To all in our beloved community,

All June, RYSE revisited what it means to create and facilitate safe spaces. This year’s PRYDE and the month as a whole gave us ample opportunity to revisit some of the original elements of what made RYSE necessary in the first place.

From everyone here at RYSE, we’d like to thank our beloved community for attending Be a Kid! RYSE to the Future in April. We had a lot of fun and hope you did too!

We successfully raised $60,000 for RYSE’s Youth Emergency Care Fund. With your contribution, we are able to provide timely and direct funds to young people to access basic human rights – safe housing, food, and health services.

RYSE exists because twenty years ago, Queer and Trans BIPOC Young People had the courage to organize and demand a space in their city that centers their collective healing, bold visions, and immense creativity.  Young people who understood the assignment of justice for all, including the generations after them.  Today’s generation of youth and adults feel the power, love, and care of our youth founders as they enter the RYSE Campus. It is the foundation and ongoing  fire for us to take bold steps together toward RYSE’s Theory of Liberation.  

Turón, tulum, lumpia, spring rolls, punipuri, mango lasi, and thai tea aromas filled the kitchen toward the end of May at RYSE. This Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Month came with intention. The end result was a vibrant AAPI Spirit Week capped off with our first inaugural Asian Rysing: Double the Happiness, Double the Fun cultural event, but all of that vibrance started with our Asian Rysing staff and their drive to introduce the space to the specific tastes, sounds, fashions, and arts the community has to offer.

What makes a young person whole?

And how often do the systems they navigate approach them with that question in mind? Is that even the intended question? Is witnessing, acknowledging, and attending to their humanity even the point of these systems?

Today we’re debuting the above “RYSE to the Future” video spotlighting…

RYSE’s annual Be a Kid! fundraiser is made possible by our generous sponsors. This year, we are honoring our lead sponsors by sharing a little bit about how each organization collaborates with RYSE. We are grateful for the contributions made by our community to help us create a space to benefit our youth.

A mid-March conversation with RYSE’s Community Health Program Manager, Fahima Zaman, was filled with an electricity reflective of the dedicated, forward-thinking energy felt at our Health Justice Center. Threaded into RYSE’s core values, we took some time to discuss health for femme-identified youth, including cis, trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming youth in 2024. A generation is coming of age amidst an old struggle in a new landscape and Fahima noticed one pattern: members just want access to knowledge.

This Black Future’s Month we reflect on Black joy, laughter, healing, togetherness, rage, creativity, community, solidarity, food, fashion…all things past, all things present, and imagined futures. If you strike up a conversation with young people here on campus, you are bound to hear about their dreams: some explain theirs at a whisper, some exclaim theirs loud enough for the area to hear, and regardless of which, this expression is why we’re here. Young people and their futures are unwritten and full of possibility…

Dear Beloved Community,

As we reflect on this past year, we are reminded that we are all healing. 2023 was a year upon years of new experiences and relationships, of joyful music and creative leadership, of profound loss and grief within our community and world, and of navigating and working to reshape the systems we live among.