“We don’t clock out”: Frontline workers serving queer and trans youth provide crisis support off the side of their desks — and it’s causing burnout

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Charlie Murphy’s phone doesn’t stop ringing. 

Every day his phone buzzes with calls, texts, and emails from queer and trans youth looking for help. Some are struggling with food insecurity and need money for groceries; others are trying to find a safe place to live. Sometimes it’s parents wondering how they can support their trans child. 

As the executive director and only full time staff at Quadrangle, a registered  2SLGBTQ+ (2 spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) charity in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Murphy easily works 50 to 60 hours a week. The organization focuses on educational outreach, employment assistance, and providing social peer-to-peer support. The reality, however, is that it’s filling much greater needs for the local queer and trans community. 

Murphy’s time is filled between working to meet the objectives of the organization’s current capacity building grant, hosting the ‘Hi(gh) Tea’ bi-weekly socials, and connecting those in need with resources and other community organizations outside of work hours. On top of that, Murphy also serves on the boards of a number of other 2SLGBTQ+ organizations. 

Despite his tremendous workload and commitments, every time that phone does ring, Murphy always tries to make space to help. Because those youth who are calling him often have nowhere else to turn, or don’t know if other help exists. Still, he can’t help with every individual problem. Burnout isn’t the only repercussion of working around the clock — the mental weight of not being able to provide support in every situation is incredibly heavy, he says.

“I personally feel, every day, that I’m failing somebody,” says Murphy. 

Among the myriad of social issues the pandemic brought to light, emergency needs like housing insecurity and the lack of crisis support for queer and trans youth was a big one. Yet, because many community service centres like food banks and housing shelters aren’t seen as safe spaces of 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, these youth are shut out. Instead, they turn to queer and trans serving organizations — who are, in turn, overworked. 

How 2SLGBTQ+ organizations are filling systemic gaps with mutual aid

2SLGBTQ+ organizations at a local level and across the country weave together to form a network that can support their communities. Through these networks, community groups can help connect queer and trans youth to the help they need, through what Tyler Boyce, executive director at The Enchanté Network describes as “systems navigation work.” 

As an example, when Murphy gets a call from a queer or trans youth in need of counselling, he will refer them to an organization like PFLAG, a peer-to-peer support organization with local chapters across the country. If someone needs advice, Murphy might lend an ear himself when he can. 

But what happens when the systems being navigated are embedded with faults? 

When it comes to helping queer and trans youth who are housing insecure, Boyce points to the fact that in Ottawa, the wait list for assisted income housing can be up to 10 years. 

“We’re navigating within systems that are not equipped to meet the needs of the people for which they’re meant to serve,” says Boyce. 

Here, mutual aid comes into the fold. When 2SLGBTQ+ youth cannot jump through hoops and deal with years-long waitlists, frontline workers within queer and trans serving organizations work around the clock, outside their jobs, to provide that immediate crisis support that youth can’t find elsewhere. 

This support comes in many forms. Most often, it can be through connecting queer and trans youth to the people and organizations that can help them. It can be lending an ear and providing advice and support to those feeling alone and lost. But all this work is done during unpaid hours, fuelled by the desire to uplift the community. 

“How do I support folks that come through my door? It doesn’t happen through my role at Enchanté. It happens through my personal networks and lived experiences as a Black, queer person living on Turtle Island,” says Boyce. “I use my own network to connect folks with lawyers that can help them support their transition or their asylum cases on my own time. I connect folks that are in need of immediate support.” 

Embedding mutual aid into the non-profit structure 

“The 2SLGBTQI+ sector in Canada is incredibly underfunded. The funding that we receive as a sector is not at all commensurate with the need that we fill within society,” says Boyce. 

In 2019, the federal government dedicated $20 million in the annual budget to go towards the LGBTQ2 Community Capacity Fund — the first federally backed funding for the sector in Canadian history. Then, in 2021, the federal budget invested $15 million for project funding to be stretched over three years. However, those working within the sector have criticized that the funding is not sufficient for the hundreds of queer and trans groups in Canada. 

Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah, executive director of The Canadian Centre for Gender & Sexual Diversity (CCGSD) also says dedicated 2SLGBTQ+ funding is very rare. Only in the last few years has there been capacity funding — as opposed to funding for specific, one-off projects — from the federal government for 2SLGBTQ+ organizations. And even then, there’s still a need for more permanent long-term funding. 

“We’re already stretched pretty thin, and don’t always have the time or money to help everyone. Financing is more often offered to create short-term projects rather than towards the long-term missions of organizations,” says Gosselin. 

For Murphy, permanent funding would mean that he doesn’t have to be the only paid staff member of Quadrangle, juggling a list of roles himself. Multi-year staff funding means that the organization can have a dedicated emergency support staff, program coordinator, bookkeeper, outreach staff, etc. 

Owusu-Akyeeah also says there’s a need for places that are doing crisis work like housing shelters, food banks, and health centres to shift their structure. They need to prioritize hiring 2SLGBTQ+ people who have the skill sets and lived experience to help queer and trans youth that are clearly in need of these services.

2SLGBTQ+ people are leading mutual aid work — how can community services learn from them?

Within the 2SLGBTQ+ community, emergency support for queer and trans youth is vast and alive. It comes from mutual aid channels on social media where someone offers their couch for whoever needs a place to sleep. It comes from a GoFundMe fundraiser for gender-affirming needs. And it comes from the workers who sacrifice their time and energy to connect queer and trans youth to life saving help. There is no question that the community is there for each other — but this should not be their burden to carry.

There is a lot to be learned from 2SLGBTQ+ people in the sector, says Owusu-Akyeeah. “2SLGBTQ people are leading the work in terms of addressing the needs of the most marginalized people in our country. And I think COVID-19 has shown those lessons through how quickly we were able to respond to the pandemic through creating mutual aid channels, and something that our populations have always had to do as a result of systemic marginalization.”

The challenge here is to understand how the community services sector can learn from these effective forms of mutual aid and crisis support that the 2SLGBTQ+ sector already does and bake it into the structure of service providers. 

“The non-profit sectors emerged to serve those most marginalized in society and provide direct emergency assistance. This isn’t happening,” says Boyce. “They need to meet those emergency supports, not just within the context of a global pandemic, but all year round.” 

When a queer or trans youth calls for direct support because they don’t know where they’re going to sleep that night, Boyce wants to know that there will be systems built into nonprofits through permanent funding structures that will ensure that those emergency needs are met, immediately and without a 10-year waitlist. 

“I think that we need to dare to believe and dare to dream that mutual aid not only can be part of non-profit institutions, but must be part of non-profit institutions based on the very impetus of our existence and society,” says Boyce. 

Queer and trans youth are searching for immediate support through a maze 

When the pandemic initially forced Canadians to stay home, some couldn’t. For some, home was dangerous. Whether it’s due to family conflict or even domestic violence, the reality for many queer and trans youth was that home wasn’t safe — a reality which existed well before the pandmic, and continues even now as restrictions ease across the country. 

“At the beginning of the pandemic, folks were pulled into those realities,” says Boyce. “And oftentimes it’s queer and trans organizations that are meeting those needs; trying to find emergency housing supports, trying to work with queer and trans youth to figure out solutions that work for them, that are led by them and then supporting them to get there.”

For instance, with a housing crisis raging across Canada, 2SLGBTQ+ youth are particularly at risk. Of the 20 percent of youth that experience homelessness in Canada, up to 40 percent identify as 2SLGBTQ+, according to the book Where Am I Going, published by A Way Home and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. Moreover, 34 percent of queer and trans youth say they’ve had to leave home due to violence and abuse compared to 16 percent of heterosexual youth. 

Aside from facing housing insecurity, Maxim•e Gosselin at Jeunesse Lambda, a community group for 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Montreal hosting events and peer support, says many 2SLGBTQ+ youth struggle with buying essential necessities, and paying rent and bills. While these are issues many Canadians have been facing throughout the pandemic, Gosselin points out that crisis supports like emergency housing shelters can be homophobic and transphobic.

Other community service organizations like food banks aren’t built to support the specific needs of 2SLGBTQ+ folks, who may not feel comfortable reaching out to these spaces for help. For instance, emergency supplies at food banks and shelters often don’t include trans-related needs like gender affirming clothes, make-up, hormones, and surgery but are nonetheless urgent needs for those experiencing gender dysphoria. As a result, more often than not, these youth reach out to 2SLGBTQ+ groups.

But due to being a historically underfunded sector, 2SLGBTQ+ serving organizations often don’t have the structural capacity to provide the level of emergency support which the 2SLGBTQ+ community needs. 

“Most 2SLGBTQ organizations, despite being locally based, aren’t crisis centres, but have had to fill the gap of providing crisis based support because traditional service providers don’t have the capacity to address to 2SLGBTQ needs, and there’s a history of distrust,” says Owusu-Akyeeah.

Clocking out of burnout, clocking into rest

Like Boyce, those working within 2SLGBTQ+ groups are also part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community themselves. Murphy says that, “being a 2SLGBTQI+ individual, I see [the issues] because I can feel that struggle of not being connected to my community at times; I can feel the struggle of, when I was younger, not paying for my rent or not paying for my food.” 

Through deep-rooted understanding, people like Boyce and Murphy want to help and offer support in every way they can. 

“We don’t clock out. We’re doing this work consistently,” says Boyce. “Those are unpaid hours. This is the work of duty; it’s the work of commitment, and it’s the work of a deep, deep love for our communities.” 

But this level of work, no matter how noble the intentions and how essential the outputs, leads to mass burnout. 

Murphy says that people working in queer and trans serving organzations struggle with saying they don’t have time when someone reaches out for help because they understand personally how difficult those low moments are. And that’s why burnout exists for these workers because, “no one wants to see another community member get completely left in the dark,” says Murphy. 

“Every Pride festival, every pride moment, people are saying you’re not alone. But when you’re in a remote area, and you feel like you’re the only person in the world, and you reach out to an organization and they can’t help you because they just don’t have the time or they’re suffering from burnout, that individual is getting completely lost and is slipping through the cracks,” says Murphy. 

Frontline workers in queer and trans serving organizations need rest; they need boundaries. Moreover, 2SLGBTQ+ organizations deserve better funding and resources in order to sustain the work they carry out on a daily basis. 

“When we talk about clocking out, it’s clocking out so that there can be that boundary,” says Boyce. “I want Black, Indigenous and racialized queer and trans people to clock in to joy, to clock in to their own personal development, to clock in to rest . . .  and if we get it right, we can allow us to clock into more life affirming iterations of being alive.” 

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