Hi, our names are Ren and Atlas and we are trying to help our dear friend Ripley keep her housing while she is working so hard to recover from a really rough couple of years.

Ripley is originally from Miami and moved to Chicago in 2022 to escape anti-trans laws. She is a poet. She loves animals, music, and action movies. She is hilarious, and kind, and can charm a whole room with her laughter.

In the summer of 2024, Ripley faced a traumatic loss .Over the past two years, she has had to move three times, each move being very destabilizing and expensive. She spiraled into issues with substance abuse, struggling to eat or perform other daily care tasks, and insomnia. She has developed medical issues which have been either caused or made worse by the levels of stress she is under - wounds on her fingers from picking her nails, infections, tinnitus, and angina. Now, after all the emotional and physical pain, her finances are unstable and she’s looking to her community for help.

At a previous job she experienced transphobic harassment and threats of violence on the way from public transit to the job, and began having to budget in extra time to take a different route every day, as the people harassing her began recognizing her, following her, and harassing her at work. The real threat, combined with the complete disregard from management, made continuing to stay in this position impossible despite her best efforts. In the aftermath, her mental health worsened.

She got another full-time job, but found that she was experiencing psychiatric symptoms that made it impossible for her to perform . So, she made the hard decision to leave that position for a part-time job in food service. She has since been able to access psychiatric care and has been working really hard on herself. With this care, she has achieved a significant reduction in symptoms. She has been better able to manage life and work expectations, slowly and steadily improving.

She is making a lot of progress in her recovery, especially over the past few months. But the costs associated with her treatment, the fact that she currently finds herself unable to work more than 20 hours a week, how rough the job market is and how much mental and emotional effort it will take to find a new job, have all left her in a financially precarious position that is threatening her ability to keep her housing.

We are asking for some community help to make sure that she is able to stay in her apartment, keep up the bike maintenance required to keep her current job, and pay for the psychiatrist appointments, medications, and therapy resources that she is using to recover. There are a lot of needs in our community, but we are reaching out for help to try and keep our Ripley housed while she recovers. She’s so close to getting herself on solid ground after two years of constant precarity. Please, help her stick the landing.