428: LGBT YouthLink of CenterLink with Deborah Levine

Deborah Levine is the Director of LGBT YouthLink at CenterLink, which supports, strengthens, and connects LGBT centers.

Chad talks with Deborah about working on something new called imi: a free digital research-backed mental health tool intended to support and help LGBTQ+ teens explore and affirm their identity and learn practical ways to cope with their sexual and gender minority stress, founding Q Chat Space, a digital LGBTQ+ center where teens join live-chat, professionally facilitated, online support groups, and how over the time that she's been doing work in LGBTQ+ spaces products and online interaction have changed and evolved.

• CenterLink
• Follow CenterLink on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.
• LGBT YouthLink
• Q Chat Space
• HopeLab
• Follow Deborah on LinkedIn.
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Transcript:

CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me, today is Deborah Levine, Director of LGBT YouthLink at CenterLink, which supports, strengthens, and connects LGBT centers. Deborah, thank you so much for joining me.

DEBORAH: Thanks, Chad. I appreciate you inviting me.

CHAD: So I was first introduced to you and to CenterLink through the Q Chat Space product. And that's still going, right?

DEBORAH: Yeah.

CHAD: But you're working on something new called imi.

DEBORAH: Mm-hmm. We actually just launched imi on June 1st.

CHAD: Congratulations on the launch.

DEBORAH: Thank you. Yes, it went pretty smoothly. [laughs]

CHAD: That's good. So, what is imi?

DEBORAH: So imi is a free digital research-backed mental health tool. It was developed by Hopelab in partnership with CenterLink, and the It Gets Better Project, as well as hundreds of LGBTQ+ young people across the U.S. It's a little hard to describe, to be perfectly honest. It really is intended to support and help LGBTQ+ teens explore and affirm their identity and learn practical ways to cope with their sexual and gender minority stress.

And we really hope that the tool is helpful, relevant, inclusive, and joyful. It is a web app, but it operates...it's not a lot of reading. It's listening, and doing, and thinking, and really giving youth an opportunity to explore and consider ways that they might help support themselves.

CHAD: That's great. And I suppose it's even a compliment to your prior work at CenterLink and with Q Chat Space, which is an online support community.

DEBORAH: Yes.

CHAD: People can use both.

DEBORAH: Exactly. We actually engaged in a partnership with Hopelab because we recognize that though youths were really excited about and engaged in the support groups that Q Chat Space provides, those are synchronous, and they happen once or twice a day. They last for an hour and a half, but that's all there is. So if you come to the website when a chat isn't happening, then there's not much to do. And we wanted to be able to provide youth with something else, and imi really fills that gap.

CHAD: So when it comes to the product itself, how long was it in development for?

DEBORAH: Great question. Of course, there was the pandemic, so there were some delays related to that. But it was about two and a half years from when Hopelab first approached CenterLink until the actual launch date.

CHAD: That's a fairly significant amount of time.

DEBORAH: It is for when you're working, I think if we were only tech firms, but both Hopelab and CenterLink are nonprofits. And the process included a lot of steps. So we actually had a prototype pretty early. But because we wanted to make sure that we did put something out into the world that actually had the impact we were seeking, we did a randomized controlled trial. We had 270 youth, half of them using a similar-looking website wit...