Transgender rights advocate Iya Dammons, the founder and executive director of Baltimore Safe Haven, an organization that provides emergency housing and other services for the LGBTQ community with a special outreach to the transgender community, says she plans to open a similar group in D.C. later this year to provide services that D.C.’s Casa Ruby provided before its shut down last week.

Dammons, who is originally from D.C. and has longstanding ties to D.C., said she was not prepared to comment on the issues surrounding the closing of Casa Ruby other than to say she knew Casa Ruby founder and CEO Ruby Corado and Corado’s years of work carrying out Casa Ruby’s mission.

Among other things, Casa Ruby operated as an LGBTQ community services center that provided transitional housing services for homeless LGBTQ youth and adults and support for LGBTQ immigrants. Corado, who resigned from her position as executive director last year but retained full control of the organization’s finances, was said to be in El Salvador and couldn’t be reached last week when Casa Ruby employees disclosed the organization was forced to close its operations due to a financial crisis.

“The work that she did was truly committed to the vision that we also have in our mission in Baltimore,” Dammons told the Washington Blade. “So, I wanted to be able to build the infrastructures out to continue that work,” she said. “We’re going to create a low barrier shelter for 18- to 25-year-olds. We’re going to start a drop-in center and a mobile outreach unit,” Dammons said.

She added that her plans also call for “providing services and new employment for those who lost their jobs with regard to what happened with Casa Ruby.”

Dammons said she has spoken with officials at the Wanda Alston Foundation and SMYAL, two other D.C. organizations that provide emergency housing services for LGBTQ youth in D.C., for the purpose of collaborating with them on the services that the new D.C. Safe Haven plans to provide.

Start-up funds for the opening of D.C. Safe Haven’s operations will be provided by the Okra Project, a national transgender advocacy organization, according to its executive director, Dominique Morgan.

Morgan told the Blade in a joint phone interview with Dammons on July 25 that she and her Okra Project team were impressed by Dammons’s plans for the D.C. Safe Haven. Morgan said the Okra Project, among other things, supports the work of transgender leaders like Dammons throughout the country.

“I just want to recognize that Iya is a product of D.C. and it’s extremely powerful when those from these communities are making and activating a solution like this,” Morgan said. “So, on top of all the work that she’s done, I think it is a beautiful moment for the hometown girl to come back to her community,” she told the Blade.

Dammons said she is aiming to have D.C. Safe Haven’s programs up and running by late fall or early winter of this year to ensure, among other things, that LGBTQ people facing homelessness will have a place to go in the cold weather.