Trevor Project in crisis: Management & financial woes threaten suicide prevention group’s existence

The Trevor Project, founded in 1998 and dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBTQ+ youth, has spent its 25th anniversary year in a state of perpetual crisis.

Expanding deficits, a depleted reserve fund, charges of racial and trans discrimination, and lengthening wait times for calls to Trevor’s suicide prevention line — the group’s core mission — have all plagued the Trevor Project since last fall, when CEO Amit Paley was ousted by the board of directors in response to a letter signed by over 200 employees expressing dissatisfaction with the organization’s rapid scale-up.

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The attack follows a “regrettable” tweet from the new president of the American Library Association.

Paley was replaced by co-founder Peggy Rajski as interim CEO.

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Now, massive layoffs, charges of “union busting,” and a poor rollout of services in partnership with the Biden administration are throwing the Trevor Project’s very existence into doubt.

In April, employees at Trevor voted to unionize with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), to better address poor working conditions like counselor burnout and what representatives have described as discriminatory behavior by management. A supermajority of 300-plus staffers supported the move.

Then in June, management embarked on a massive layoff of Trevor staff: 12 percent of full-time employees, including the entire recruitment team, payroll and financial staffers, and all of the training team for Trevor’s crisis hotline, according to sources who spoke with the Washington Blade.

Over thirty percent of those layoffs among 44 mid- and upper-level staff were representatives of the Trevor Project’s new union guild, Friends of Trevor United.

“The Trevor Project leadership announced last month’s layoffs suddenly while union representatives were in an active bargaining session,” read a statement from the CWA released at the end of July.

A “disproportionate number” of those employees were prominent and vocal union advocates, the union noted, including trans and BIPOC members.

“The Trevor Project management has actively threatened and silenced union members and advocates in nefarious ways,” the union charged, “including prohibiting workers from discussing their working conditions on the job and, instead, forcing them into one-on-ones with management that often lead to workers being disciplined for airing their concerns.”

“To make matters worse,” the union added, “management failed to adequately respond to information requests regarding how workers were selected, while refusing to make any form of compromise on their arbitrary selection criteria.”

The layoffs and charges of union-busting come after another management miscalculation that resulted in more counselor layoffs and longer wait times for crisis counseling.

In 2020, the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act of 2020 created a new three-digit mental health hotline — 988 — that would include an option dedicated to LGBTQ+ callers. The Biden administration turned to the Trevor Project as an experienced ally that could stand a pilot program up.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funded the pilot with $7.2 million, but the number of callers was vastly underestimated and left Trevor short-staffed, according to a source who spoke with the Blade. Administrators for 988 rebuked Trevor for poor planning.

The high demand for services led SAMHSA to make the LGBTQ+ subnetwork permanent and expand it to seven providers, while Trevor’s role was reduced along with its funding. That meant another round of layoffs, with Trevor cutting half of the 200 counselors onboarded for 988 services prior to the pilot program’s conclusion this summer.

A statement from the Trevor Project disputed the union’s characterization of the nonprofit’s recent turmoil.
 
“The recent public statements from Friends of Trevor United claiming that we engaged in ‘union-busting’ are incorrect and misleading,” a spokesperson said. “None of our actions – from our voluntary recognition of the union to the way we conducted a reduction in force – have been anti-union, and no one was affected because they support the union. We take our legal obligations relating to the union very seriously, and we’ve always fully supported our staff’s union rights.
 
“The necessity of a reduction in force is to protect the sustainability of our organization, and it would have been necessary regardless of whether or not our staff had recently unionized.”