B3C Housing Safety Fund
The Housing Safety Fund is currently closed
Our Housing Safety Fund (HSF) continues to highlight the significant challenges our community members face in meeting their basic needs. Access to affordable housing continues to remain elusive for those living at the intersection of gender, sexuality, disability, and race.
Since 2021, in each fiscal year, we have helped approximately 80 individuals access over $200,000 in material resources supporting their housing stability.
After opening last summer, the HSF has gotten over 850 responses to our interest form! Our inbox has received thousands of emails from community members seeking support.
This fiscal year, we have already helped over 60 people access or maintain their housing and reached over $200,000 in support communities facing housing insecurity.
A surprise and noteworthy shift for the current year is that the number of applicants has nearly tripled! While our team is diligently working to get back to folx who qualify as quickly as we can, we are making moves to increase our capacity to handle the worsening housing emergencies facing our communities.
Our initial hope was to open the fund by January, but with over 800 intakes in our inbox, we are making the tough choice to close the HSF fund to new applicants. We sincerely had not anticipated the level of response we would receive this time around and feel it’s important to appropriately prioritize working through the backlog of community members hoping for assistance.
Those who have already contacted us via the interest form can expect a response if we can proceed with your application. You will start to hear back from us in 2-3 weeks. Please note that submission of interest does not guarantee funding or assistance.
To create some consistency and spread ourselves more evenly across the year, we will move to regular openings/ closings for the HSF from February to May and August to November. The fund will open again when our new cycle begins in August 2024.
The need is always present, so we are working on building a streamlined process for referrals from partner agencies, including The Equi Institute, Cascade Aids Project, and Quest Center for Integrative Health. That way, we can remain responsive to community members identified as needing critical support while processing existing applications.
We ask that folx not make requests for rental assistance, the status of their interest form via social media or our info@ and instead directly email us at housingfund@bbbcollective.org. We will contact you if you have already filled out the interest form, and we can move forward with your application.
The fund was set up to honor the memory of TeTe Gulley, a Black transgender woman the Portland community lost in 2019. The fund is intended to support significantly marginalized individuals currently struggling with housing security and/or safety.
Data shows and B3C understands that individuals whose identities lie at the margins have lived experiences involving increased discrimination. Through this fund, B3C will do our best to uplift as many increasingly marginalized members of the Portland community as we are able. The fund will prioritize individuals who have not already received funding for housing from us. If you have applied before and did not receive funds, please feel encouraged to do so again and make sure to check yes for ‘have you applied to the B3C Housing Fund before?’.
Please note: at this time we can only provide funding in the form of checks made out to landlords, property rental/management companies, or other housing security/safety service providers (storage rental fees, etc).
If you are interested in applying, please send an email to housingfund@bbbcollective.org.
[ID] Yellow background with Black text and silhouettes of houses"Housing Safety Fund Currently Closed!"
Older Black person holding a bouquet of flowers wearing a mask and sitting next to a young Black child at Tete Gulley Community Event.
Three masked Black folks posing for the camera behind a grill at Tete Gulley Community Event.
A group of masked Black folks posing for the camera at Tete Gulley Community Event.
Ubuntu Healing Project
A green cicle with a mirror immage of a Black femme with a bright pink filter. There is a white flower with yellow and blue buds above text reading the Ubuntu Healing Project.
Black & Beyond the Binary Collective works to provide safety by filling the gap in access to mental health resources for Black trans, queer, nonbinary, and intersex Oregonians. Many of us find ourselves faced with housing insecurity and pending evictions, unemployment and underemployment, racially charged violence, and daily microaggressions. These acts of violence exist alongside systemic transphobia, dysphoria, and the gender binary. Living at the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender often find ourselves confronted with the genuine struggle for life when suicide feels like the only option. Hunhu/Ubuntu in the traditional thought of Southern Africa. Philosophically, the term Hunhu or Ubuntu emphasizes the importance of a group or community. The term finds a clear expression in the Nguni/Ndebele phrase: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons). "I am because you are".
The Ubuntu Healing Project is a culturally specific healing program for Black - African queer/transgender youth and adults that bridges indigenous and cultural healing practices with Western mental and physical health. The Project is a collaboration between Black and Beyond the Binary Collective and Radical Rest. The Ubuntu Healing Project works with providers who identify as Black – African and queer/transgender, with indigenous wisdom and connections to African cultural practices, and who practices liberation-based, gender-affirming care.
2SLGBTQ+ MEANINGFUL CARE CONFERENCE
Our mission for the conference is to center the lived-experiences of those accessing care, while challenging ourselves to uplift marginalized voices. The Meaningful Care Conference takes place every other year. The next conference will be in 2026.
The day-long conference seeks to:
Promote Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex + culturally responsive health care and social services by uplifting marginalized voices and centering lived-experience
Take an intersectional approach to addressing multi-level health disparities
Share updated promising and evidence-based applications of 2SLGBTQ+ culturally responsive health care
Develop and diversify networks of 2SLGBTQ+ culturally responsive health care and social service providers
Move past equality and equity to center lived-experience, systems-change, and justice
Be change-based, with community leading the way on challenging systems