Model and Strategy
The Trevor Project is the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning (LGTBQ) young people. Like Battery Powered, we believe that people of all sexual orientations and gender identities deserve support for their mental health. We are committed to reaching every LGBTQ young person who needs us with free and confidential crisis counseling 24/7 via phone, chat, and text, with the ultimate goal of ending suicide among LGBTQ youth.
In the past few years, demand for our digital crisis services, TrevorChat & TrevorText, has rapidly increased. For the digital natives that contact us, chat and text are often more comfortable ways to talk about their mental health and the unique challenges they face. In 2020, we will serve 60,000+ crisis contacts on chat and text, a 62% year-over-year growth. But this is only the beginning of our exponential growth. With your support, Trevor will greatly increase the staff, volunteer, and technological capacity for our digital crisis services—providing our life-saving and life-affirming services to even more LGBTQ youth in need.
Impact
By scaling our digital crisis services program, we will work towards providing immediate, life-saving crisis counseling to any LGBTQ young person in need of mental health support. This project will empower us to:
1. Provide support to more LGBTQ youth where they are already spending time. 73% of young people have smartphones, and 90% of texts are opened within three minutes. Our research found 75% of youth would prefer to contact Trevor via chat/text instead of phone. This project will enable us to provide crisis intervention services to more LGBTQ youth via these highly accessible platforms.
2. Provide support to more LGBTQ youth from high-risk communities. TrevorText and TrevorChat are more popular than our Lifeline with our most vulnerable populations, including transgender, non-binary, immigrant, and female-identified youth. Based on our independent evaluation, 45% of transgender youth who used chat/text did so because of a perceived reduced likelihood of being misgendered. 68% of youth who used chat/text reported they did so because it felt more confidential than the phone, and 63% because they felt it was easier to be themselves. We are investing in text and chat because they are inclusive and offer ways for all youth to get the support they deserve.
3. Provide support even faster. When youth chat and text us, they may have to wait for a few minutes in our queue before one of our counselors can respond. Getting back to youth quickly will reduce dropoff from our digital crisis services and will ensure high quality of care for all youth who reach out. With Battery Powered’s support to grow our volunteer capacity and technological infrastructure, we will reduce wait times on Chat and Text.
Leadership
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Amit Paley
CEO
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Dr. Tia Dole
Chief Clinical Operations Officer