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TRANSFORMING COMMUNITY OUTREACH A New Model: Service as Outreach Challenges facing LGBTQ individuals often go underreported, preventing policymakers from accurately assessing and responding to the community’s needs. Decades of erasure and explicit discrimination from all levels of government, as well as nonprofit service providers, have contributed to a distrust of establishment institutions among many LGBTQ community members. Various community outreach initiatives have been created to reduce the underreporting of LGBTQ issues. However, some models of community outreach, while well-intentioned, seem to prioritize the unilateral extraction of data from queer and trans people, which may further exacerbate distrust. Fair housing agencies and providers who wish to be effective in expanding their work with queer populations should recognize these historic dynamics and take affirmative steps to build trust.
Free Name & Gender Marker Change Clinics Hearing from our community partners that the most frequently requested legal need in the St. Louis trans community was assistance with obtaining legal name changes, and recognizing the housing access implications of not having accurate government IDs, EHOC’s legal staff partnered with a queer community organization to provide this requested service as a form of community outreach. In partnership with the all-volunteer St. Louis Name Change Mutual Aid, in 2022, EHOC began incorporating on-the-spot, walk-up legal name and gender marker change clinics into our informational booths at regional Pride festivals. Importantly, EHOC’s trained staff centered trans-affirming practices and demonstrated queer cultural competency, and individuals who took advantage of the name change services were more inclined to discuss other housing barriers that they had faced.
In one PrideFest weekend, over 100 people completed legal packets for name or gender marker changes. While receiving name change assistance, community members informed EHOC staff of past housing problems, including illegal evictions based on gender transition, difficulties reflecting name changes on deeds, and a lost housing voucher due to name discrepancies.
