The new Director of Youth Programming at GSAFE, Yante Turner, sees the young people he works with as the true leaders. “I believe that young people are already experts,” he says.

At his core, Turner says he is a Black, trans abolitionist organizer. As a change agent, he seeks to make queer and trans youth feel seen and show them that LGBTQIA+ adults are thriving. “It’s being that person to hold space for young people,” Turner says of his role. “The other part is the development of their leadership, which I think is really significant in our work, because it gives and shifts power to young people.”

GSAFE’s mission is to act as a catalyst for LGBTQIA+ youth development, leadership, and support in K–12 schools, but Turner thinks GSAFE does far more work than the mission statement can capture.

Turner was born on Milwaukee’s northside, and he comes from “Black mamas that know too much and from elders and ancestors that will give up the world for my liberation and freedom.” Outside his director role, Turner does community work that brings him a “lot of life” and “fortifies” his role at GSAFE. “I love Black people. I love trans folks,” Turner says. “I’ve been in community with Black queer and trans abolitionists and abolitionist work for the past several years.”

Creating impact from the start 

Turner may be in a new position, but he is not new to GSAFE. He started working at GSAFE as an AmeriCorps member, working with both GSAFE and Diverse & Resilient in Milwaukee to collaborate and create a bridge between the two organizations and communities. For several years,Turner worked as a counselor for the GSAFE’s Leadership Training Institute (LTI). As a counselor, he says he was able to be in community with queer and trans youth experiencing realities both similar and drastically different to his own.

While at the Leadership Training Institute, Turner created a training for white queer and trans youth, many of whom had never been around Black and brown people, to talk about white supremacy and what it means “to create concrete change and shift narratives as white allies to Black and brown liberation of trans people.” The training Turner created allowed him to build a relationship with GSAFE that was also connected to the spirit and community-based work he did as an abolitionist organizer. “It opened up my heart to GSAFE,” he says.

Turner also works with Sun-Seeker MKE, a Black and trans abolitionist collective, where he introduced the training he developed at GSAFE. Workshops offered a place for Black and brown people to “speak and talk without punishment, carcerality, or criticism” and ended with young white people working in groups to process the steps of anti-racism.

In the workshops, Turner saw young white queer and trans people who had never thought about their relationship to their whiteness challenge themselves and challenge the people around them.

“It allowed me to see that young people are always going to be okay,” he says. “Adults are the issue, because we’re not being critical about what’s being offered. We’re not being critical about our relationship with each other. Young people were doing it in that session.”

Turner’s experience as an LTI counselor, and his experience developing new training for young people, led him to where he is now. “That’s how I got into it,” he says. “Watching young people be brilliant and then challenging myself to be in a full-time role to continue to challenge white supremacy.”

Setting goals, passing the torch 

One thread running through Turner’s work is his trust in young people to build a better future. “We are the holders of things, not the leaders,” he says. “When we talk about developing young people to sit in the spots that we are currently in, that looks like mentorship, that looks like advocacy and support, and that looks like adults moving over and literally putting funds, support, and resources where their mouth is.”

At GSAFE, there is a focus on “wraparound care” and “dignity-based work” to treat young people as “whole people.” When mentoring a young person in a leadership role, or encouraging them to attend a program, Turner says, “You actually have to care about their mental health. You have to care about what their communities look like, what their parents are saying, if they’re getting enough sleep, if they have access to food.”

Turner believes GSAFE’s job is to explore what it looks like to set young people up to thrive, even if they currently aren’t. “We’re trying to remove ourselves from the survival lens of queerness,” he says.

In his new role, Turner has several goals, the first being to serve more people of color. GSAFE has historically served white people and been led by white people, he says. Turner credits Executive Director Tyrone Creech for transforming and shifting GSAFE’s mission and vision. “TJ is now in leadership as a Black, gay man who was born and raised in Madison and understands the political and social landscape he is in,” Turner says. “I’m here because I want to follow him.”

Turner wants Black young people to have access to the resources that GSAFE has, and he wants to create leadership positions for young people within GSAFE. He also wants to make sure transfemme folks are served by GSAFE in ways that are “autonomous and valued by them.”

Turner’s largest goal while at GSAFE is to establish a “peer-to-peer, youth-based crisis intervention response.” The community response would be a community-to-community training program that trains young people in mental health first aid de-escalation, covering everything from how to make a gunshot wound non-deadly to drug overdose reversal.

“Young people are not all right, and simultaneously are all right,” Turner says. “That is because we allow young people to ferment in the terrors of the world and offer no solutions as the people that have given them that world.” He says many adults fear that because they have to make room for young people, they have to move “out of existence.” Turner says that is not the goal. “Move out of power, so our young people can move into positions of power, and we can move into positions of mentorship and care.”