Who this Fellowship is for

Set 1 — Where we're starting from

You're queer and/or trans. This is a space built by and for LGBTQIA+ leaders, one where you have the chance to find resonance in shared experience before you get to work.
You lead in Missouri. You're rooted here, your work lands here, and you plan to be here through the life of the Fellowship. (If you're weighing whether to stay in Missouri, we'd rather have that conversation openly with you than have you rule yourself out.)
You lead something. An organization, a collective, a congregation, a campaign, or your own practice. Titles matter less than this: there's a sphere where you can actually change how things work, and you're willing to try.
You can commit to the arc. [DETAILS] We know what we're asking. Stipends and access supports, including travel and childcare, are built in, and we'll work with you and your organization to make it possible.

You're carrying something hard right now. Not a tidy case study – a live, thorny thing you haven't been able to think your way out of. Maybe a conflict that keeps resurfacing, a program that isn't landing, a gap between what your organization says it values and what it does on a Tuesday. That difficulty becomes your work here.
Your work has outgrown your language for it. You're navigating real complexity, and you sense the usual tools aren't reaching the root. You don't need to have studied systems change; this is for people who've been doing it without a name for it.
You've been leading long enough to have been humbled by it. Roughly five or more years of holding responsibility in queer or social justice work, enough that you've seen an approach stop working, watched a strategy meet the limits of the system around it, and had to reckon with why. We value maturity and hard-won wisdom, and that can come at any age.
You've carried something all the way through. A program, campaign, organization, or project you've held from beginning to end, including the hard middle and whatever the ending looked like. Not necessarily a success. We're interested in what you learned when it got difficult.

You're willing to work with your whole self. This Fellowship includes somatic practice, working with your own patterns and triggers, and learning to stay grounded in conflict. That means maturity and real vulnerability in front of peers. You don't have to be excited about it, but you do have to be willing.
You're curious about people you don't already know. Some of the Fellows will be people you've never met, or people you've had friction with. That's by design. If the queer St. Louis ecosystem is going to hold together, the trust lines will have to run across the gaps, not just within the circles that already exist.
You're not currently in crisis. Depletion and burnout are part of why we're doing this, and you're welcome exactly as tired as you are. But this is a leadership program, not therapy, and if you're in acute crisis right now, we'd rather support you toward the right care.
You're open to being part of what we learn. We'll ask you to complete assessments at the beginning and end, and to reflect honestly along the way. Your coaching conversations stay confidential; only anonymized, aggregate themes are shared with SQSH and our funder(s). Nothing about your participation will be shared publicly without your consent.

You come from any corner of this ecosystem. Executive directors and organizers. Healers, therapists, and health workers. Faith leaders, artists, and culture workers. Mutual aid crews and long-standing institutions. Trans-led projects and broad LGBTQIA+ organizations. We're not looking for one type of leader, we're looking for a cohort that reflects the real range of queer St. Louis, including people who don't usually end up in the same room.
Your work touches the conditions shaping queer health and wellbeing, broadly understood. Housing, safety, belonging, care, income, dignity. You don't have to work in healthcare; you do have to be working on something that shapes whether queer and trans St. Louisans can thrive.