A new D.C. program that teaches job-seeking skills to transgender people and then pays some of their salaries for up to six months was fast-tracked by Mayor Vincent Gray after violence against transsexuals escalated this summer.
The program is run through Project Empowerment, an $11 million-a-year program paid for with D.C. tax dollars that helps
hard-to-employ city residents such as ex-convicts and ex-addicts find work. Project Empowerment is a decade old, but Director Charles Jones said only four transgender individuals had enrolled before a class was formed specifically for them.
These are people “who feel like they cannot be a part of” society, Jones said.
Project Empowerment runs its job skills training courses on three-week cycles and helps roughly 1,000 D.C. residents per year, according to Jones. The city’s first transgender-only class enrolled in mid-September and graduated 17 people last Friday. Project Empowerment had budgeted about $147,000 for the transgender class, which includes a $8.25-per-hour wage for some graduates’ jobs for up to six months. The employers pay nothing.
| A history of violence |
| July 20: Myles “Lashay” McLean, 23, was shot and killed early in Northeast. Police said two men approached McLean and one asked a question then pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and opened fire without waiting for an answer. |
| July 31: A transgender person in Northeast was shot and wounded after being a approached by a man who asked for change then opened fire using a semiautomatic handgun. |
| Aug. 27: An off-duty District police officer is charged with shooting at three transgender women and two male friends while the group was sitting in a car on a city street. |
| Sept. 12: A transgender woman was shot early in the morning in the Shipley Terrace neighborhood in Southeast. She was shot in the neck, but managed to drive to a police station to seek help. The suspect later turned himself in. |
Promises have long been made to the transgender community, said Jeffrey Richardson, director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBT Affairs. But this summer, attacks against transgenders in the region began making headlines when a 22-year-old transgender woman was brutally attacked at a suburban Baltimore McDonald’s in April.
In July, the District saw two shootings within 11 days, prompting a meeting in August between the mayor and transgender activists. Weeks later, the plan was finalized to enroll a transgender class at Project Empowerment and work with local organizations to help recruit students.
“It was quite fast,” said Jones. “The mayor said ‘You’ve got to do this … like now.’ ”
As Project Empowerment staff were being trained for their new class, two more attacks on transgenders made headlines in the District.
Richardson said the new class wasn’t directly inspired by the attacks but it was related.
“They really brought to light that when you can’t obtain gainful employment, sometimes folks put themselves at risk,” he said.
All the recent attacks in D.C. were on transgender women and occurred in early morning.
This month’s class produced similar results to any other Project Empowerment class — some graduates went on to a full-time job, others got a six-month trial job paid for by the city. Others needed more education to be a good job candidate and are taking English lessons or classes to finish their GED.
The goal is to show the community D.C.’s resources are available to them too, Jones said. A second transgender-only class may be in the works for February.
