Joe Barb is Executive Director and Founder of LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center. They have a mission to strengthen and empower all youth, however they identify, to overcome obstacles by providing housing, supportive counseling, community education, and advocacy.
Victoria and Chad talk with Joe about identifying needs for the center, his own lived experience and connection to the LGBTQ+ community, and deciding what services to provide and evaluating which are most impactful.
LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center (https://lgbtqfamilyconnectionscenter.net/)
Follow the LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center on Twitter (https://twitter.com/center_lgbtq), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lgbtqfamilyconnectionscenter/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/LGBTQFamilyConnectionCenter), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/lgbtq-family-connections-center/).
Follow Joe on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-barb-978ba0204/).
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel.
VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Joe Barb, Executive Director and Founder of LGBTQ+ Family Connections Center, with a mission to strengthen and empower all youth however they identify to overcome obstacles by providing housing, supportive counseling, community education, and advocacy. Joe, thank you for joining us.
JOE: Thank you. I appreciate it.
VICTORIA: Wonderful. So you started the center over two years ago. If you could go back in time and give yourself advice to when you were first starting out, what would you tell yourself?
JOE: Wow, very similar to for-profit companies, having the tenacity to keep knocking on doors, never accepting no for an answer, and understanding that tenacity is everything. Nothing happens without continuing the fight every day.
VICTORIA: Great. And how did you first identify that need for the center?
JOE: A million years ago, when I was a late teenager, my parents had a pastor in their church suggest to them that in order to bring me back to God and back to their church, that they should cut me off financially, you know, I was a young freshman in college prod me in that direction. So my parents took the advice, and I found myself in my second semester of college with no funding. The check for the second semester had been canceled from my family, and I didn't know what to do.
So I called a friend in South Dakota that we had met on vacation. And she said, "You know what? I have an apartment building here. I just had an apartment become vacant. Why don't you move to South Dakota, and then we'll work on everything else?" So that lived experience kind of proded the whole thing. And then meeting the youth who had been displaced from home for being a trans youth caused the rest.
CHAD: Well, I'm really sorry for that personal experience that you had. But it's pretty powerful and that you've gone on to help others in similar situations is really admirable.
JOE: Yeah, it's been quite a journey. And my lived experience, honestly, I was with stability within 24 hours. The more I became comfortable and complacent in my life and then met somebody who wasn't; it brought me back to that. And then just looking at statistics, looking at how youth end up in a houseless situation created something in me that I had to address.
VICTORIA: So you had your own lived experience and that connection to your community which helped you identify that need and start out on the center. Did you find there were a lot of resources for building nonprofits?
JOE: There isn't. And it's really something that when you go into it, you believe that when you create a nonprofit and you finish that application, you sen