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Primary Submission Category: Health equity
Centering LGBTQ+ youth of color “explicitly, unequivocally, and without apology” to deliver culturally and structurally responsive, evidence-based mental health services
Authors: Shoba Ramanadhan, Davine Holness, Isabella de Sa, Morgan Mulhern, Sam Quest-Neubert, Breanna Wheeler, Emma-Louise Aveling,
Presenting Author: Shoba Ramanadhan*
Introduction: LGBTQ+ youth of color face profound mental health inequities driven by intersecting systems of oppression. Community-based organizations (CBOs) can mitigate this by offering safe spaces and essential services, but their impact is constrained by professionalized nonprofit infrastructure and an evidence base that focuses on privileged groups and individual-level interventions.
Methods: We conducted a three-year, participatory, case study of Boston GLASS, a long-standing CBO serving LGBTQ+ youth of color in Greater Boston, to elucidate how staff conceptualize and enact high-quality mental health services. The work was co-led by community- and university-based researchers and utilized interviews and focus groups with current and former staff, document review, and ethnographic observations with staff, peer leaders, and clients between March 2023 and December 2025.
Results: We found that GLASS staff conceptualize care not as a set of discrete clinical encounters but as a structurally and culturally responsive, relationship-centered ecosystem. Three forces animate the model: (1) connections to social movements and justice; (2) centering of joy, community, and humanity; and (3) elevation of lived, practice-based, and local expertise. The model is vulnerable to restrictive and fragmented funding, administrative burden, insufficient staff support, and a hostile sociopolitical environment.
Conclusion: The GLASS model problematizes dominant notions of who or what constitute “active ingredients” in mental health services. Implications include the need to broaden definitions of evidence and support structurally responsive, community-led frameworks, with accordingly broad metrics. The question that remains is how best to support funders, policymakers, and researchers in moving past top-down, individualistic efforts that maintain the status quo and instead support the conditions that allow vital, community-led models to not only survive but thrive.