Walter Panzirer can’t remember precisely where the plane was headed that day, but he remembers the in-flight movie clearly. It was the story of a father whose gay son committed suicide. The movie was a production of The Trevor Project, and when Panzirer, who is a trustee at the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, got back to his office, he asked his team to find out more about the organization and its work.
Panzirer’s experience working as a school resource officer and a first responder in California and South Dakota helps guide the Helmsley Charitable Trust’s work, specifically its Rural Healthcare program. As IP’s Martha Ramirez has reported, that work includes support for both healthcare and mental healthcare in rural regions of the U.S, where both are often hard to find.
As Panzirer told Ramirez, “Your zip code should not determine your health outcomes and health equity, but unfortunately, in the United States, it does. And at the Helmsley Charitable Trust, we’re trying to level that playing field.”
Panzirer’s early work also exposed him to the challenges LGBTQ+ young people face — situations he was reminded of that day on his flight: “It really gave me pause to think back on my own experiences,” he said. “I’ve seen the struggles in that community — struggles with self-identity, and mental health issues, and even suicide.”
Panzirer and his staff were impressed with what they learned about The Trevor Project’s work. The organization’s mission is to provide crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ young people. It conducts research, advocacy and public education, with trained crisis counselors available to answer calls, texts and chats 24 hours a day through its hotline services.
Trevor received close to 500,000 crisis contacts last year, according to Kevin Wong, senior vice president of marketing, communications and content. “When you think about LGBTQ+ causes, when you think about mental health and suicide prevention — it’s like this unique Venn diagram,” he said. “There are different organizations that support all of those causes, but when you think about putting them together, The Trevor Project — we’re the leading suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ young people.”
The Helmsley team began conversations with The Trevor Project about working together. “That’s really the genesis of this project,” Panzirer said. “Rural healthcare is underfunded. Mental healthcare is underfunded. And when you put rural and mental health together, it’s super underfunded. There are so few resource in rural America — especially for a community that has four times the likelihood of considering suicide than than their heterosexual peers. I knew something needed to be done, and Trevor seemed like a natural partner, because they were already the experts.”
The result? A $5 million award from the Helmsley Charitable Trust to help The Trevor Project deploy a mental health awareness and support campaign for rural LGBTQ+ youth. The campaign will include advertising, public service announcements and social media messages. It will also support trainings for youth-serving organizations by The Trevor Project’s training team.
“We’re in a mental health crisis, and we know that The Trevor Project’s approach works,” Panzirer said. “I’m sure there are other approaches, too, but this is one where I really, truly believe we can help the most people the quickest. That’s what you need in a crisis: we need to help a lot of people quickly.”
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Reaching young people where they live
There is growing evidence that, amid a national mental health crisis, LGBTQ+ young people are having a particularly tough time. Every 45 seconds, an LGBTQ+ youth attempts suicide in the U.S., according to estimates by The Trevor Project.
Transgender young people are at particularly high risk. A recent CDC report found that 72% of transgender students “experienced persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness.” Compared to their cisgender peers, the study found, “transgender and questioning students experienced a higher prevalence of violence, poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and unstable housing, and a lower prevalence of school connectedness than their cisgender peers.”
Anti-trans policies introduced in many states are making matters worse, a recent Trevor Project report found. The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, found a statistically significant increase in suicide attempts amoung trans and nonbinary youth in states that enacted laws restricting the rights of trans people.
Stigma, isolation and a lack of access to mental health resources in rural communities can often make LGBTQ+ young people feel they have nowhere to turn. According to a 2022 survey by The Trevor Project, 55% of LGBTQ+ youth in Montana had considered suicide over the past year, compared to 45% in the U.S. as a whole. In South Dakota, 19% of LGBTQ+ young people had attempted suicide in the past year, compared to 14% nationwide.
The project launched by Helmsley and The Trevor Project aims to reach those young people where they live. This means working to reduce stigma and shame by uplifting the experiences of LGBTQ+ young people, encouraging them to seek help, and making sure that help is available. The campaign will initially target the states supported by Helmsley’s Rural Healthcare Program: Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
The campaign will work to raise awareness about The Trevor Project’s crisis services. “People are likely to know about our services if they live in New York, or California, or other coastal places where LGBTQ+ identities and resources are a bit more plentiful,” Wong said. “We want to make sure we are connecting rural LGBTQ+ young people and youth-interacting organizations with The Trevor Project and its services, too.”
To date, The Trevor Project has launched a number of successful public service campaigns. In 2019, influencer Eugene Lee Yang participated in a YouTube video promoting The Trevor Project. In another example, when former NFL player Carl Nassib came out as gay in 2021 (he was the first active NFL player to do so), he donated to The Trevor Project and directed young people to its crisis services.
In both instances, the organization received a surge in web traffic and donations, according to Wong. “When The Trevor Project is in the public eye and more people know about our work, then more people can get help, and more people know how to support The Trevor Project and the young people in their lives,” he said.
Breaking the cycle
With LGBTQ+ communities under increasing fire from conservative political and religious leaders, organizations defending their rights need more support than ever. But commitments from funders aren’t meeting the moment, if recent years are any indication — on the contrary, as IP’s Dawn Wolfe found in her analysis of a report by Funders for LGBTQ Issues. The report tracked 2022 funding levels and found “a static or effectively shrinking level of funding for queer groups in the face of a continuing, multipronged attack on LGBTQ Americans’ rights,” Wolfe wrote.
Panzirer understands the tricky politics of the moment, but that isn’t stopping him. “Politics has made this divisive,” he said. “I know that a lot of Helmsley Rural Healthcare states are very conservative, and talking about the LGBTQ community is going to bring controversy. But these are human lives. Many young people are dying. We all need to come together as a community and address the mental health care crisis. We know Trevor reaches this community. We know Trevor can break the cycle of suicide, and that shouldn’t be controversial at all.”
