Ok adults. Be prepared for an emotional explosion because I’m about to get super fucking real with you. But first … context.

About four or five years ago, I was scrolling Insta while having a drink at a friend’s bar when I came across an incredible place in Wisconsin called The Hounds & Tap. It’s a taphouse, dog park, doggy daycare, dog grooming, and dog boarding place all under one roof. And I thought, well, this is fucking genius. Because who wouldn’t want to relax with a bevvy while somebody else gives their dog a bath? Then before I realized what was happening, my brain did what my brain tends to do, and within about fifteen minutes I had turned somebody else’s perfectly reasonable dog business into a workforce-development program.

I started thinking: what if I built something like this in Northern California and staffed it with displaced queer kids and foster youth? Not the bullshit “job experience” thing where an organization brings in a kid to fold flyers for three hours and then the CEO congratulates themselves for changing a life. I’m talking REAL jobs: dog grooming, food service, customer service, scheduling, inventory, running a floor, learning how a small business actually operates. Skills you can take somewhere else. Money of your own. References. A work history. A little bit of independence that doesn’t disappear the second the program ends. And lots of dog hair, of course.

And this stopped being one of those ideas I scribbled in a notebook and forgot about. We got pretty damn far. We found grants we started building packages for. We were looking at private funding. I was figuring out what it would actually take to make the thing a real brick-and-mortar reality. Then the federal landscape changed. Programs serving LGBTQ youth lost dedicated funding, grants were being pulled or rewritten around gender-related programming, and suddenly some of the funding paths I had been building toward were no longer paths I felt I could reasonably count on.

And having to shelve that idea hurt, because I had spent real time – lots of time – thinking about kids who had already lost something enormous: home, family support, stability, sometimes all three. And what really pissed me off was realizing that, once again, the solution being offered to the kid was basically: okay, adjust. Your family cannot handle you? Adjust. Your school is hostile? Adjust. Your church does not know what to do with you? Fucking adjust. Your sports program was not built with you in mind? Adjust. Your nervous system cannot tolerate the environment everybody else decided was “normal”? Adjust. Your extended family wants to make Christmas miserable because Aunt Judi can’t survive a pronoun? Apparently you should adjust. <<<Forehead slap>>>

And one day I started asking myself: Why the fuck are the kids always the ones being asked to adjust? Seriously. Why are we forever teaching kids how to survive systems the adults built badly? And look, I’m Gen X. I know exactly where some of this comes from. A lot of us were raised in 1986 and are now parenting in 2026 with the emotional toolkit we were handed back then. And let’s be honest, that toolkit was already missing several pieces. Our parents literally had to be reminded by people on television to make sure we were in the house at ten o’clock at night. <<<PAUSE FOR EFFECT>>> We were not exactly raised during the golden age of emotionally responsive parenting.

So yes, some of us are trying to parent kids through situations our own parents did not have language for, using tools that were barely adequate for us in the first place. I have compassion for that. I really do. But that cannot become the kid’s burden. At some point, the adult has to update the software. Why is the first question so often, “How do we help this child cope?” What if the first question was: What the hell do the ADULTS need to change?

That is where Rainbow Roots came from. The original project, a brick-and-mortar that is still very much in play, was downstream. If a queer kid had already been displaced, I wanted there to be somewhere for them to land. A job. Community. People who noticed them. Something solid while they figured out what came next. And I still want that. Very much. But Rainbow Roots started because I asked a bigger question: What if I could keep the kid from getting displaced to begin with?

Because I have dear friends at a place called Brave Trails doing extraordinary work with LGBTQ, neurodivergent, and disabled kids. They give kids community, adventure, creativity, and a place where they can exhale for a while. They get to explore nature, do theater, put on shows, and experiment with clothes from the costume closet. I LOVE their costume closet. I mean that sincerely. But somebody also needs to sit with the adults. Somebody needs to talk to the parent who loves their kid desperately and is still scared shitless. The parent whose religion is suddenly colliding with reality. The parent who thinks accommodation means indulgence. The parent who thinks protecting their son from bullying means telling him not to wear the skirt. The parent who made a mess of the first conversation and now does not know how to fix it. The parent who genuinely wants to do better and has no fucking idea where to start.

That is my end of the deal. Brave Trails gets the costume closet. I get the parents. Which is absolutely fair.

And since I started building Rainbow Roots, I have discovered people and organizations who have been doing adjacent work for years. Organizations like The Family Acceptance Project. Mama Dragons. Heather Hester. And Brave Trails, of course. A whole ecosystem of people trying to make life safer and better for LGBTQ kids and their families. I did not invent family acceptance. I did not invent supportive parenting. I sure as hell didn’t wander into an empty field and plant the first rainbow fucking ally flag. And I think it is important that I say that out loud.

Rainbow Roots came from my particular question, which was: What if I could keep queer kids from being displaced to begin with? Then I started wondering: Who is being asked to carry the cost of the way we have always done things? And when the answer kept being the kid, I got pissed. Because children are already doing the work of becoming themselves. They should not also have to manage everybody else’s fear, theology, embarrassment, politics, traditions, sensory expectations, family secrets, and learning curve. That is adult work.

So when I say, “I keep queer kids safe by helping parents grow,” that is what I mean. I am not trying to make parents perfect. I am trying to help adults notice what their kid is being asked to carry while everybody else figures out their shit, and then asks: Now that we know, what changes?

Rainbow Roots is not a brick-and-mortar. Not yet. That is still part of my mission, but it is further downstream. The brick-and-mortar asks: If the kid is already outside, how do we go get them? Rainbow Roots asks: What can we change before they ever have to leave? Because maybe, just maybe, instead of teaching another generation of queer kids how to survive adults who refuse to adjust, the adults can be the people who fucking adjust for once.

That’s all for now. For more, please visit rainbowrootsmedia.com. And don’t forget to take good care of yourself today. Whew … ok. I think I actually DO need a bevvie after that one …