About Sarah:
Sarah relocated to Charlotte after spending 15 years in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MSW from New York University and has spent her career working at the intersection of LGBTQ community and youth. Prior to coming to Time Out Youth, Sarah worked at A Way Home America, a national initiative focused on ending homelessness for LGBTQ youth and youth of color, and at The LGBT Community Center in New York.
At Time Out Youth:
As Chief Executive Officer, Sarah helps the team bring their visions for creating safe space for LGBTQ youth to life. As a social worker, she’s spent her career working with LGBTQ youth, fighting for access to safe housing, supportive families, and their right to exist fully as they are. She is passionate about this work and wants to use any opportunity she has to remove obstacles for our vibrant queer and trans youth.
When she’s not working:
You can usually find Sarah reading a book, on a fun trip with her spouse or hiking a trail with her dog, Coconut.
Fun Fact:
Sarah is a first generation Egyptian-American!
From the Charlotte Observer:
‘I feel lucky.’ Q&A with new director of Charlotte’s LGBTQ+ youth center BY DEVNA BOSE JULY 14, 2021 12:30 PM
Sarah Mikhail, Time Out Youth’s new executive director, might be relatively new to Charlotte — but she’s long been fighting for the organization’s cause. Time Out Youth is a Charlotte-based organization that provides support services to LGBTQ+ youth. It’s a natural fit for Mikhail, she said, since she’s loved working with young people since the beginning of her career. Though she started out as a fashion merchandising major in college, she quickly realized her passion for social work. “I became completely enamored with the profession and the versatility of it,” she said of her ability as a social worker to help children in various capacities.
“It was really evident to me working with these kids that I was connecting with that they were born into a life circumstance that was not their fault, but it was certainly their problem.” It made her consider her own childhood, and the privilege she had grown up with, even with parents who were Egyptian immigrants to the United States. “It was clear to me that the systems that made it easy for me to have access to things, were making it difficult for them to have access to anything,” she said. She worked in foster care in New York right after graduation and lived in Brooklyn before moving to Charlotte.
Mikhail and her partner visited the Queen City during the pandemic and “fell in love” with it. They decided to make the move permanent in September. One of the things Mikhail is most excited about is working with young people again in her new role. “I want to be able to hear them out,” she said. “They know what they need more than I do. I want them to tell us that we either have something to offer them or we’re willing to hear what they need and help them get it.” The Charlotte Observer interviewed Mikhail this week to find out more about her vision for Time Out Youth.
What inspired your passion in this kind of work? “I am a social worker, and I spent the last 15 years doing social work in Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been primarily in the child welfare space and in the LGBTQ space, and then intersections of those things throughout my career. My most recent role is doing national work in ending youth homelessness.”
Mikhail had been considering volunteering at Time Out Youth when she heard about the executive director position. She spent a couple of months interviewing with different members of the organization’s team before being offered the gig. “Working at the intersection of the LGBTQ community and young people is just my perfect idea of a role. Being a queer person and knowing that so many of the young people that we serve are people of color is super amazing to me. “I feel lucky to do work in a community that I care about and one that is also mine.”
What is Time Out Youth? Time Out Youth was first founded as a support group when Charlottean Tonda Taylor realized no support groups existed for LGBTQ youth in Charlotte. Taylor, who realized she was gay during her childhood, had left Charlotte for a “more tolerant climate,” Time Out Youth’s website says. She returned 20 years later — her brother was dying from leukemia and later contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. Her father also somehow became infected with the disease and took his life to spare his family the “burden of his illness,” according to Time Out Youth’s site recounting the organization’s history. Taylor’s brother Sam died seven months later.
At the time, AIDS was viewed as a “gay” disease and carried much stigma. Soon after the deaths of her father and brother, a friend approached Taylor to help a teenager who was struggling with her sexual orientation. The first Time Out Youth support group met on April 8, 1991. Mikhail says: “It’s an amazing organization that just celebrated its 30th-year anniversary this year. That support group turned into an organization that now offers therapy, support groups and case management like emergency housing assistance and financial assistance. You can come to the center and do your laundry, you can get a meal. So I’m really excited to join an organization that provides so much. “Though it’s a small, tight-knit group of people that provide all of this, their impact is wide. It’s been so heartening to get to know them and learn about their goals and ideas for how much more is possible for them.”
What’s your vision for Time Out Youth? “A key part of my leadership style is collaboration and having youth lead the work. A lot of the work I’ve done has been really well-informed by young people but not particularly youth-led, so I have an interest there. I want us to continue to grow, I want to build a bigger team that can keep doing what they’re already doing that really, really works, and give them space to build out things that they know young people need.” “How do we build partnerships, how do we build programming that young people that are coming to Time Out say they need, and more importantly, why aren’t young people coming? What do we need to offer them that we don’t have? So, for me, it’s about growth and expansion — not in terms of quantity, but intention to build what young people need.” “I told the team I’m going to spend a good six months listening to people.”
What do young LGBTQ+ Charlotteans need? “Definitely housing. It’s something that Time Out Youth has done. We currently have only one housing specialist who is connected to some shelters and we have a host home program, but it’s certainly not enough. Figuring out where partnerships in the housing space are will be really, really meaningful.” LGBTQ youth represent about 40% of the homeless youth population. Of that population, studies indicate that as many as 60% are at risk of suicide, research says. “Our LGBTQ young people, particularly Black and brown young people, are coming to Time Out for services. But they are not even able to access some of the mental health support because their basic needs aren’t being met. So how do we ensure that those young people are both able to access services for their mental health or physical health, and also get that case management and housing support?”
What do you want local LGBTQ+ youth to know about you and Time Out Youth? “I really love to lead with the concept of intersectionality. I am a queer and brown person and believe that it is my honor and my duty to lift up the voices of young people that either share my identity or that I’m an ally to. All queer brown people are not a monolith, so I cannot speak for young people that are coming in that are Black, that are transgender, that have any identities that are within my community but I don’t share them. So how do I be a voice, and lift them up? “I believe that my job isn’t to speak for you but to give you a seat at the table so that you can speak for yourself.”
Link to full story here.
Visit Sarah’s LinkedIn profile here.