I witnessed several trends which were present over the course of my six months of research, the most salient being the pervasiveness of gender expansive parenting amongst queer families, unalignment of politics and vision between Our Family Coalition's staff and leadership, and a pattern of staff being under-trained and underprepared in providing sensitive services to a marginalized community.
One of the most common and powerful tactics which I observed queer families use was gender expansive parenting; families commonly used gender neutral pronouns for their children, or listed their child's gender as 'Other' or 'Questioning/Unsure' to allow the child agency in their self-determination. Of all of the strengths I witnessed Our Family Coalition’s families exemplify, I believe this to be the one which holds the most possibility for positively impacting a family's wellbeing. Under gender expansive parenting, young people who will grow up to be transgender and nonbinary are more likely to understand themselves earlier in life and will have parents who have supported and advocated for them their entire lives. For those youth who have been raised gender expansively and are cisgender, the benefits remain; rather than being raised in a home that expects them to conform to stifling gender norms, they will be free to be their complete selves, and will also have a greater understanding and level of support for their LGBTQIA+ peers. This strength therefore was one of the most compelling findings I observed throughout my research.
Over the course of my field study, I frequently observed that the staff's vision for the organization and ideas about long term goals did not align with the visions or politics of some key leadership members. My colleagues' calls for accountability and tangible change were met with leaders who offered placations and lacked the dedication to implement real solutions. The organization's decisions surrounding its goals and how to achieve them were not made collectively, and as such disagreements about the organization's trajectory and how best to pursue the nonprofit's mission were common. These challenges subsequently contributed to the mission drift which the organization experienced, and therefore a miscarriage of the services which Our Family Coalition offered.
Our Family Coalition exhibited a major lack of training and preparation for its staff, both in terms of skills training as well as training about LGBTQIA+ issues. I frequently aided other staff and interns with skill development in areas such as database use and grant reporting. On more than one occasion, I educated my colleagues about various queer issues. This practice of under-training staff not only presents concerns about exploitation, as staff are expected to train one another (and in my case as an intern, without payment for doing so) but is also alarming in that staff are not being adequately prepared to work with a marginalized community which is already likely to have experienced harm. In the instance of an intern who started at the same time as me, he had little to no prior understanding of the LGBTQIA+ community and frequently misgendered other staff; it became my de facto responsibility to correct him and teach him about different principles of our community. This lack of training therefore harmed both the organization's staff and its members. By not preparing employees for vulnerable situations nor supplying them with the knowledge necessary to work with a unique marginalized group, OFC risked betraying their mission by creating spaces which were not safe for queer and trans people.
In light of these findings, my research argues that for the sake of liberation and upstream, lasting change, modes of research must shift to center the strengths and desires of communities rather than solely focusing on the injustice and challenges they face. Barriers to social justice must also be removed with particular attention to the many ways in which aspects of the nonprofit industrial complex undermine the very movements for change which nonprofits are meant to sustain. Until the advantages of communities are the primary focus of analysis - and their oppression utilized only to provide the historical context of their resilience - we cannot expect to create a culture in which all people are celebrated for the assets which they contribute to an increasingly diverse and expansive world.