A Sweet Farewell from our Executive Director, kai alviar horton

Dear Trans Lifeline Community,

I hope this letter finds you deeply held and cherished.

As I sit down to write to you, I find myself incredibly moved by the last almost two years that I have had the honor and privilege of being the Executive Director here. To say that this role and our work have pushed me to grow as a person and leader is an understatement. I am so grateful and so proud of all we have accomplished together.

It is with an open and certain heart that I let our community know that I am ending my time at Trans Lifeline as our Executive Director.

We plan to be very intentional about what the next steps will look like to welcome this new, exciting chapter here. Over the coming months, we will be announcing a call for applications and will lead a deeply thoughtful and values-aligned recruitment process to bring on new leadership to our organization. Please stay tuned for those upcoming announcements.

When I first joined Trans Lifeline in 2024, I could not have fathomed the times we would find ourselves in. We spent these past two years focusing on rebuilding our financial stability, culture, and structure. It has been beautiful, hard, scary, and hope-inducing, to say the least.

There is so much to be proud of that has gotten us to this moment, so many incredible humans past and present who make this work possible and who deserve fields of flowers for making Trans Lifeline what it is today: a place that models trans futures that are abundant, loving, and boundless. What a gift, what a journey.

As we look ahead, we will continue to deepen our work by offering more and more presence for our callers on the hotline, disbursing wealth to trans people through our expanding microgrants program, and hosting community-facing programs and digital spaces that continue to meet the ever-growing need for being a space of connection and community through these times; we are here and we are not going anywhere.

I am incredibly excited, hopeful, and heartened to welcome new leadership to Trans Lifeline as I know that new energy and vision will only continue to make our work deeper, more loving, and build the world we so deeply believe in.

Every day I have been in this role, I have felt incredibly honored, even on the hardest days. I often felt like it was some sort of miracle I ended up here, I will never take that for granted. I hope that the love and labor I was able to pour into this organization has ripple effects that last for many years to come.

I want to thank each of you for the ways your love and support have made us better, knowing that without all of you, we would not be able to do our work the way we do. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

As I close this letter, I am wishing for a world filled with trans love and joy. Where trans kids get to grow old. Where we get to live long, beautiful lives. Where our elders are treated with dignity and respect. Where Black and brown people receive the resources they deserve. Where trans people, especially women and femmes, are held in divine love. That we may live to see a free Palestine, Sudan, DR Congo, and freedom to all people who have lived under colonial violence. That we may never normalize humans being ripped away and disappeared from their families and communities. That we choose love in the face of empire. May we remember we are worthy of the love we so deserve and may every trans person remember they deserve to live.

With so much love and gratitude,

kai (he/him/él)
Outgoing Executive Director at Trans Lifeline

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