Velvet Lenore didn’t come to Compass Community Center looking for a program. She came in because she saw rainbow flags outside and needed a place to catch her breath.

At the time, she was sleeping in her car while trying to attend ballet school, surviving one day at a time.

“It wasn't so much the services that they offered me,” she said. “It was the love that they were giving me to show me that I wasn't alone in this.”

Compass helped her find food, locate her first place to stay, and connect to community members who offered small jobs so she could begin saving money. It was the first safety net she’d had in her life.

And Velvet’s story, as extraordinary as she is, is far from unusual.

The social, emotional, and financial gaps queer people face start early, long before any attempt at economic mobility can even begin. LGBTQ youth often navigate a stacked deck: coming out, family rejection, bullying, harassment, and strikingly higher rates of homelessness, addiction, HIV infection, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.

Because those early disruptions compound over time, queer people often reach adulthood with fewer supports, fewer networks, and fewer chances to stabilize. That’s exactly where LGBTQ community centers step in. They fill the gaps families, schools, and institutions leave behind, quietly providing the conditions that make long-term mobility possible.

That gap is enormous. 

According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, 17% of sexual-minority adults in the U.S. have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, more than double the rate in the general population. The Trevor Project reported in 2022 that 28% of LGBTQ youth have faced homelessness or housing instability at least once.

For Tony Lima, CEO of SunServe, those statistics are not abstract. They walk through the doors every day.

In Fort Lauderdale, SunServe’s Sunshine Pride House is a relatively new 12-bed transitional home serving LGBTQ young adults who have nowhere else to go.

The house is designed as short-term transitional housing, not a permanent shelter. Most residents stay for a few months while they stabilize, work, and move toward independent living.

“So these kids are coming to the house because they've either aged out of foster care or they've been kicked out of their homes because they're LGBTQ,” Lima said. “You kind of have to start from zero. Which is the common theme of all of these youth.”

Sunshine Pride House provides housing, therapy, life coaching, clinical support, and job readiness.

The statistics that follow LGBTQ youth into adulthood — poverty, homelessness, mental-health struggles, and lower access to stability — are exactly what this home is trying to interrupt.

Nationally, LGBTQ adults have higher poverty rates than their straight, cisgender peers. One analysis of U.S. data found that about 22% of LGBT people live in poverty, compared with roughly 16% of straight and cisgender adults. That gap doesn’t appear randomly. It appears because early instability becomes adult instability unless someone intervenes.

SunServe is one of those interventions. The organization has long centered mental health care, housing support, and practical life skills across its youth, senior, and transgender programs. The Sunshine Pride House is a natural extension of that work — pulling those supports under one roof for young people who are experiencing homelessness.

In the transgender services department, staff help clients navigate job interviews, connect with affirming employers, and even dress professionally.

“We help them get jobs. We have a clothing closet with suits and professional attire,” Lima said.

Day-to-day life skills are treated as economic building blocks.

“We teach our youth about financial literacy,” he added. “How to balance a checkbook. How to buy groceries.”

The impact of that stability extends far beyond any single program. Economists have been tracking these patterns for years.

Few people have articulated this more clearly than M.V. Lee Badgett, one of the country’s leading economists on LGBTQ inequality and author of The Economic Case for LGBT Equality.

Economists consider health — physical and mental — a form of human capital. 

And when LGBTQ people face additional hurdles, challenges and barriers to economic success, it limits their ability to work, earn, and advance.

“If we got rid of those gaps by 2030, our GDP would be 1.6% higher than it will be otherwise,” Badgett said. 

In other words: LGBTQ inclusion is an economic strategy.

LGBTQ nonprofits and community centers are among the few institutions explicitly working to close those gaps — not just through advocacy, but through day-to-day services that keep people housed, healthy, and connected.

At Compass Community Center in Palm Beach County, those disparities show up in very concrete ways. Raymond Cortes, Compass’ health services director, oversees the Ryan White Part A program for people living with HIV, work that sits right at the intersection of health, housing, and money.

“The job is providing people who are living with HIV services and linkage to care,” he said.

That linkage can be the difference between spiraling and stabilizing. New clients come through early intervention, get screened, and are connected immediately to a case manager who can help with insurance support, legal aid, housing and employment referrals, and basic survival needs.

“We have emergency finance services where we can help clients with at least one month’s rent, and we can help them with utilities,” Raymond said. “We have a clinic where they do other STD testing, so we have a lot of resources here at Compass.”

Ask him what most often stands between his clients and stability, and he doesn’t hesitate: jobs, insurance, and a roof, all tangled together.

It’s a cycle he sees every week in the clients who come through his door.

National data backs him up. Research has consistently found that LGBTQ adults are more likely to be uninsured and more likely to delay or skip care because of cost than straight, cisgender adults, even when coverage gaps narrow. Those setbacks compound when employment is unstable.

“Employment being up there is like number one. Because if you can't have employment then you don't have health insurance and you can't get the care that you need,” he said. “It all goes hand in hand.”

Those barriers land hardest on the people already pushed to the margins.

“It’s much easier for a gay man or a lesbian to find employment or to get healthcare than a trans or a queer person,” he said.

National surveys of transgender workers have found that they report unemployment at roughly twice the rate of the general population — a disparity Cortes sees firsthand.

For Cortes, healthcare isn’t separate from economic mobility; it’s the foundation of it.

“I would say that’s one of the most important ones out of all of them,” he said. And with political attacks and recent cuts, “right now we’re back to square one, where our trans community can’t get the care that they really need and want.”

With the state cutting HIV testing dollars and tightening restrictions on LGBTQ health care, places like Compass and SunServe, are more important than ever. 

For Cortes, the power of a queer community center is clearest in the long-haul success stories, like a client who struggled for years to stay connected to care until everything was finally under one roof.

“Having all the resources here at Compass will help a client succeed,” he said. “You don’t give up on clients. You cannot give up on clients. You’ve got to meet them where they’re at.”

If Compass shows how health access and support can stabilize someone in the present, Velvet Lenore shows what sustained support can make possible over an entire lifetime.

When Lenore arrived at Compass decades ago, she needed stability. Over time, the center helped her build it. She stayed connected, grounded, and found her footing.

She didn’t just move forward; she built something bigger.

Today, Velvet has 122 drag children (yes, you read that right), a sprawling chosen family modeled on the guidance and stability she once needed herself.

“I wanted to create this family based on what I went through as a child,” she said. “I never felt like I had enough guidance. I needed people to talk to me.”

Some of her kids have battled addiction.

“A couple of my kids were on drugs when they met me and I helped them get off drugs,” she said. “I actually went to the AA meetings with them.”

Many were financially unstable when they met her.

“I teach them how to save,” she said. “I trained myself how to manage my money, and I pass that on to my kids.”

One of her children told her recently that she had filled the void left when he lost his mother.

“It always makes me feel good to hear things like that,” Lenore said.

This is chosen family as economic infrastructure: mentorship, resource-sharing, crisis prevention, stability, life skills, emotional grounding, and generational support.

In most households, this support passes through families automatically. For queer people, it has to be built.

SunServe also played a crucial role in Lenore’s transition as a trans woman.

“They helped me with my paperwork, with changing my name. They helped me get my medication,” she said. “I wouldn’t be standing here as me today if it wasn’t for them.”

To Lima, support like this isn’t peripheral; it’s fundamental.

“In order for someone to live a rich, full, healthy life, and to be able to enjoy economic stability, people have to be able to live authentically,” he said. Without access to gender-affirming care, safe housing, and mental-health support, “you’re not going to be able to really put the steps together to have a full and productive life.”

Authenticity isn’t abstract. It’s the precondition for participating fully in work, community, and economy.

Queer nonprofits and community centers typically aren’t thought about in this way. They don’t position themselves as economic powerhouses or mobility engines.

But that’s what they are.

Economic mobility doesn’t begin with income; it begins with stability, safety, support, and a chance to breathe. Queer centers create those conditions quietly and consistently, giving people their first real foothold. That’s the economic story hiding in plain sight: queer centers aren’t just helping people survive — they’re helping people move up.

This story is part of the Economic Opportunity Lab, a national initiative from the Local Media Association and Comcast NBCUniversal supporting data-driven reporting on economic mobility.