The queer book bike serving Brooklyn

LGBTQ+ youth centers, like The Ruth Ellis Center, are working to provide a sense of community and access to necessary services to uplift local LGBTQ+ youth. The Ruth Ellis Center offers shelter to LGBTQ+ youth facing homelessness and serves about 1,200 people each year. Along with shelter, the Center also works to bridge the healthcare gap in the LGBTQ+ community by partnering with Henry Ford Health to provide general wellness visits, STI/HIV screening, contraceptives and gender-affirming care.

Several individuals and groups like Columbus Community Deathcare and Live Without Regrets doula services are emerging to offer LGBTQ+ people adequate deathcare as they often don’t have access to the same resources, autonomy or dignity as cisgender people. End-of-life doulas and other providers that embrace the Death Positive Movement are offering holistic care that honors a dying person’s wants and needs while respecting their identity.

Sexual orientation and gender identities 123 or SOGI 123 is an optional resource educators can use to provide grade-level appropriate materials that help create safe, inclusive learning environments for students. All 60 school districts in the province are part of the SOGI 123 Educator Network, which allows educators to work together to design programs that foster inclusion in schools. Schools that integrate SOGI 123 have seen a positive impact on students’ mental health, as well as their sense of belonging and willingness to engage.

An interactive virtual reality experience developed with transgender individuals called Body of Mine VR is fostering empathy and understanding by sharing personal narratives and anecdotes that demonstrate their journeys, struggles, and triumphs.

Local volunteers dubbed “activist archivists” are working to document the lives and contributions of LGBTQ+ people across the state, creating an archive of local LGBTQ+ history in the midst of recent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that makes it difficult — and even illegal — to discuss and teach about LGBTQ+ identities and activism.

Books for Keeps hosts free book fairs to keep children and their families reading year-round. In 2022, the organization gave away more than 58,000 books, the most it has ever donated in a single year.

The John C. Anderson Apartments is a LGBTQ+ friendly, senior facility in Philadephia, Pennsylvania, that gives residents an affordable place to feel safe and be with their peers.

More and more public libraries around the United States are creating seed libraries as a way to encourage gardening, combat hunger insecurity, and build community resilience. For example, the Jefferson Public Library in Georgia has seen the number of people using the seed library grow to more than 300 in 2021. It can be a lot of work to maintain the seed libraries, but some librarians see it as a way to engage the community.

In 1965 a traveling salesman published a series of travel guides with gay or gay-friendly businesses across the U.S. that became survival guides for the LGBTQ community. “Mapping the Gay Guides” has digitized those collections, allowing users to explore the original descriptions and added historical content written by graduate students. Reasons for why locations appear and disappear from year-to-year are provided, which sometimes intersect with LGBTQ hate crimes. A $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow them to continue to preserve and make the forgotten history accessible.

Feeding those in need and helping one's community are traditions of the Sikh faith that date back centuries, but they are now benefiting neighborhoods across America where Sikh houses of worship, Gurdwaras, are churning out as many as 145,000 meals over the course of 10 weeks. Gurdwaras are outfitted with the infrastructure to make meals on a mass scale and because Sikhs are expected to donate ten percent of their time or money to community service, they also have the volunteers and funds to buy ingredients. This allows them to fill a need that arose after soup kitchens fell short of the demands.