‘Ruth Would Be Mighty Proud’: As Ruth Ellis Center Turns 25, the Mission of Its Namesake Lives On
Over two decades later, how REC expanded from a drop-in center to a multi-faceted organization
When Krystina Edwards was a young resident at Ruth Ellis Center, safe from the dangers of Detroit’s red light district, she felt hope for the first time in a long time. But never would she have imagined the life she’s living now, more than a decade in the future.
Today, Edwards serves as Ruth Ellis Center’s community engagement manager as the organization celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s a role that sees her giving back every day to the organization that showed it always believed in her — through the words she needed to hear as a young person and through deeds, big and small, including support that connected her with resources to get her bachelor’s and master's degrees at Western Michigan University.
“Without Ruth Ellis Center, I wouldn’t be the person I am,” Edwards tells Pride Source. “They opened so many doors for me at a very young age, even when I was known as this ‘unruly child.’ The staff didn’t see that. They saw a girl who had an ability to advocate for others, and they nurtured that by putting me in spaces where I could learn how to advocate for myself and others.”
After Edwards graduated with her master’s of public administration degree, she started a career in Kalamazoo working in various advocacy roles. “And I loved Kalamazoo,” she says, “but when this opportunity came up, it felt like an honor. And now, as part of the development team, I can share my story with people who need to hear it. It’s a full circle story.”
Established in 1999, Ruth Ellis Center has grown from a small drop-in center in Highland Park to a growing non-profit organization that runs four physical locations, including the Clairmount Center, a 44,000 square-foot space opened in Detroit’s Piety Hill neighborhood in 2022 that offers 45 long-term housing units, a health and wellness center staffed by Henry Ford physicians and mental healthcare providers, a fitness center, a technology center, an onsite cafe and several community spaces. Residents can receive gender-affirming hormone therapy, sexual health services, HIV care, primary care and mental health treatments onsite.
Dr. Amorie Robinson, co-founder, clinical psychologist and associate director of outpatient therapy in behavioral health at Ruth Ellis Center, tells Pride Source the concept for the organization started with a single child whose story was not unlike Edwards’.
In the late ’90s, a situation was brought to the attention of Robinson and a group of advocates, including John Allen and Courtney Wilson, who were meeting at Affirmations LGBTQ+ community center in Ferndale. “He was 16, a young gay teenager who was being kicked out of his home,” Robinson recalls. “He’d been threatened violently once it was discovered or disclosed that he was gay, and we rallied around this problem because he didn’t have a place to stay and certainly wasn’t feeling safe at home or within his own family. We all found this very tragic, and we felt compelled to do something about it.”
Robinson and the other volunteers ensured the teen had a place to stay, which sometimes included the home she shared with her partner at the time. After this experience, a core group of these advocates launched the simple, powerful initiative that would become Ruth Ellis Center: “Support youth and keep them safe.”
Coming up with the name was simple, Robinson says. The Center’s namesake, Ruth Ellis, was born in 1899 and came out as lesbian in 1915. By the 1940s, Ellis was providing shelter, physical support and spiritual affirmation to young LGBTQ+ community members in the Detroit area who had been rejected by their families.
“I thought about Ruth Ellis, who was my friend, mentor and somewhat of a grandmother figure of mine back then,” Robinson explains. “She had given refuge to young people in the community, particularly African Americans who were seeking support, affirmation and safety.” Ellis gave her blessing and was there to cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the Ruth Ellis Center in 2000, at age 101.
“It was on the second floor, right after her 101st birthday, which, by the way, she danced at,” Robinson recalls. “That’s a testimony to how physically healthy she was at the time. A co-founder offered to escort her up the steps but she said, ‘That’s OK, I’ll do it myself,’ and she did. We celebrated together, and she knew that this would be a place that would save the lives of many youngsters in Southeastern Michigan who are suffering from the pain and rejection by their own families. And thus was born the Ruth Ellis Center.”
A month later, Ellis died. “But she left in peace, knowing that this thing, whatever it was, was going to happen,” Robinson says. “We had her blessing and we’ve always known her spirit is with us. Those first board meetings, all of a sudden, the lights might flicker and we’d tell each other, ‘That’s Ruth, saying ‘Y'all make a decision!’”
The board made many decisions, always with the needs of its young adult community in mind. Chief among those needs, true to Ellis' personal mission: safety and affirmation.
Edwards recalls early days visiting the drop-in center, where she and other girls from the red light district would stop by for a hot meal, fresh clothes or just to be together somewhere calm and safe. “It was this family environment I didn’t have other places — none of us did. We were all on the streets, doing the same thing with no one in our corner,” she recalls. “And so it was a pleasure to hang out there. You knew you were gonna be greeted by smiling faces and probably even learn something. That was always just a great time, and important for me, as a person who grew up homeless and with a mother who was a drug addict. We bounced around a lot.”
Dropping into the Ruth Ellis Center put Edwards on the organization’s radar, and when a spot opened for a child in foster care — Edwards was a ward of the state by her mid-teens — staffers went looking for her. At the time, Edwards was without a cell phone and had recently quit the all-boys high school assigned to her by the state. Her next option was being sent to a boys’ home. “Imagine them sending me to a boys’ home,” Edwards muses. “After I’ve been on hormones, after I’ve been living my life as a woman, as a girl, for the past three or four years. To think they were going to literally force me into a boys’ home was terrifying. I couldn’t do it. I ran and never looked back.”
By the time Ruth Ellis Center staff caught up with Edwards, she had been on the run for months. Edwards explained that she had been running to avoid the boys’ home. “And the next thing I knew, we got into a car. It was raining all day, but when we got to Ruth’s House, it’s as if the gods had opened up the sky. I kid you not, the sun was shining right over this random house we pulled in front of and there was no more rain,” Edwards recalls. “And then I walked in and was introduced to the house manager. I was taken to my room and my roommate and I literally was in a house.”
Edwards says that at Ruth’s House, one of Ruth Ellis Center’s residential facilities, she honed her cooking skills and learned how to do laundry and other basic tasks, but that the most impactful experience was learning how to take care of her mental health. Ruth Ellis Center connected her with mental health providers and helped her finish high school. It was also where she found a stable, supportive chosen family — a family that piled into cars to support her at her grandfather’s funeral. Small, impactful moments that “made me really know I was loved and cared about,” Edwards says.
Over time, Edwards was even able to forge new relationships with her parents thanks to the efforts of Ruth Ellis caseworkers. “My dad was never really in my life much during my childhood, but as I got a little older and after he came to [Ruth Ellis Center support] groups with me, he became one of my biggest supporters,” she says.
Ruth Ellis Center Executive Director Mark Erwin notes that there are still only a handful of organizations that prioritize and center the foundational needs of young people first. “A huge focus for Ruth Ellis Center historically has been access to those basic safety net services and housing resources,” he explains. “That’s really how we began — just a safe space to access things like food and clothing and, over the years, we’ve [been] adding housing programs and things like integrated health services.”
Health service access has been critical in the Detroit region. In 2013, Erwin says, the city represented around 9% of the state’s population but around three-quarters of all new HIV infections, predominantly impacting 13 to 19-year-old Black gay men and Black trans women. Today, residents at facilities like the Ruth Ellis Clairmount Center can access health and wellness resources on site. These initiatives are a direct result of the Center responding to the needs of young people based on what they are sharing, Erwin says.
“It’s anything from just having a cold and needing some cold medicine to HIV prevention and chronic disease management,” he adds. “That can happen right there in that space and from there, they can maybe head to a therapy workshop and then upstairs is your apartment. The idea is eliminating as many barriers as possible for these young people.”
“It’s another example of how Ruth Ellis Center is here responding to the needs of young people based on what they are sharing with us, not based on what we think is best for them,” Erwin adds.
Edwards says one of the key elements of how Ruth Ellis Center reaches young people is by remembering that they are, in fact, young people. She remembers getting in a little trouble with her friend Roxy, who lived nearby. “I was a little defiant,” she recalls. “Roxy and I would occasionally sneak out — we were like any teenagers, just hanging out, listening to music, playing video games, but I’d get caught sneaking back in after curfew.” Staffers doled out consequences, but “I was never ridiculed or persecuted for it,” she says. “They’d say, ‘We know you’re a teenager and you’re going to do teenage things, but your safety is what we’re concerned about. We don’t want nothing to happen to Krystina.’ I’d lose little privileges, but I still had my family.”
Ruth Ellis Center Director of Development and Advancement Nazarina Mwakasege says she’s constantly amazed and inspired by residents and program participants. When a young adult recently told her, “You really are in this with us and for us,” she says it was a moment that reminded her why she serves in this role. “It reaffirms my work and the experiences I’ve had,” she explains. “I think [we] do this in service, in part, to the small pieces and even the larger pieces of ourselves that can so closely identify with these young people in the experiences they’ve had as being part of the community.”
Mwakasege says she’s often inspired by simply being immersed in Ruth Ellis Center’s physical spaces. “It’s difficult not to be driven by a space where, when you go into the bathroom and do something as simple as wash your hands, Beyoncé lyrics adorn the mirrors,” she says. “There’s so much acknowledgement of the community that we serve and with whom we work and even the space that we occupy right in our offices in Highland Park and other historically Black city spaces.”
“Ruth would be mighty proud of the cofounders and the pioneers, and she would be so proud of the young people,” Robinson says. “The ones finding ways to survive and to authentically be themselves in the world as challenging and dangerous as it is, especially in a climate like this.”
“She is still with us in spirit,” Robinson says. “She’s looking over us and she would not have even dreamed of having four different sites throughout Detroit and Highland Park. She wouldn’t even conceive of how much we’ve grown, from a small drop-in center to having all these different comprehensive services.”
“Ruth’s mind would have been blown,” Robinson says. “She would have been overwhelmed with joy that we have a steady board, a growing staff and four locations that are saving lives.” Robinson, aka Kofi Afua Adoma, is the namesake of one of those locations. Kofi House centers on the needs of lesbians and queer women and girls.
“There really shouldn’t be a Ruth Ellis Center,” Robinson adds. “There shouldn’t be a need for this in the world. These youth should be able to live out their lives and be all of who they are in the world and be treated like everyone else. Ruth believed in equality and she believed that God loves everybody. She would be outraged if she were still around, to see how some religious people are against LGBTQ+ people. But I know her spirit is watching over these young people. She wants them to be safe and loved and affirmed. She wants them to be cared for and to see that they get the services they need.”
Looking ahead
As Erwin considers the next phase of Ruth Ellis Center’s evolution, he acknowledges that some of the barriers present in 1999 still exist today. “We’re still navigating some of these very real challenges in terms of how these systems like child welfare, healthcare and housing are not set up to support LGBTQ+ young people,” he says. “So it is as much of our responsibility to support these young people as it is to support these systems in understanding how they can evolve to better support and better prioritize these young people who are so disproportionately affected by homelessness and so overly represented in child welfare.”
One way Ruth Ellis Center advances systemic change is through its Ruth Ellis Institute, which provides training and consulting for human service organizations and care systems. Institute team members work with professionals who administer various services to young adults, educating them on topics that fall under the “SOGIE” (sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression) umbrella.
Jessie Fullenkamp, director of the Ruth Ellis Institute, says a typical day might include educating a child welfare case manager on the definition of nonbinary or working on a training program for foster care agencies. The Institute recently contracted with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to train every CPS foster care and adoption case manager in the state of Michigan.
“The goal is that they really understand the importance of listening to young people and deferring to the language they’re using so that there’s an attitude and behavioral shift,” Fullenkamp says. It’s not always an easy process — in fact, she says, some organizations or individuals who are mandated to receive training through the Institute are quite resistant.
Fullenkamp says it’s critical to have reasonable goals in mind. Progress that happens in inches, not feet, is still progress. “We’re not likely to change someone who is offended by even talking about pronouns,” she acknowledges. “They’re probably not going to decide to hang a rainbow flag in their cubicle, right? That’s probably not realistic. But what we can do and where we have seen an ability to really make a big shift is when our goal is not to change a person’s mind, but to help a person feel understood.”
“Often, something shifts within them that allows them to be open to hearing about the behavior that is being asked of them on the job,” she adds. “But when you have a goal of changing someone’s mind about something, the assumption is that you’re the only person who knows the right way. Instead, we really see everyone as having a piece of the truth, even if the way they articulate it is different than how we do. If we see goodness in them and invite understanding, that’s often something people are not being offered in their workplace — or in life.”
In the end, Fullenkamp says her team tries to model the behavior they are asking them to exhibit with LGBTQ+ young people, adding, “We’re seeing real progress.”
“The young people we serve are some of the most creative, resilient and talented young people I’ve ever met. The focus should always be on how we can provide resources so that they can achieve all they want to achieve in their life — that’s what it’s about,” Erwin says. “It’s not this hyper focus on the circumstances which brought them to Ruth Ellis Center. It’s recognizing that these are incredible young people who have every right to dream of a future that is entirely theirs, just as every other young person should do.”
Ruth Ellis Center will celebrate its 25th anniversary at a gala on Sept. 26 at The Colony Club in Detroit. The VOICES! event will feature a silent auction, an open bar, a formal dinner, special guests and live performances. Reach out to [email protected] for information about sponsorship opportunities. Find tickets and details at bit.ly/3z5orGW.
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