Welcome to Queertopia!

LGBTQ+ led community focusing on homelessness through an antiracist lens.

Queertopia’s mission is community empowerment led by amplifying and celebrating QTBIPOC voices and taking direct action to combat the housing inequity that has swept our city. We are a group of abolitionist harm reductionists with lived experience in trauma, homelessness, substance use, recovery, and neurodivergency.

We work intimately in camps throughout the city establishing found family bonds through trust, transparency, lack of judgment, joy, and dependability. We are who is called at 3am when tents are blowing away, at 7am when a friend needs a ride to the hospital, or at noon when someone just needs to vent about their boss not paying them. Within the past year, we have been directly responsible for placing over 150 Black & Indigenous Austinites into housing, largely through unpaid labor and empowering the unhoused community to work towards collective justice.

Advocacy Timeline

Since 2020, with funding only from Instagram donations, we have helped place over 150 Black, Brown, and Trans Austinites into housing who were not connected to government resources. We have lived at camps throughout the city- including operating a protest surrounding City Hall. Our shelter, QT Main, is the only LGBTQ+ shelter in Travis County- and it is operated on no funding. Our outreach work is focused in the St Johns community, who have been displaced due to gentrification. We are the most effective caseworkers in ATX, yet are not recognized as caseworkers. We get people housed.

Our History

Intentional Queermunity

Queertopia is in the fundraising stages for a tiny home town in TX and a smaller hub with a shelter in ATX. We will be able to do outreach work in Austin, San Marcos, and San Antonio to assist with housing and other advocacy work. Residents with former incarceration for possession will be able to operate and profit from hemp fields, and remaining hemp will be used in clothing production for the multiple fashion designers living at QT.

QT will be centered on our core values:

consent

anti-racism

sustainability

mental health

disability justice

restorative justice

harm reduction

the belief that all work is equally valuable to a community

There are no LGBTQ+ hubs in Austin for folks experiencing homelessness. We plan to change that.

Help build Queertopia

Contract Services

Hire folks with lived experience to provide services to unhoused neighbors

  • Advocacy work

  • BOLO list clients

  • Food Security

  • PSH Packets

  • MAP cards

  • Documents

  • Camp outreach

  • Divergent Assistance

  • Community First Village Applications

  • Coordinated assessments and HACA list placement

Projects

  • Pals with Paws

    Once we place community members in housing, we like working with the Austin Animal Shelter to find them some furry roommates!

    Get a cuddle buddy

  • Peer Support Group

    Bringing together people with their lived experiences to build and empower community that meets people where they are in supporting them and their needs without value judgements.

    Get an accountability buddy

  • Advocacy

    Providing unhoused community members with advocates who are informed and have the resources required to ensure people receive equitable medical, legal, and social services.

    Get a ride or die buddy