Mission

Our mission is to create a world in which all Queer and Trans youth are supported to realize their power and autonomy through self-determination. We help youth resist oppression by building community, healing, and growing together.

Youth OUTright engages in intersectional and intergenerational dialogue with a focus on gender and racial justice. Our work includes programming for youth ages 11-24, training for youth-serving organizations, and advocacy for policies that protect Queer and Trans youth.

Youth OUTright WNC, Inc. is a 501(c) 3 organization.

Racial Justice

Youth OUTright believes that racial justice is a commitment to centering the liberation of Black and Brown folks. Racial justice requires healing the harm caused by colonialism, abolishing systems of oppression, and uplifting and centering QTBIPOC voices throughout the process. We work to disrupt cultural silos, white supremacists, and patriarchal hierarchies through growing intersectional partnerships and standing in solidarity with aligned social justice movements. Youth OUTright occupies unceded Cherokee, Yuchi, Catawba, and Miccosukee lands, in the 18 counties of so-called Western North Carolina.

Gender Justice

Youth OUTright believes that gender justice is the freedom to express one’s gender in its fullness in any and all spaces. We believe that a community that has achieved Gender Justice views gender in expansive, non-binary terms and is equitable across gender and sexual identity. We work towards the deconstruction of white supremacist gender models that have been forced upon indigenous cultures around the world, bodily autonomy for all, and the end of the cisgender-hetereosexual patriarchy. 

Disability Justice

Youth OUTright believes that disability justice means prioritizing the self-determination, interdependence, intersectionality, and access needs of the people we support, even when there may be friction between those needs. We believe that a community has achieved Disability Justice when it has a robust care network that ensures people's needs are met equitably and in a manner that facilitates the freedom, autonomy, and liberation of people with disabilities. We work towards creating accessible spaces by holding regular conversations about the access needs of the youth we serve and our staff, providing free accessibility tools and aids, and prioritizing accessibility in all of the spaces we create.