In Support of the Black Trans Travel Fund
This year, Pride Month takes on a different energy. “We have an opportunity to share the stage with the Black Lives Matter movement, in an act of solidarity, and focus our energy on the lives that need the most support right now,” shared a member of the Pride network — Spin’s LGBTQ+ Employee Network.
With this statement in mind, we asked ourselves at Spin how we can best honor the love, acceptance, and equality that Pride Month stands for, while also recognizing that Black lives are at the core of this discussion. So, we passed the mic to our Pride Network — an employee resource group dedicated to fostering connections, building community, providing resources, and advancing opportunity for Spin employees of all sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions — to explore this topic.
We are honored to share that the Pride Network selected an incredible organization at the intersection of both movements, the Black Trans Travel Fund.
The Black Trans Travel Fund is a mutual-aid based organization committed to uplifting the narratives and supporting the livelihoods of Black trans women. Launched in June of 2019, BTTF was developed for the purpose of providing Black transgender women with the financial resources needed to be able to self-determine and access safer alternatives to travel, where women feel less likely to experience verbal harassment or physical harm.Image courtesy of the Black Trans Travel Fund
“The Black Trans Travel Fund gives Black transgender people, who have always been at the forefront of the movement for equal rights, the ability to safely move around their communities. Everyone deserves the freedom to get where they need to go safely, and I’m proud Spin is supporting BTTF to help make that happen for more people.” — Emerson M., Pride Network Member.
27-year-old Devin Lowe founded the Black Trans Travel Fund in 2019, after seeing the impact he could make by crowdsourcing funds to provide safe transportation options for transgender women. In the first six months, the organization was able to pay for over 700 car rides for more than 300 women. “We are so thankful to the Spin team for reaching out to BTTF and offering tangible support at this crucial time (of COVID-19) where we have doubled the amount of women we are providing services to each month.” — Devin Lowe, BTTF Founder & Executive Director. “With Spin’s donation we will be paying for car rides for 100 Black trans women!”
“We chose to support the Black Trans Travel Fund because we believe that this underrepresented community needs help the most.” — T.J. W, Pride Network Member. “For me, it is important to empower the participants in the Black Trans Travel Fund with the resources they need to get out of abusive situations and get to places of love and support where they can be who they were meant to be without fear. And in keeping with Spin’s core values of ‘Do the Right Thing’ and ‘Create a Better Tomorrow,’ I believe that Spin’s support of the Black Trans Travel Fund is the right way for our company to ‘walk the talk’ and do just that.”
At Spin, our mission is simple — to give people the Freedom to Move. We often think of movement in regards to micromobility access. In a broader sense, though, the Freedom to Move also means the ability to feel safe in this movement.
“We’re a company that provides a transportation alternative. The BTTF focuses on transportation for a massively underrepresented community. It just makes complete sense.” — Shawn O, Pride Network Member.
This Pride month, we are honored to expand our mission beyond micromobility and to help provide the Freedom to Move safely, for those in need, with a $5,000 donation to the Black Trans Travel Fund.
