Update: Ruby Corado announced in a Facebook Live video on Friday that she is stepping down as the executive director of Casa Ruby, the bilingual LGBTQ+ organization she founded and has championed since opening the first location near Howard University in 2012.

Corado, who back in January said she would step down within two years, said she was announcing this move at the beginning of D.C.’s new fiscal year. Alexis Blackmon, the nonprofit’s director of government affairs, will take over as interim executive director, Corado said in her announcement.

“We have built a great team at Casa Ruby,” Corado said. “We have spent a lot of money on bringing [in] talent.”

Corado said she will be focusing on “producing private revenue” for Casa Ruby. Corado said she started this project with Casa Ruby Pharmacy — she even has hopes of starting a restaurant and a club that would help fund the greater organization. Earlier this summer, while facing widespread criticism over its handling of Black customers — specifically, Black women — Nellie’s Sports Bar hired Corado to lead diversity and inclusion trainings for the business. (Some activists have expressed concern that the hire was a performative attempt to cover up its misdeeds while wrapped up in a scandal.)

Earlier this week, Corado started a GoFundMe to raise funds for its low-barrier shelter, after D.C.’s Department of Human Services pulled its grant for the organization.

In the 34-minute-long Facebook Live video, Corado addressed the tense relationship between D.C. government officials and the organization over the years and made a call for donors and officials to support Casa Ruby’s mission to protect and serve LGTBQ+ youth.

“I’m not leaving the girls … I’m just not going to be the main target anymore,” Corado said. “What I want to ask of all of you who will listen to this video … It’s time to support the Black trans leadership of this organization.”

Corado said she will be helping the organization’s board in searching for a permanent executive director.

Original: 

Ruby Corado, one of D.C.’s most prominent transgender activists and founder of the nonprofit Casa Ruby, announced that she will be stepping down in about a year and half from her director position at the bilingual, multicultural organization serving the city’s LBGT residents.

“I’m not leaving tomorrow — I’m starting my transition plan,” says Corado, who has already stayed at helm of the organization well beyond her original goal of leading the organization for 10 years. After years of lobbying elected officials and dealing with the frustrations of “bureaucratic bullshit,” Corado says she’s aiming to create more grassroots support for Casa Ruby and the residents it serves.

Corado started the nonprofit 17 years ago, and opened D.C.’s first drop-in shelter serving Latino transgender residents in 2012. Over the past several years, the organization has expanded with multiple transitional housing units for LGBT youth, and provided employment training programs, HIV testing, immigration services, and support for survivors of domestic violence, among other resources. Corado currently leads a team of more than 100 employees, oversees a 24/7 drop-in shelter that’s remained open for the entirety of the pandemic (without a single client testing positive, according to Corado), and operates various fundraising and donation drives.

“When I founded Casa Ruby, I had a goal. And my goal was to save lives,” Corado says, who first announced her intention to step down on Facebook on Monday. “My goal was to create a safe haven, a space of opportunity, where homeless people and marginalized people will really have a chance to save their lives. And part of that was convincing an entire city that disposable people needed a chance. And that took me a long time, because we need to change minds and hearts.”

Corado plans to open the door for new trans leadership with her departure from the executive director role, and funnel her energy into strengthening Casa Ruby’s ties within the community, rather than focusing her efforts on the Wilson Building. According to Corado, years of working with elected officials and lobbying for more funding while continuing to witness friends and community members die without housing or healthcare has been “exhausting.”

In 2020 alone, Corado says she knows of 17 trans and LGBT people in her circle who have died while experiencing homelessness, five of whom froze to death. Meanwhile, Casa Ruby’s grant budget from the city’s human services agency has recently been slashed by about $83,000 — a part of the city’s larger funding cuts to homelessness nonprofits during the pandemic.

“From the beginning I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna give myself 10 years, because this is extremely exhausting work,’ ” Corado says. “Not because of the people, that’s the best part of the job — to serve the people who need Casa Ruby. But it’s extremely exhausting to deal with a system that does not value the lives of marginalized people, a system that [is] still demonizing people for being in survival, for being broken, even though it was the same system that broke them.”

While Corado says Casa Ruby has seen a boon in community support over the past year — citing a Network for Good survey that showed a 66% increase in community backing and donating in 2020 — failed attempts with city leaders to implement new programs or allocate increased funding have prompted her to focus on building connections with community members, and steer away from working with government stakeholders.

“I am empowered to create more change, and I recognize that I can only do so much from the executive director’s office,” Corado says. “I am empowered to work with our supporters in the community. And it may mean to hold some politicians accountable.”

In the next year and a half, Corado says she plans to work on implementing several new programs into Casa Ruby’s model, like opening a pharmacy, running a ghost kitchen to provide both meals and job opportunity to clients, and eventually a create a grocery store to combat food insecurity — all ventures she says have buy-in from community members.

Though she’ll shed a formal title sometime in 2022, Corado says that’s about the extent of her eventual distance from the organization. She’ll join the board of directors and continue working closely with her network of clients and employees.

“As long as Casa Ruby bears my name, it will support people,” Corado says. “If it has my name on it, trust me, people will be at the center of it.”

And in stepping down from one leadership role, Corado says in a few years, she may be eying another  — on the D.C. Council.

“I make a call of action to the newly elected women, please make good on the 20-year promises that have been made to the trans community that were never kept,” Corado says. “Trans women are dying. Somebody make good on these promises. Or I’m gonna come…I have a feeling that I’m going to run for the council sometime in the future. Baby, I am going to come and shake it.”