The Lakers Youth Foundation teamed up with Rainbow Labs to host the Lakers LGBTQ+ Tee-Off, a Pride Month event celebrating Queer and Gender Nonconforming youth. As a community partner, Rainbow Labs empowers youth through mentorship and community building rooted in lived experience and self-expression.

Co-Founders of Rainbow Labs, Jacob Toups and Luis Vasquez, were selected as the Rams' fourth "pLAymaker" honorees and surprised with a $5,000 check from The Los Angeles Rams Foundation.

Jacob Toups joins Stories Behind to talk about creating spaces of belonging for LGBTQ+ youth, the power of intersectionality, and reclaiming the word “queer.”

With this summer’s Olympics Tokyo Games 2020, and the recent win for the U.S. in the Women’s soccer tournament, we got to talk with former two-time Olympic gold medalist, Angela Hucles Mangano, all about soccer, the Olympics, and her LGBTQ+ identity.

“Family,” a word that carries an immense amount of weight in our hearts, minds, and communities. No family is quite the same, but we still manage to relate at our core. I was able to sit down with Ruth Campos and Emma Coto, two amazing parents involved within our One Bold Summer program, and see what it means to them to have an LGBTQ+ family.

In honor of International Non-Binary People’s Day, we got to sit down with one of our lovely mentors, Tré! Tré sees being non-binary as a metamorphosis process, “I just feel like a butterfly, I’ve been a caterpillar for so long and when I figured out who I was and who I identify as I felt like a butterfly, a very gender-neutral butterfly! It is a process and I’m still trying to figure it out for myself every single day, believe it or not!”

One of the reasons why I joined Rainbow Labs was to be a part of something that changed the narrative of what it means to be LGBTQ+. The LGBTQ+ mentor programs in existence heavily focus on LGBTQ+ identity – which is great in many ways, but when you are working with LGBTQ+ youth it’s sometimes nice to help them explore other aspects of identity.

Mentorship Matters.  But more importantly, mentorship matters for kids who are at-risk.  For someone like myself, who is a Black woman who identifies as a lesbian, I am forever grateful for the mentors that I had in my life.  My dad died when I was just fourteen years old and at the time, I had no idea why I was so angry at the world. Hell, I thought it was just teenage hormones. 

When COVID19 hit the United States last March, I had a flood of messages from my network to make sure I was safe. Family called to check in. Friends started group text messages for support. My coworkers at the time reconfigured our peer support program for veterans and athletes to go virtual to protect the safety of those we served during the crisis. What I saw and witnessed was a village of people rushing to support everyone I loved.