Seventeen volunteers from the St. Louis area have come together to form a new helpline service for LGBTQIA+ people, St. Louis Queer+ Support Helpline or SQSH. The helpline will go live by the end of August, by which time each volunteer will have received 50 hours of training in topics including cultural competency, sensitivity, peer counseling, anti-racism, and substance abuse. Once up and running, callers in the area can connect with LGBTQIA+ affirming peers Thursdays through Sundays, noon–7 p.m.
While flying back to Washington University in St. Louis from their home in Singapore at the end of summer 2018, Luka Cai thought of the idea of a city-wide peer helpline. The idea was based off of Luka’s own identity and experience as a transmasculine, nonbinary, pansexual person who was born and raised in Singapore.
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“Growing up in Singapore, I always wanted a nonjudgmental, LGBTQIA-friendly, confidential person I could talk to, some kind of role model or someone who could have given me the emotional support I needed growing up,” Luka says. “Because I didn’t have that support, visibility, or representation, I felt isolated in the queer experience growing up.”
Upon moving to St. Louis for college, Luka says they were inspired by the local LGBTQIA+ community. They wanted to contribute in some way.
“When I came to St. Louis and to Wash. U., I experienced for the first time an environment in which I felt I could be fully out to people around me and still be accepted and recognized for the other parts of my identity without stigma attached to my queer identity,” Luka says. “In particular, outside of Wash. U., the LGBTQIA community in St. Louis is a community I’ve always wanted to become more involved in.”
With a grant from Washington University’s Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement, Luka got to work. Between November 2018 and March 2019, they conducted a community needs assessment and spoke with community partners to confirm the need for such an organization in St. Louis.
As SQSH took shape, the organization established ties to many existing LGBTQIA+ friendly groups in St. Louis, including Safe Connections, Metro Trans Umbrella Group, Civil Rights Enforcement Agency, Pride St. Louis, and Trans Education Service.
“I will say working on the helpline has been more life-giving than anything else I’ve worked on in recent memory,” Riott, Luka’s project co-coordinator and a master’s of social work student at Washington University’s Brown School, says. “It is a massive project. We have a small budget, we’re volunteer-run, and we’re trying to do something new here in St. Louis.”
Recruitment and interviews for potential volunteers took place between March and May. Luka and Riott hoped to find a diverse, passionate, and devoted first training class. This first crop of volunteers will serve on the helpline at least 3.5 hours per week for one year.
“Serving the St. Louis region, which contains 1,300,000 people, is a huge operation. Starting a helpline with 17 volunteers means we have limited capacity,” Luka says. “Because of that, I know it’s important to meet the needs of the most marginalized members of our community, including queer and trans people of color, low-income queer people, and queer people with disabilities.”
June 1 marked the first day of SQSH’s intensive training program. Training consists of a mix of guest speakers, bonding time within the training class, and practicing conversations for once calls begin to come in. Each session emphasizes real-world application.
“This is by far one of the best training experiences I have been in so far,” says Braveheart Gillani, a volunteer with SQSH and master’s of social work student at Wash. U.’s Brown School. “There is a lot of thoughtful and meaningful sections, which are great to learn. As a group, we have grappled with the dire status of queer rights and resources in St. Louis, and acknowledged the large racial issues present in the city.”
Luka and Riott aim to make all training sessions inclusive and to build community within the training class. Practicing active listening and strong friendship skills, Luka and Riott hope, will translate to the volunteers’ lives outside of the helpline. They believe this will create a ripple effect of openness and support throughout all of the volunteers’ own networks.
“I think that it can be so powerful when people learn the skills to support each other from an identity-affirming place,” Luka says. “Therapy and professional mental health support is so important and helpful for people, but I know it can be inaccessible for a lot of people. That’s why I think encouraging a culture of peer support, where we feel empowered to actively listen and create a culture where we talk to each other about the challenges we face, it can be so powerful and create a wave of mutual support in the community and a feeling of connectedness among human beings.”
Recruitment for this upcoming fall’s training class is now open here. SQSH is especially looking for potential volunteers holding multiple marginalized identities, especially people of color. The tentative date for a helpline launch party is August 15 from 6–8 p.m. at Pride Center.
