TRANScend Retreat 2025: Help Us Come Home!

TRANScend Retreat is BACK and we need your support to bring it to life in 2025!

After taking a pause in 2024 to reflect, recalibrate, and restore, we’re returning this October with renewed vision, a strengthened foundation, and this year’s powerful theme: Homecoming.

In the midst of increasing political violence, shrinking funding, and relentless attacks on trans lives, we are choosing to root ourselves in what remains: our relationships, our legacies, and our commitment to collective care.

TRANScend Retreat is a sacred space created by and for Black, Brown, trans, and genderqueer people to rest, heal, organize, and build. Since 2017, we’ve welcomed over 800 attendees, provided full scholarships to more than 75% of participants, and created paid opportunities for over 200 artists, healers, and organizers. In 2022, we even flew 14 Black trans women from the South to join us through our Muhlaysia Booker Travel Fund (MBTF).

This year, we’re doing it again. We need your help to make it possible.

What Your Donation Supports:

Securing our retreat venue at Saratoga Springs

Paying our majority Black TGNC organizing team

Providing full and partial scholarships for attendees

Travel stipends through the MBTF

Creating accessible, healing-centered programming including workshops, rituals, meals, housing, and joy

Why It Matters:

Across the U.S., anti-trans legislation, ICE raids, and funding cuts are threatening our safety and survival, especially for Black trans folks, immigrants, and those living at the intersections of oppression.

And yet, we gather.

We rest.

We remember.

We imagine what’s possible.

We come home.

TRANScend Retreat is about more than surviving. It’s about envisioning a world where trans people thrive. Where we take up space. Where we dance under the stars, organize on our own terms, and nourish our minds, bodies, and spirits, together.

Who We Are:

TRANScend is led by a majority BIPOC team:

✨ 84% BIPOC

✨ 60% Trans

✨ 40% Genderqueer

Our scholarship program directs 75% of funds to BIPOC applicants. We believe self and community care are essential to leadership, and we design our spaces with radical access, deep joy, and transformative healing at the center.

How You Can Help:

Donate today — any amount makes a difference

Share this page with your networks

Help us grow by connecting us to sponsors or funders

Because of your generosity, TRANScend has continued to evolve for eight years. Help us come home again in 2025.

Thank you for believing in this vision. Thank you for investing in trans futures.

Transparency & Fiscal Sponsorship

TRANScend Retreat is a fiscally sponsored program of the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center. All donations made through this GoFundMe will be processed by the Oakland LGBTQ Center and deposited directly into TRANScend’s dedicated sub-account.

Your contribution goes directly toward funding TRANScend Retreat 2025, including travel scholarships, organizer stipends, meals, programming, and lodging for attendees.

We are deeply grateful to our fiscal sponsor for supporting our administrative and financial infrastructure while we continue building toward independent nonprofit status.

If you have any questions about the fiscal sponsorship or need a tax receipt, please feel free to contact us directly.