon houses of worship to shelter these young people on their premises for a week. Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan took up the challenge and kept their doors open for two weeks. Inspired, they resolved to offer support to LGBTQ youth year round and on June 12, 2006, Trinity Place Shelter officially opened its doors for the first time.
“We’re open 365 nights a year and since we opened eight years ago we’ve had no interruptions in providing shelter and services,” says Trinity’s director and co-founder, Kevin Lotz.
Though Trinity Place is a religiously unaffiliated, non-sectarian shelter, it’s still housed on the first floor of Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan and was co-founded by its pastor, Reverend Heidi Neumark. The church has a long history of social activism and community organizing. In fact, according to Lotz, the church congregation voted unanimously to open Trinity Place Shelter, an important reminder that the homophobic rhetoric espoused by certain religious figures does not reflect the values of all religious members … though it does for some.
Though most residents at Trinity Place Shelter are from New York City, Lotz admits that the young people who come from outside of New York are “disproportionately from the Deep South … and quite a few of those do, in fact, site either family or religious based rejection.”
In addition to a bed and free food, Trinity Place Shelter provides residents with individual and group counseling, vocational training, an unlimited weekly metro card to meet their transportation needs, individualized case management, legal services, career counseling, and access to free medical services at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Additional programming includes Saturday night activities such as spa night (always popular) and cooking lessons with professional chef, Karl Wilder.
The shelter allows residents to stay for up to a year and a half so long as they’re “making progress towards independent living goals.” Many of Trinity Place Shelter’s “highly motivated” residents are enrolled in either high school or GED classes and have applied to colleges and received full scholarships. Lotz speaks of one resident who woke up at five every morning for a three-hour commute in order to complete his education. “Against great odds he completed his GED and got a job and successfully moved out of the shelter,” Lotz remembers proudly.
Though the shelter is small, Trinity Place is making a very real difference in the lives of LGBTQ youth. For eight years it has given these young people the opportunity to get back on their feet. Maybe acceptance does have a future.
For more information about volunteering or donating please visit www.trinityplaceshelter.org