Ruby Corado, a longtime transgender activist and founder of Washington, D.C.’s LGBTQ+ center Casa Ruby, has announced that she will be stepping down as its executive director in 2022. After serving as the non-profit organization’s leader for almost a decade, she tells them. that she’s making the choice to make way for new trans leadership and better “ways to support” her grassroots advocacy.
“I never thought I would be here forever,” she says of the decision, which she first announced in a Facebook post on January 4.
A part of her natural duty as a leader, as she explains, is to know when to step aside and allow others to take on new responsibilities. “I want to see more transgender leadership,” she says. “I want to see Black trans women in leadership.” As an example of the kind of rising stars she has in mind, she points to the recent appointment of Khloe Pitts — a Black trans woman who first came to Casa Ruby as someone who needed shelter — as the general manager of the organization’s newest drop-in center in southeast D.C.
In a video announcing her new position, Pitts explains how Casa Ruby provided her the opportunity to grow in both her personal and professional life. “I started from being homeless, nowhere to go, no job,” she says. “ […] Coming here [to Casa Ruby], getting all these trainings, meeting all these new people of color from all over the world, that’s when I began to volunteer,” until she eventually joined the non-profit’s staff.
“I plan on letting the people in the Southeast area know that they have someone here for them, this can be their safe haven,” Pitts concludes.
Corado launched Casa Ruby in 2012, making the non-profit D.C.’s first bilingual LGBTQ+ drop-in shelter that centers trans and gender non-conforming people of color. She has expanded the organization since to provide food services, HIV testing, clothing, mental health resources, career counseling, and immigration aid.
While facing the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple transphobic death threats, Corado has kept the doors to its 24/7 shelter open throughout 2020, and recently offered emergency refuge to those needing a place to stay during last week’s white supremacist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.
“I created a model, based on people of color who are living in margins, coming together,” she beams with pride. “This model centers survivors. It centers people. That is why I feel a lot of people embrace the model, but I see the system rejecting that model.”
