The Trevor Project — Digital Crisis Services for LGBTQ+ Youth

Founded in 1998 after the murder of Matthew Shepard, The Trevor Project runs the only national 24/7 crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention service focused on LGBTQ+ young people aged 13-24, via phone, text and web chat, plus the moderated peer-support network TrevorSpace.

In FY2024 its Crisis Intervention team handled more than 450,000 calls, chats and texts, with volume spiking sharply around political events — a roughly 700% surge the day after the November 2024 election and a 33% increase around the January 2025 inauguration.

A peer-reviewed academic study (Homan et al. 2014, ACM CSCW) analysed the social graph of about 20,000 TrevorSpace members and found that youth more deeply integrated into the platform's social structure reported lower depression scores (PHQ-9), one of the few peer-reviewed evaluations of an LGBTQ+-specific digital peer-support platform.

The service's funding proved fragile: after citing a funding "perfect storm" in January 2025, the organisation lost a $26 million federal 988 contract in June 2025 and cut 12% of staff, showing that even a heavily used, evidence-linked digital service can face abrupt sustainability risk from a single funding decision.