San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘You don’t have to be alone’
Thrive Youth Center’s founder to retire after years of helping get LGBTQ youths off the streets
When she was 13 years old, Sandra Whitley was put in a mental institution after she sent a love letter to a girl at her school. Years later, when she came out as gay to her parents, they shut the door on her.
Decades later, even as homosexuality has become more widely accepted, young people still are being shunned by their families for being gay or transgender. Sometimes, they end up living on the street.
Eight years ago, after doing research on what she calls an “epidemic” of homelessness among LGBTQ youths, Whitley founded the Thrive Youth Center to help gay and transgender homeless in San Antonio.
Based in its own wing of the Haven for Hope campus on the near West Side, the nonprofit offers an emergency shelter with 13 beds. It secures apartments for homeless youths where they can stay while they rebuild their lives. It provides counseling to help them cope with their traumatic past and helps them get their paperwork in order so they can get an education or a job. The youths have access to other services at Haven, including substance abuse recovery.
“I think it first started, to be honest, with a desire,” said Whitley, 62. “It’s really kind of simple: Not having them feel that loneliness that I felt at such a young age.”
After helping thousands of homeless youths get off the street, where they lived under threat of hunger and violence, she’s preparing to retire as executive director at the end of September. Yet she’s confident she’s leaving the nonprofit in good hands: Jennifer Hixon, who formerly served as the violence prevention manager for the city of San Antonio’s Metropolitan Health District, will be taking over.
In Whitley’s honor, Thrive is creating an endowment known as the Sandy 225 fund to provide financial aid that will help homeless youths pursue their educational and career goals. It’s now seeking donations for the fund.
“I’m excited, but you know, I’m sad,” Whitley said of her retirement. “I mean, I started Thrive. I’m the founder. So it’s kind of bittersweet. I’m going to miss everybody a lot. But I think it’s time.”
‘Some magic way’
Lilith Valentine had dropped out of school in the seventh grade. A couple of weeks ago, thanks to the help she got from Thrive, she attended her graduation ceremony to get a high school diploma.
Valentine, who is transgender, grew up in a rural town where her parents forced her to live “in a shack with no power, no water,” she said.
“I came here from a field of cows. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what happened,” she said. “You can look in all directions, and all you see is plains and the sky. And I couldn’t do it. I got a bus ticket to San Antonio. Then, some magic way, I got here.”
After only four months at Thrive, she’s managed to build
a foundation for a new life, securing a Social Security card and a birth certificate.
“I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have clothes,” she said. “Then I came here, and it all changed. I have a diploma. I have clothes; I have money; I have a job. A high school diploma. I’ve blossomed.”
Gay, bisexual and transgender youths are overrepresented among the homeless, studies show.
According to a study conducted in 2018 by the Chapin Hall research center at the University of Chicago, young adults who identified as being LGBTQ were more than twice as likely to report having been homeless over the last year than those who did not.
Among homeless youths, those who were LGBTQ were more likely to suffer an early death.
“While virtually all youth facing homelessness experience adversity, LGBTQ youth describe particularly pervasive exposure to trauma both before and during their periods of homelessness,” the study said.
Often, the LGBTQ youths became homeless after being kicked out by their families, Whitley said.
“They say — and I think it’s true — that anybody that’s on the street, probably within 48 hours they have to break the law in order to survive,” she said. “Whether that’s stealing food in a store; unfortunately some women and probably young men selling their body for a place to stay, or food. That’s huge.”
Her path to opening Thrive started when she did research into this “epidemic.” She traveled widely to visit homeless shelters specializing in helping gay and transgender youths. At that time, there were about 25 in the U.S., with none in Texas. She began volunteering at Stand Up for Kids, a local nonprofit helping homeless youths of all stripes.
“I got to know the youths and knew that they were sleeping underneath bridges here in San Antonio. I thought what I needed to do was open up a shelter.”
Her initial plan was to open a center inside Travis Park Church in downtown, until Haven for Hope and the city of San Antonio approached her about locating it at Haven. The center was founded in February 2015.
‘The only one in the world’
Whitley knows what it’s like to become alienated because of one’s sexual orientation. Her childhood was painful, but it helps her understand what the youths at Thrive are feeling.
She grew up in Hereford, a “very conservative” small town near Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle.
“Before 13 was great,” she said of her childhood. A natural athlete, she excelled at running and long-jumping. “Everybody thought I was going to the Olympics.”
A turning point for her was when she was caught at age 13 sending a love letter to a female classmate. The girl’s father tried to get her kicked out of her school, she said. Her parents sent her to a mental institution for seven months.
“This is in 1975. I didn’t know anything about being gay. You know, people just didn’t talk about that back then,” she said. “I really came out an angry person. A lot of bad stuff happened in there. I think that changed everything. Obviously, being in a small town, being gay was not good. You know, not having friends. Not only am I gay, I just came out of an institution. So I was very much ostracized.”
Not long afterward, her family moved to San Antonio.
After her first year of college at the University of Texas at Austin, she came out to her parents. “They disowned me,” she said. They didn’t speak for
nearly 20 years.
Her mother, with whom she’d been close growing up, thought that Whitley was choosing to be gay. She told her that she would “never knock on my door,” Whitley said.
But in the end, she did. Around 2003, she came to where Whitley was living in Florida and apologized for shunning her and sending her to the mental institution.
Whitley credits the Alcoholics Anonymous program, which she got into in the late ’90s, with giving her the tools to forgive. She quoted a saying about the futility of resentment: “They say it’s like holding a piece of glass and squeezing it and wanting the other person to bleed. But who’s bleeding is yourself.”
The path to service
Before founding Thrive, Whitley worked as a paralegal in Denver. Having long desired to work for herself, she seized an opportunity to run an auto detailing shop in Florida, despite not being knowledgeable about cars. Under her management, the shop thrived.
After reconciling with her parents, she moved back to Texas to work for her father, a dentist who had built a mobile dental unit. She ended up buying the unit from him.
“I thought well, I should try it and see if I could live again here in Texas. And probably mend the relationship I had lost with my parents, which was probably the best thing I did. Because they now have passed, and there’s no regrets,” she said.
Thrive now has a staff of 22 full-time employees. It gets its funding from diverse sources: the city of San Antonio; Bexar County; the state of Texas; the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD; charitable foundations; corporate partners; and individual donations.
Thanks to the HUD grants,
Thrive can lease 45 apartments each year for the youths to live on their own. The nonprofit supplies the youths with essentials such as furniture, kitchen supplies, internet and a cellphone. A case manager works with them to help build life skills.
“We’re giving them an opportunity; I can’t make them do anything,” Whitley said. “It might not be this time that they show up. If they want to continue to do drugs, they can’t stay here; we have limited beds. They might come back a year or two years later and they’re ready.”
Thrive’s counselors encourage the youths to learn trades in order to make livable wages. They have gone on to work as medical and pharmacy technicians and to pursue careers with computers.
The nonprofit helps connect transgender youths with health care providers offering hormone therapy.
Whitley described an effort to persuade a local high school to announce one trans youth’s new name — he had transitioned from female to male — rather than the “dead name.” He’s now taking college courses, she said.
After her retirement, Whitley plans to travel with her partner of 16 years. They like to go on ambitious trips. In 2012, they hiked the Himalayas in Nepal, going nearly as far as the base camp for climbing Mount Everest.
Running Thrive can be emotionally difficult, she said — hearing the youths’ stories about being kicked out of home, the trauma they suffered on the streets. Yet she’s been able to use her insights to help them.
“Even though your parents might have rejected you, and didn’t like the fact that you identify as you do, there are other people here that will help you,” she said. “You don’t have to be alone in all of this.”