For Julian Johanson, becoming who they are today was an uphill battle.
“When I first moved here about eight or nine years ago there was nothing,” said Julian Johnson, Youth and Family Project Board Member. “Absolutely nothing. I was going into high school. I recently came out as bisexual and trans. So I was like oh sick, I came out and now we’re moving here?”
It was a battle Julian vowed to never let anyone fight on their own ever again.
“I want to make sure that everyone knows that they can be themselves and that there is someone there for them and there’s a resources for them to be themselves,” said Julian.
Organizations like The Resource: Youth & Family Project, where the mission is written in the name itself. The LGBTQ non-profit is located in West Bend.
“I got to meet some amazing people and grew closer with them,” said Julian. “I’m genuinely so very excited to see more and more people getting involved and developing resources because community building especially for LGBT people is suicide prevention.”
Emily Greene, Executive Director said the organization has been around since 1975 but on June 29th at 10am, they’re giving their community some new tools to utilize.
“We’ll have an open house here at the Resource center to showcase the work that we put into the renovations in the space and highlight this resource in Washington County,” said Emily.
She said creating community spaces is still the goal, things are just on a much bigger scale now to meet a higher need.
“We offer a variety of different support services such as individual counseling for youth, group counseling for youth, supervised visitation for families,” said Emily. “So that it takes away some of that fear of being different and realize that LGBT youth and adults are just like everybody else.”
A realization Julian said was worth fighting for.
“I can never promise that it gets better but it’ll at least get different and sometimes different is more than enough,” said Julian. “Just don’t give up. Don’t stop. Fake it until you make it.”
You can click on the link to stay up to date on what The Resource: Youth & Family Project has coming up in the future.
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