Trevor Project in crisis amid financial woes, staff dissension, ‘union busting’: sources

Long wait times, calls going unanswered plaguing critical LGBTQ youth resource

By JOEL LEV-TOV

(Editor’s note: This article contains references to suicide and self-harm. If you are having thoughts of suicide or are in crisis, call 988 to talk to a counselor or 911 for medical attention.)

He was cutting himself and his mother was worried.

Whom should she call? Who could help her son John, who is gay, and doesn’t have an accepting community in Asheville, N.C.? She asked around. Trevor Project, one person said. Trevor Project, another said. Trevor Project. Trevor Project. Reach out to the Trevor Project, the world’s largest nonprofit assisting LGBTQ+ youth.

Phone service, his mother Darlene Coleman said, is unreliable in the town so she selected “chat” on the organization’s homepage, hoping to talk to a counselor.

She waited. And waited. For five minutes, then 10, 15, 40, and 47 minutes. No one answered. The website warned her that hold times were longer than usual. But this long? It had taken her forever to convince John, who asked for his name to be changed for fear of backlash, to even talk to someone. This wasn’t helping.

She checked back later that day. And waited on hold. And waited some more. She gave up, then tried the hotline the next day. Again she waited and waited until eventually giving up.

What, she wondered, was going on at the Trevor Project? How could the organization dedicated to preventing LGBTQ+ youth suicide not help her son? Coleman reached out to several other organizations before getting help from the Rainbow Youth Project, but the question still haunts her: What if someone wasn’t as determined as she was? What if someone in crisis didn’t want to wait around for hours to talk to someone?

Her son looked at her and said, “They really don’t give a damn if I’m here or not.”

“I’ll never forget that as long as I live,” Coleman said, tearing up.

Her experience isn’t an anomaly. Josh Weaver, who was Trevor’s vice president of marketing until November 2022, said the average wait times to talk to a Trevor counselor are about three minutes. But during nights and weekends, they said, wait times often exceed 30 minutes. Another employee confirmed that wait times could stretch anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours during peak periods.

“That could be life or death,” Weaver said.

The Human Rights Campaign has issued a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States. Legislators around the country introduced and passed a record 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills just eight months into 2023.

The stakes could not be higher. A Trevor Project study found that close to half of LGBTQ youth considered suicide in 2022. But when those LGBTQ youth were surrounded by communities supportive of their identity, the study found, the rate of attempted suicide dropped dramatically.

In 2022, Trevor’s phone and chat lines supported a record number of people, more than 236,000, through calls, texts, and online chats, according to the organization’s 2022 annual report. And the organization has been rapidly expanding, seeking to help more and more youth.

But in interviews, 11 current and former Trevor employees, many speaking to the Blade anonymously for fear of retaliation, said that growth was much too fast and came at the cost of service.

Former CEO Amit Paley spearheaded the organization’s expansion from a handful of people to a massive organization with more than 700 employees. In the process, the employees said, it became more like a corporation than a nonprofit.

“A lot of us were joking that it was the most corporatized nonprofit that anyone has ever worked for,” said a former mid-level employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It was very money driven, very growth, growth, growth.”

Trevor’s coffers had $9.7 million in them in 2018 and rose to more than five times that in 2022, close to $55 million. The marketing, content, and communications team was even called the “growth vertical.”

Informed about the size of Trevor’s assets, though, Coleman was outraged.

“Fifty-four million dollars,” she repeated. “And they can’t answer a damn phone?”

That growth put massive pressure on Trevor’s staff, especially the people running crisis services.

“Those wait times are there because it’s demand, demand, demand, demand, let’s get everything out there,” Weaver said. “Let’s get as many people as possible and not think about the quality of it.”

Suddenly, crisis workers couldn’t take time off between calls to regroup without taking paid time off or sick leave. The crisis workers criticized that policy, saying that they needed to be doing well to support callers, but management didn’t budge. The managers cited Trevor’s “tools to support wellness” in an email seen by the Blade.

“We are building structure and accountability so that we have counselors available when youth call. That means putting structure around when and how crisis workers are spending time not interacting with youth,” an email sent on Sept. 2, 2022, from the lifeline management team – Richard Ham, Vivian Suniga, and Heather Gillespie – read.

A month later, on Oct. 20, 2022, the team followed up with an even more blunt email message.

“Given our current call per hour metrics (1.2 calls per hour per crisis worker), September’s call outs and partial shifts would equate to 470 LGBTQ youth in crisis we were unable to support.”

A Trevor employee familiar with Trevor’s crisis services speaking on condition of anonymity said Gillespie resisted calls for crisis counselors to get more time off – despite the difficult job counselors have.

“The work is very heavy, it’s very challenging,” the employee who used to be a crisis counselor said.

Counselors are often working with youth contemplating suicide or even in the process of taking their own lives and many of the counselors are coping with their own stress because they are also members of marginalized groups, they said. Not to mention the prank calls and callers using the line for sexual gratification.

The three managers who had authored that blunt assessment in the email as well as three other Trevor Lifeline leaders were later fired after being placed on administrative leave, but the policy didn’t change, the anonymous source said. Counselors were reportedly told to take as many calls as possible.

Some transgender staff, staff of color, and disabled staff felt erased and unable to be themselves, which reached a breaking point at a routine meeting in October 2022. In it, top staffers presented the results of that year’s staff climate survey.

The results of the survey were harrowing. About twothirds of staff said they weren’t satisfied with how decisions are made at Trevor, according to its results reviewed by the Blade.

A majority – 55% – of Trevor employees said they hadn’t seen positive changes based on the last climate survey. Most employees said they weren’t satisfied with the leadership or had no opinion. Only slightly more than half of the staff said they wake up feeling fresh and rested for work – though, the data emphasized, that was up 12% from the previous year. Far fewer employees – though still a vast majority, three quarters – said they would recommend Trevor as a great place to work.

In previous years the results presented to staff didn’t break down the satisfaction by race or gender. When Black staffers pointed that out, they were “completely dismissed,” said Preston Mitchum, who was the director of advocacy and government affairs at Trevor before he quit in February.

“With the numbers that have been presented, we have an obligation to maintain a level of confidentiality and anonymity within this process,” Meg Fox, who was the director of people, culture, and experience until July, said in a recording reviewed by the Blade. “Again, for 20 years I’ve been doing surveys, that has been the path paramount principle by which we live by, so nobody is trying to silence anybody’s voice here.”

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