Featured by LGBTQ Nation: “TurnOut organized a queer mutual aid network to help respond to the LA wildfires”

LGBTQ Nation, an online news magazine reporting on issues relevant to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community featured TurnOut in their article “TurnOut organized a queer mutual aid network to help respond to the LA wildfires” by Greg Owen on Thursday, April 10, 2025.

Read a copy of the article below:

The massive Los Angeles wildfires in January and their aftermath compelled scores of grassroots, community-led organizations, small businesses, and individuals to jump into relief efforts to give aid and comfort to the more than 200,000 residents forced to evacuate. Around 18,000 homes and structures were destroyed in the Pacific Palisades and Alta Dena regions before the fires were finally extinguished three weeks after they began. An estimated 29 people lost their lives in the blazes.

Volunteer opportunities beyond those offered by traditional aid organizations like the Red Cross could be hard to find. Web searches revealed a fractured landscape of calls for donations and searches on Reddit for how to help.

Jack Beck, a veteran activist with experience at AIDS Project Los Angeles and as communications director at MPact (Global Action for Gay Men’s Health and Rights), started the mutual aid group TurnOut in 2015. A kind of volunteer clearinghouse, TurnOut’s mission is to connect people looking to share their time and energy with organizations that do the most good in their own communities.

The California-based nonprofit has three chapters, in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego, a statewide network of 6000 volunteers supporting roughly 200 organizations, the group’s founder says, to address scattershot efforts by grassroots organizations to find volunteers to help with efforts benefitting the queer and trans communities.

Beck spoke with LGBTQ Nation from his home office in Oakland about TurnOut’s efforts to connect volunteers with LA wildfire relief efforts and how the nonprofit is charting a new course through politically perilous times.

LGBTQ Nation: Let’s start with your group’s response to the LA wildfires. When and how did you activate a response to the fires, which started on January 7?

Jack Beck: It’s always a balance between pushing something out immediately and then taking a moment to figure out where is the right place to direct people and not just being reactive.

So we activated our LA network on January 9, and we started pushing people to Project Angel Food, who have an initiative to deliver meals to fire victims. There’s the LA Mutual Aid Network, which was hosting a donation center. There’s also the Moss Venice shelter that we sent folks over to, to collect food, toiletries, face wash, sleeping bags — all the stuff that the people affected need.

There was also a fire mutual aid resource map by an organization called MALAN (Mutual Aid LA Network) that we sent out, which was an interactive map of all available resources. They are a collection of community-based emergency response groups that do trainings, and are doing a lot of work there on something called LA 2050, mobilizing a lot of folks and highlighting volunteer opportunities, donation drives, other ways to get involved.

And then there was an LA queer events coalition that had a town hall on healing and fire relief efforts that also got a lot of attention through our newsletter.

There are a lot of grassroots organizations out there dedicated to disaster relief and other causes. What’s the gap TurnOut is filling in the effort to recruit volunteers for them?

The reason why people sign up for TurnOut is that they are looking for ways to volunteer or make an impact for a cause they care about. And often, a lot of the groups that are doing work are not search engine optimized, and their websites look like a GeoCities website from the 1990s. A lot of grassroots work doesn’t have funding, and it’s just people who are kind of showing up and doing their best.

So we work to make that visible and give folks an entry point to any kind of work that they want to get involved with. We try to take a philosophy of, “All you need is the desire to get involved,” and then we will give you a lighted pathway to doing the kind of service you want to do. We make an effort every week to crawl the web and social media and reach out to orgs to figure out what’s happening and find those opportunities.

It sounds like it’s helpful, if those organizations want to recruit volunteers, to be technically savvy.

Absolutely, yes…. These organizations have so little money and they’re so resource-constrained that … I’m not sure most of them would be able to implement a full SEO-optimized website. So that’s kind of where we see our value add, bridging that gap for them and making whatever they’re doing visible to the people in our network who we are spending all year going out and recruiting, and building what is now a statewide network of 6,000 volunteers supporting roughly 200 organizations.

“Powering intersectional movements for mutual aid and liberation” is your motto. How do you define “mutual aid”?

Mutual aid is defined as communities working together to support each other in a lateral model, instead of a hierarchical model — specifically, not just meeting the needs of your community members, but also addressing the root causes of those needs.

A common way that people talk about mutual aid is that it is solidarity over charity. And that’s what we do at TurnOut. We are queer and trans people helping queer and trans people. There is not this sense of what — I editorialize a little bit, and say that I do — I find it creepy when people are like, “Oh yeah, we’re so fortunate, and we’re helping those who are less fortunate than us.” We don’t do that. We are volunteering for organizations one day and getting services from those organizations the next day.

We are spending our time and our energy to support the infrastructure that keeps queer and trans people alive, because nobody else wants to invest in that. That’s why we built this structure. You could see it clearly in the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s that when people do not care if trans people and queer people live or die, we have to do it ourselves. We have learned how to raise money, we have learned how to build organizations, we have learned how to organize.[…]

We know no one’s coming to save us but us. So we are really leaning into this infrastructure and creating opportunities for queer and trans people to save our own lives. That’s the intersection of the LGBT community and volunteerism.

What’s unique about that relationship?

I think volunteerism has been a core part of a healthy LGBT community for a long time. I think again, the AIDS epidemic is probably where a lot of that started, because we knew that we would not survive if we didn’t show up, rise to the occasion, expand out past the boundaries of what we thought we were capable of to meet the moment. And I think it really has become a part of queer and trans culture.

But I think it has fallen off. In fact, we know it has fallen off because volunteer rates at queer and trans organizations have been on the decline for a long time. That is also true for all organizations in the United States, that volunteer rates have been going down. We’ve been organizing volunteers for these organizations for 10 years. And I’ll tell you that my personal feeling about why that’s happening is that a lot of the queer and trans movement infrastructure has become institutionalized and has been fit into this nonprofit box.

We’re a nonprofit, so I can’t throw shade at that categorically, but the volunteer stuff that we would be sending people out to, in a lot of cases, was like, “Do admin work for this large HIV service organization that has a multi-million-dollar budget, and their executive director makes $200,000 a year.” And you’re now doing basically unpaid administrative work for an organization that absolutely could afford to pay you.

Like an unpaid intern.

Yeah, yeah, like an intern. And you don’t have the ability to shape the work or have any input into what is important to you as a queer person. And I think that is a core difference between the early days of the AIDS epidemic and what characterized the queer and trans infrastructure about a year ago.

What’s an example of traditional charity models failing?

Oh, gosh. I was just talking to an executive director of a trans Latinx organization in a state I won’t name, and they were talking to me about how they have so little money, but they have the community, like, so many trans Latinx people who come to their events. Meanwhile, there are much larger, better-known organizations who have big funders and institutional donors that are supporting them, but when they host events, they basically have like 10 people who show up to them. They use this organization to lend legitimacy to their own programming, and this organization doesn’t get any of the money, so they’re basically getting taken advantage of. The orgs that actually have connections to the community are left in the cold.

If you look at the funding sources for queer and trans work, for every one hundred foundation dollars in the United States, less than 25 cents goes to queer and trans organizations. Often, those foundations are run by wealthy people who may or may not have a real sense of the work that needs to be done.

And I think this is part of the problem with traditional charity models, is that it leaves the decision-making power in the hands of people who already have money because they get to decide who gets it, and that ends up reinforcing a lot of the power structures that keep our communities out of power because they are not invested in liberation, necessarily, especially types of liberation that might challenge their own authority, or challenge their own ability to call the shots and be driving the bus, because they think their ideas are correct, and they don’t trust communities to make the right decisions about what’s right for us.

People might assume that low foundation dollars are made up for by lots of queer and trans people donating to make up the gap. But research shows that roughly 3% of queer and trans adults have ever donated to a queer or trans nonprofit, which is extraordinarily low. I don’t think it’s because they don’t care. I think if you look at other research around reasons why people don’t make donations, the number one reason is that they’ve never been asked. And so many of these organizations are so small and so under-resourced, they just don’t have the capacity to have a full-time development fundraiser on staff. We don’t have the movement capacity to be going out and asking people for donations, raising the percentage of queer and trans people who are donating to queer and trans causes.

And so the donors we have left are primarily white, primarily higher-educated, primarily cisgender, primarily higher-income, and those folks are donating to the causes that make sense for them.

Often they are not going to understand the need for, like, radical arts programming for trans people of color, or, you know, any number of things that are maybe outside of their experience, including, I will tell you — I have had a number of conversations with older white gay men to solicit donations, and they have flat out told me, “If you are working with trans people, we will not give you money.” And that is an experience that is not isolated to me.

How long have you been getting that response?

I first noticed it probably two years ago. And not to say it wasn’t happening before then, but that was really when I started doing that individual outreach.

You’ve written that “power stays in the hands of those who already have it. Inequality keeps rising, the climate keeps warming, and the institutions we once trusted for solutions seem completely incapable of making any meaningful impact.” You paint a pretty disheartening picture. Are people so overwhelmed with those issues, not to mention the politics of the moment, that they just can’t get it together to engage?

I do think people are overwhelmed. I think it is especially true now with the Trump administration. I mean, I think the strategy is to intentionally overwhelm people. And there are a number of activist groups that I work with where we are constantly reminding each other, like, “Wait three days to react, before you blow up your whole thing.” Because, in fact — I was just on a call where someone was talking about this exact issue — and they said, “Look, we have decided to focus on one to three things, and anything beyond that we cannot engage in. Because if we focused on every fire that is being lit right now, we would be completely wrecked, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

It’s so heartbreaking for me to see people on social media, for example, so discouraged and feeling like there’s no leadership. There’s no one with integrity that is really stepping up to the plate. The Democrats are certainly not doing it.

What needs to be done, in my opinion, and what people don’t see, is all of this furious work happening behind the scenes, and a lot of people doing the work are not like publicity grifters. These are not people who spend a lot of time trying to get on the news, or become social media-famous, or like, have a f*cking podcast that makes them a bunch of money. These are people who have sacrificed great amounts of personal opportunity and money and time to serve our communities, and those people are organizing.

And I just want to tell folks, like, hang on. There are a lot of extraordinarily smart and talented and dedicated people who get up every morning thinking about how they’re going to care for queer and trans people, and they go to bed every night thinking about the same thing. And those folks are working in this new environment to respond and make sure people have what they need. And if you haven’t seen it yet, you will.

I think as queer people, our superpower for this moment is, “We know how to take care of ourselves when no one else gives a f*ck about us.” BIPOC folks know how to do that. Folks who are outside of the system know how to do that. And as this administration moves forward, more and more of us are falling into that category of being completely abandoned by the system, and we are ready to work together.

I am very hopeful for what is possible to achieve outside of the government, outside of traditional spaces of nonprofit funding. This might be the beginning of a new phase for our movement, or maybe potentially a new movement entirely.

Can you tease some of the developments you’re talking about?

I can’t. Yes, I can talk about the stuff that we’re doing at TurnOut, but I am really hesitant to talk about any of the other work that we have encountered, or we’re working on with anyone else. Security is now a core priority.

The government has made it legal to spy on queer and trans people in the United States. They have made it clear that they are ready to strip the nonprofit status from any organization they believe is engaged in supporting terrorism. We have been outspoken about a ceasefire in Palestine, and it’s clear that they consider that to be in that category. You know, they’re talking about spray-painting f*cking Teslas as terrorism.

We’ve started supporting communities all around California and in other states who are interested in doing what we have done with TurnOut. We have our first chapter starting up in Dallas, which we’re very excited about. And literally anyone who wants to do this work can get in touch with us, and we would be more than happy to support you in building this kind of network in your area. We would love to hear from you.

Would you call TurnOut’s expansion, or TurnOut’s existence, part of the resistance?

Um, that’s so complicated. I don’t like the term “resistance” because it focuses on reacting to something. I don’t base my desires on reacting to what Donald Trump does or doesn’t do. And, in fact, I’m very frustrated by a lot of the performative activism that has happened under the banner of resistance.

But there has also been a sea change in the social justice culture. I was just talking with my boyfriend about this the other day, and he was recounting a conversation he was having with someone, and this person was like, “I think cancel culture might be over.” I actually think that’s true.

This thing that has occupied so much time and so much space — I think collectively, so many people that I know, both who are lay queer people and people in organizing circles, just collectively seem to have recognized that this is not worth our time. We cannot afford to be alienating people who don’t agree with us on 100% of things. What we do need is tools for working together with people who we might not agree with everything on, but metabolizing those differences and using that to fuel forward momentum for what we do agree on.

You know, people have been talking about intersectional work for a long time, but people have not talked about how to do that work well. And I think we saw during October 7 that a lot of people who had come together because we share a passion for queer and trans organizing were not necessarily in the same place when it comes to Zionism and Palestine, and we watched a lot of organizations suddenly start attacking each other and destroying parts of the queer and trans infrastructure that the most vulnerable members of our communities depend on, in a way that didn’t help anybody in Palestine or Israel.

Somehow, we seem to have collectively internalized that message and are moving into a new phase where it is not really about how you can perform your purity as an activist because of what you believe in. This is what I want to focus on. This seems to be where people are at: “I want to build. I’m tired of tearing stuff down.”

Check out the article on their website here.