Imagine you’re walking down a sidewalk with a couple of friends, all heading in the same direction. No one’s coming toward you, and you’re not blocking anyone’s way. But at some point, you realize you’ve been pushed to the edge because none of you can walk in a straight line. Suddenly you’re in the grass, the curb, maybe even the street. Your friends don’t notice that they’ve edged you out of the group. It’s usually not malice, just a lack of attention or intention. It's nothing to dwell on, nothing to feel overly victimized by.

But it’s an image that clearly illustrates how marginalization works. That lack of attention — and sometimes, yes, malice — means some of us end up walking in the grass while others are pushed into the street, where the possibility of harm is far greater. Most marginalization isn’t deliberate, but if we open our eyes to the people who are supposed to be walking with us, we can see where they actually are, what they’re navigating, and how often we are the obstacles to their safety and belonging.

Safety is not guaranteed for marginalized people, for organizers, or for those living in communities that have been extracted from, ignored, or exploited. I learned early that safety wasn’t promised, but I knew how desperately I wanted it. I knew how much I sought it out, even putting myself at greater risk just to get close. I knew how I twisted and hid my own self to fit into containers that promised safety, even when those same containers were dangerous to me in other ways.

I didn’t consciously name “safety”, for myself or others, as a goal when I was young. I didn’t realize that’s what was missing. I didn’t plot a career around trying to create it. But looking back, every job, every project, every community I’ve invested in has had one shared purpose: creating safer spaces for people who have been denied them. I’ve never pretended my work could eliminate all harm or control every outcome. What I’ve tried to do is help people build spaces of belonging or even celebration — spaces with clarity, grounding, and enough collective power that we don’t face harm alone. Safety has always been a guiding light I was working to create as a pathway to a freer world, even before I had the language for it.

Looking back, safety has been woven through everything I've intentionally set out to do. Each job was simply the medium available to me at that moment. Those containers were often limiting, so I built my own and supported efforts outside the systems that harm us. Community can create its own safety practices with alternative structures, relationship agreements, and strategies that make harm less catastrophic and life more possible. If safety can’t be promised, it must be created.

There’s a spectrum of safety, of course, and it means different things for different people. Several years ago, the right wing meme-ified the idea of “safe spaces” by acting like safety meant comfort. But we aren’t talking about the same thing. Discomfort is a growth edge; a lack of safety is harm. Marginalized people are more likely to dismiss, minimize, or justify harm just to get through the moment, while people who experience harm less often may mistake discomfort for danger.

When I’m training community members from largely privileged backgrounds, I often have to say plainly that discomfort is not a lack of safety. We need folks to step into discomfort as an act of solidarity. And while something may be uncomfortable for one person based on their identity and history, that same experience might be genuinely unsafe for someone else. We still want everyone safe, and we work to reduce harm when people take bold action alongside marginalized communities.

We all deserve safety. It can be the ground beneath our feet, the thing that lets us grow, risk, imagine, and organize.

In Direct Practice

I’m a macro social worker at heart, drawn to systems, advocacy, and organizing. But graduating with an MSW meant building my organizing résumé while paying the bills in direct practice case management. I worked with LGBTQ+ youth, foster families, and adults living with HIV. Safety in that context meant making sure people had a place to sleep and food to eat, giving them a moment to catch their breath in a space where their identities weren’t questioned, being present during mental health crises, and being an unwavering support system. Sometimes safety was simply letting someone know they were seen.

It was also in this work that I began earnestly training service providers and educators on working with LGBTQ+ youth, a bridge between direct practice and movement building.

Organizing Taught Me That Safety Is Collective

When I moved into political and community organizing, I stepped into a different kind of safety work: community safety through collective power. Whether working to pass local nondiscrimination protections, pushing back against over-policing, equipping people with tools to organize, or sustaining coalitions to defend our communities, organizing was where I found steadiness. When political forces weaponize our identities, rhetoric becomes dangerous, and laws erode our rights, our coalitions come together. When any of us are targeted and unsafe, all of us are unsafe.

Alongside this work, I grew into more literal community safety roles. From 2009–2012, I served as a legal observer and clinic defender in Charlotte. In 2014, that work expanded to tracking Klan rallies across North Carolina. I still track bad actors, train people to recognize threat symbols, support digital security, and help communities prepare for moments of risk. More recently, that has included anti-ICE patrol trainings and being present when immigration agents terrorize neighbors. Today, I also work with small Prides on creating safety plans for their events. It matters that we know who is around us with the intention to cause harm.

But beyond identifying and responding to threats, or mitigating risks, safety is about reclaiming power that has been denied to us. It’s about ensuring people can exist with agency and equal treatment, especially when systems try to isolate us. Many of the core organizing tools I learned were locked behind expensive fellowships and workshops accessible only to paid organizers. Part of my work now is putting those tools in as many hands as possible.

In the Church

Growing up, my faith community was my safest place. I spent several days a week at church, around adults who had known me my whole life. I felt accepted, celebrated even, for how much I knew about scripture and history. I was given leadership opportunities. The support I had there shaped me deeply.

But safety shifted. Anti-LGBTQ+ protesters entered and disrupted our service one Sunday, making it literally unsafe. And as I grew into my identities, I remained unsure how I fit in the congregation that accepted, but did not affirm, LGBTQ+ people. Later, at a religious college, it was unsafe to be out at all. I learned quickly how discriminatory the school’s reaction could be toward LGBTQ+ students. My friends and I attempted to start a Gay-Straight Alliance, building student support even though we were ultimately denied official recognition. More than a decade later, that same university now highlights its LGBTQ+ student group on social media. Sometimes safety work is creating the seeds so that it's safer for the next generation to accomplish what you dreamed.

My experiences in church, a religious studies undergraduate experience with faith-based extracurricular activities, and seminary taught me the delicate politics of LGBTQ+ inclusion in primarily white Protestant spaces. I often wonder how different my life might have been if I had been able to stay connected to the church I loved, secure that I would be embraced exactly as I am.

Faith communities can be profoundly powerful in creating safer worlds. I learned early that safety is not just physical; it’s cultural, psychological, spiritual, and relational. Congregations are often the first or last place people seek belonging. That’s why I care so deeply about supporting churches to understand their commitments to inclusion, to nurture community, and to create spaces where all can breathe. That, too, is safety work.

Sanctuary, like church itself, is not just a place. It is a practice, a discipline of care.

Community and Cultural Spaces

Safety has also shown up in the community spaces I’ve helped build. At an LGBTQ+ youth center where I worked, the age range shifted and suddenly the oldest youth lost their safe space. A few of us started a young adult group for ages 18–25, which included discussion nights, skill building, outings, harm reduction, and a supportive path into adulthood. I ran that program for years until it was no longer needed.

Today, I serve on the working board of HayCo Pride, rooted in the intersection of queerness and Southern Appalachian culture. We host monthly hikes, cultural events, community art projects like zines and archival work, a trans+ adult support group, and consistent mutual aid.

After Tropical Storm Fred and Hurricane Helene, I pulled together constantly updated resource guides so people had a central place to look for whatever they needed for stability with constantly shifting county-by-count information. That work grew to a team of 60 people across the state who were committed to recovery and community care.

I also serve on the board of a Southern, LGBTQ+ archive called Invisible Histories, which highlights the often erased and suppresed historical culture of LGBTQ+ people in the South. They encourage individuals and family members to collect individual histories, produce zines on archving our own communities, and train communities on the importance of knowing and preserving our histories. Knowing our own history and ancestors, that we are part of a larger story, is a form of safety for queer folks who otherwise would not have access to a direct lineage in which we are reflected.

Mutual aid and cultural care, helping people see themselves in the larger story, and community spaces are all forms of safety.

Pride Education Services Exists Because Safety Is Teachable

Pride Education Services is my way of scaling safety, through building trainings, cohort programs, community learning spaces, and strategy sessions that pass on the skills, frameworks, and imagination people need to create safety where they are.
 

This work is about belonging as strategy, care as infrastructure, and safety as a shared responsibility instead of a personal burden. Safety is the starting condition, not the end goal. It’s the first step that helps us build the world where all of us can thrive and be celebrated.
 

All my life I’ve been building safety, whether or not I realized it. Now that I do, I know how urgently we must scale this work to get it into hearts, minds, practices, and embodied.
 

So I’m ready to write about it, teach it, train it, and live it with you. Stay tuned for upcoming programming.