Mission, Strategy & History

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Our Mission

GSA Network is a next-generation TQ2S+ racial and gender justice organization that empowers and trains queer, trans and allied youth leaders to advocate, organize, and mobilize an intersectional movement for safer schools and healthier communities.

Our Strategy

Devising Freedom, launched in 2022, is our adherence to the political assignment that is liberation. It spans from 2022-2030 across two election years in the United States. As a mandate to continue to deepen and expand our youth-led power-building.

The Four Pillars

• Homecoming or community building: The disruption of TQ2S+ isolation through base-building, cooperative leadership, resource sharing, and collective action.
• Truthtelling or storytelling: Systematically recording & preserving the experiential wisdom of TQ2S youth in service of posterity and political praxis.
• Spirit Sustaining, or healing justice: Tending to the material realities of TQ2S communities, individuals, and their families by employing a holistic arsenal of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and somatic defenses against state violence. 
• Stargayzing or world-building: Cultivating the political will to move beyond all forms of captivity through intergenerational wonder, creative inheritance, and ancestral instruction.

Our overall strategy for fighting for educational justice is to work with grassroots, youth-led groups and GSAs, empowering them to educate their schools and communities, advocate for just policies that protect trans, queer and Two Spirit youth from harassment and violence, and organize in coalition with other youth groups across identity lines to address broader issues of oppression.

All of our work with students focuses on leadership development and activism that prioritizes building alliances not only across sexual orientation and gender identity lines, but also across race, ethnicity, and class lines. Our resources and trainings are designed to facilitate coalition building.

GSA Network includes the National Association of GSA Networks, which unites 40 statewide networks of GSA clubs, GSA Network of California, which connects more than 1,100 clubs across the state, and Gender Justice Leadership Programs (GJLP) and STAR Freedom School. We also support student-led campaigns through GSAsUnite! (unite.gsanetwork.org), an online campaign and petition platform for trans and queer youth across the country.

To receive news and updates on our opportunities and resources and get connected to a network of trans and queer youth, register your GSA with us today.

Our History

We began in San Francisco in 1998, when LGBTQ+ youth came together to support GSA clubs and fight for safe schools. In 1999, youth leaders helped pass the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act and formed our first Youth Council. By 2000, we held our first Activist Camp, and within just a few years, we were supporting hundreds of GSAs across California.

In 2005, we helped launch the National Association of GSA Networks, which grew to include more than 40 statewide organizations representing thousands of clubs. Over the next decade, we deepened our commitment to racial and gender justice, opened new offices in the South and Midwest, and in 2015 shifted to a Co-Executive Director model led by LGBTQ+ people of color. In 2016, after listening to youth across the country, we became Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network to reflect the full diversity of identities within GSAs.

More recently, we’ve continued to grow nationally. In 2020, youth leaders pushed forward the Police Free Schools movement as we expanded programs like the Two-Spirit Initiative and Gender Justice Leadership Programs. In 2022, we launched our long-term strategy, Devising Freedom, a roadmap through 2030 grounded in the brilliance of TQ2S+ youth. And in 2024, we introduced STAR School and the STAR School Fellowship to resource young leaders and grassroots partners focusing on the South and Midwest.

Today, we carry forward this legacy of youth power, building a future where every TQ2S+ young person can lead with autonomy, dignity, and delight.