The archetypal example of a stolen resource is like: A homosexual youth gets thrown out of their parents’ house for being gay, and tries to go to a LGBTQ+ shelter. The shelter turns them away, because the space that youth might have taken is being occupied by an asexual who surely isn’t “really” oppressed.
As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have worked for human resource nonprofits, like shelters and so forth. And the thing people don’t get is: A shelter at high capacity is good. If you care about a population and want them to have resources, you want to use those resources as much as possible.
Do you know the worst thing for a shelter?
Shelters are generally funded, in large part, by outside sources–charitable foundations, government agencies, et cetera. They receive their funding by saying, “We have the capacity to serve 600 people a year, and in fact, we served 635! Please continue to fund us at this level because we are clearly serving a valuable purpose.”
Every shelter I’ve worked at keeps meticulous records of everyone they turned away. Because those are worth their weight in gold.
The better thing is to say, “We served 600 people this year, and we had to turn another 600 people away because we didn’t have room for them.” Because as much as it sucks to be the person turned away? This means funding bodies are more likely to say, “You know what, you’re right. We are going to give you a grant to build a second facility, and then increase your funding in the future so you can serve twice as many people.”
You will NEVER get that second shelter if it isn’t proved that people need that space but aren’t getting it. I know that being rejected is a really fundamental trauma for a lot of us, but in the broad scheme of human services, we are competing with a lot of OTHER groups that are struggling for resources, and they’re all at max capacity too.
(There actually isn’t an LGBTQ+ shelter within a thousand kilometres of me, because there just aren’t enough of us on the prairies to justify the expense. So yes, this is a bit hypothetical to me because yeah, imagine getting resources. But I’m extrapolating from what I know.)
It is the job of shelter workers to decide how to apportion resources and make sure the people who need them most get them first. When you work in a shelter, you get very good, very fast, at turning some people down because other people’s needs are more pressing. And it is better for the LGBTQ+ community at large to have someone reach out for resources that other people need more, and be turned down, than to have them quietly decide ahead of time that they don’t “deserve” those resources and never ask at all. If they asked, then you can say, “Look at all the people who asked for help, who we don’t have the resources to assist!”
If they didn’t ask, your funding bodies will say, “There’s no demand for this kind of service, so why should we waste our money on something nobody wants?”
Everything we have as a community, we have because we either got a bunch of people together and made it ourselves, or got together en masse and demanded it. That requires as many people as you can manage. If you want there to be more resources? You need to ask for them first.
