Donate to Relocate Lauren & Jade to Safer State

Mutual Aid Request:

Disabled, t4t couple in need of support during financial hardships and emergency after emergency.

Expenses detailed at the end.

Direct donations can be sent to @lleed on Venmo or @jadeandlauren on Cashapp!

A message from Lauren (23):

Thank you all for taking time to read and share. Jade (24) & I have been in a relationship for 7 years (in May!), changing, discovering, and struggling together. A part of that struggle has been living in a Red State, where a week is filled with a year’s worth of breaking news. No one can even guess what demands the current administration is going to make. As someone who works a full-time job at a National Park Site, we really have no idea what’s to come. When I go to work, I stress about the administration shutting us down or firing my colleagues. When I am home, I stress about the administration putting my partner, my community, and myself in danger. Ultimately, we love living in Atlanta and being with our community, so we decided we needed to stay in Georgia until there was a reason not to be here, but one week later those reasons we begged for decided to show up.

Last Sunday (4/6/25), rain fell the entire day with bouts of drizzles or thunderstorms here and there. The flashes of lightning were quick to come and go, but its damage left a lasting impact. At about 2:20 that afternoon, I heard a terrible boom while I was at work. Jade calls and, in a careful panic, says “The house was hit by lightning. The entire garage is filled with smoke. Cricket, Dante, and I are safe, but scared.” That terrible sound I had heard was the bolt of lightning striking our home about 3 miles away.

Before running out of the building, I called the non-emergency line and requested a fire team to come inspect our rental home of any electrical hazards. Finally home, I pulled onto my streets with what looked like an entire fleet of fire trucks. There were 12 Firefighters moving around my home. They told me they were baffled. A lightning strike hitting your property let alone damaging the way that it did? It was something they had never seen before.

Jade told me everything that had happened in that short burst of electricity: a lightning bolt struck a tree, traveled down its roots, and split in the ground entirely shattering the cast iron meter cover, the meter box, and our connection to it. The other ricocheted lighting strike continued traveling through the ground almost perpendicular to other branch of lightning. Now, the next part is a scientific guess as how it went down because the damage left behind was just that f***king wild. The stray bolt moved through the root system of the main tree to another where the energy blew out of the ground. This burst of energy somehow dug out around the base of a tree it never directly struck, and the rest of the residual bolt exploded through the driveway retaining wall. From there, we believe the electricity hit a large puddle of water collecting under our garage door. This final blow caused parts of our garage door to weld itself, blow out the outlets, and spark a hole in the plumbing. This leak was, of course, not found until the next day when the water connection was restored. After about only 12 hours with water, we had to shut it off again without knowing what sort of electrical damage could be hidden in the walls.

We are now past 96 hours with no power and only having had the water restored 72 hours after the initial incident.

This disaster was the first chip away of our plan to stay. We live in a rental home and are being totally ignored by our property managers as to the repairs our home needs. But nothing can be done, a couple of renters vs the housing market only really has one way to go. And in all honesty, a lightning strike almost felt like an omen to us. We thought maybe we do need to leave.

We’re almost there, but we haven’t quite come to the end of our story yet. Last night April 9th, during our final night at our hotel, Jade was pulled over by two police cars for outdated registration stickers. To make a long story short, the night escalated with Jade’s car being towed and us in tears from the cop’s threats. Unfortunately, Jade lost her job in October 2024, and finding a safe job as an autistic trans woman has proven to be difficult. The new year came and still without a stable income, she was unable to renew her car insurance and therefore renew her registration. It is a bad situation that we had put ourselves in, but any one who has struggled with finances will understand the need to chose between insurance or rent.

At last, we arrive at the present in our story. After the longest half of a week of our lives, we questioned our place in Georgia. You reading this story already know the answer to the question we had to ask ourselves. We still question it now sometimes, but we want to find peace somewhere. A place where when these emergencies happen, we know we’re in a safer place for us. I’m not exactly sure where we’re going, so that’s an update for another day!

The rest of the donations will go towards funding this bittersweet move. Sure, right now things are okay, but we realized we don’t want to stick around until it’s too late. We are scared of the way our state is moving, so we’re moving, too. After all, we have always wanted to live up North in the cold and clever culture, but the South is our first home. Although, even with everything going on, we are really thrilled by the idea of our new home. Sometimes it’s safer to leave home and love it from afar than is it to stay.

We looked into it a lot, and we decided we will be moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota! A place fit for all of us with a children’s theatre for me, parks for Jade, and loooots of nature and walkability for Cricket and Dante :) We will update this page as we know more, but our rough idea of expenses looks like this:

To recoup the loss of our groceries, emotional stress, missed days of work, and added bills (hotel accommodations, fast food, ice, etc.) our intent is to put $1000 of our goal towards these losses. We also live with 3 other people in the home who were affected too. So, a 15% share of the total donations will be split amongst our 3 roommates. Although this is primarily a GoFundMe for my partner & I to relocate to a trans-friendly state, we made the decision to allocate money for our roommates’ sakes because not only did they lose their rental home indefinitely, but we want them to have extra money to secure a lease after we move out in August.

Our second intention is to put $1,160 of our goal towards the costs of the impoundment, tickets, and car insurance down payment.

As for the remainder amount, a majority will be going towards our moving goal. Of course, these donations will still contribute to the 15% total share for our roommates:

$5,000 - First month/security deposit for the new place

$2,000 - Moving/Transportation fees

$840 - Surprise expenses, if unused, the money will go towards funding Jade’s HRT and to pet bills

Disclaimer: if we are unable to reach our $10,000 goal by our intended move date, donations will go towards our medical necessities, such as mobility aids, HRT, and bills.

Thank you so much for your support, we already feel a lot if you made it this far!! Anything else, even $1, is so helpful, but if you can’t donate, we appreciate you anyway. Please consider sharing, instead. It’s all love <3

Since you made it all the way down here, here’s a photo of a completely unscathed lightbulb. A true soldier that shot out of our garage ceiling onto the concrete floor without shattering.