TLDR — Help us support an abandoned teenager who is new to NYC and has no supportive family while she sorts out her new life here, including helping us out with some items she needs. (Clothes, replacing a laptop, etc.)

The Story

A.E. is a teenage trans girl who is now living in New York, after fleeing Texas to escape neglect and transphobic abuse from both family members and her state. She was thrown out after coming out to a family member, who also stole the money she’d made at her part-time job and disabled her bank account. Her other relatives are varying levels of unstable, unsafe, and/or not able to care for her. She spent several weeks on the street before making her way to the East Coast, where she arrived very sick and malnourished. She was attempting to reunite with an estranged family member who ended up being unwilling to help.

We are two adults local to the NYC area who were alerted to her situation when she first arrived here in late November. A mutual friend reached out to us, since we are the only people they knew near where she ended up. Although we’d only just met her, we helped her navigate the immediate crisis she was in that week, and after a flurry of research, were able to set her up with a case worker through an organization and connect her with resources specialized for youth in her situation. Since then, we have:

She is, thankfully and luckily, out of immediate danger. However, she is still a kid and dealing with a hugely overwhelming situation on her own.

Her Situation Now

(skip down to Current Needs if you don’t feel like reading all of the context)

A.E. eventually needs to get caught up in school, and she also needs work, and she needs legal documentation to accomplish both of those. While her case worker has been able to make some progress on detangling the tasks at hand, systemic bureaucracy can be really quirky and circular, so there’s a lot of threads to pull to sort either of those things out for her. There are, for example, certain resources she cannot yet access because of time constraints due to her age and the fact that she is new to the area. A.E. also experienced pretty severe parental neglect before arriving here, and as a result, she is behind on schooling against her own choice, and has patchy legal documentation and a complicated custody background, so sorting out school and work are not the most straightforward or quick-to-resolve tasks.

All that being said, she is a very bright, sensitive, inquisitive, and hard-working teenage girl who looks forward to developing her interests and having a career someday (or at least a job sometime soon). She is extremely sweet, responsible, and working hard to maintain a level outlook in a situation that would frankly make many adults crumble out of sheer frustration.

On the emotional level, she is (very understandably) bored and anxious. While there are so many ways that New York will likely eventually be a more supportive place for her to grow as a young queer person, it still is going to take time for her to acclimate to a brand new city (let alone develop into an independent adult). We’d love for her to have outlets to get out of the house, etc while she waits for some of these other slower-moving legal and bureaucratic issues to resolve.

Current Needs

A.E. came to New York with only a small backpack, a beat-up laptop, her favorite book, a Nintendo Switch that got stolen (heartbreakingly, as she is a huge Pokémon fan) and only a few items of clothing. There is a running list of things my partner and I would like to help her with, since we have some of the emergency basics sorted. Here is an itemized list with prospectively budgeted costs from our research:

Mostly, anything we can do to make sure she has support and outlets to stay focused over the upcoming months as her pathway back to formal education gets resolved.

Many people have heard about her story from me and asked how they can help. I’m sensitive to others’ financial environment right now, so I’m intentionally setting this goal low so that we can budget and chip away at that list above. It would be huge to cross off one of those bigger line items as even just her laptop situation is a huge pain right now. We are doing the best we can with her immediate needs — whatever others pitch in will help us tackle some of these other needs for her faster or more fully. She is thankfully physically safe now, but there’s a lot on her shoulders and it will take time for more things to be in her control.

Distribution & other ways to help

We will purchase and directly give these items to her with any funds raised. For any funds that don’t go to a specific purchase, as mentioned, we have a secure way to disburse some cash directly to her for any emergent needs she has (needing to buy herself food, etc) that we’ve been keeping replenished.

If you’re unable to contribute but still interested in helping, please also feel free to contact me if you are local and can help with any of the following:

Thank you! ❤️❤️❤️