Brent: McKinley Forbes doesn’t want other people to go through what she went through. After telling her parents that she is transgender about six months ago, she was kicked out of her home and spent months traveling from one couch or spare room to the next.
She got a job at BigCommerce in Austin and now has a place with a roommate, and she’s spending her spare time working on an project that aims to connect displaced LGBTQ youth with well-vetted people who are willing to offer their spare room or spare property for up to five nights.
The emerging nonprofit startup, Safenight, is a product of the HackOUT hackathon at the end of June — it won first place. Forbes’ story is both an example of how our own experiences can help yield the best ideas and how hackathons can connect people with similar goals who may have otherwise not crossed paths. Without HackOUT, it seems unlikely she and Safenight co-founder Kee Tobar would have met and discussed solutions to LGBTQ youth homelessness. (See our full story.)
And they’re tackling a serious problem. A 2012 study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimated 40 percent of 1.6 million homeless youth identify as LGBT. And I spotted a Washington Post story that dug deeper into the data. “The study’s other findings are equally bleak: 46 percent of homeless LGBT youths ran away because of family rejection of their sexual orientation or gender identity; 43 percent were forced out by parents, and 32 percent faced physical, emotional or sexual abuse at home.”
This is not an easy problem to fix — and Safenight is still in its very early stages. But when smart, dedicated people get together and apply new technologies and tap into our increasingly-interconnected networks, they can make a big difference. |
