What this is
Transitions to Moments that Matter is a prevention-focused narrative intervention and companion tool ecosystem. It is designed to help families, providers, and youth-serving systems recognize how everyday institutional practices contribute to exclusion, service avoidance, and housing instability among transgender and gender-diverse youth, and to act before disengagement escalates.
Development context
Transitions to Moments that Matter is currently in its capstone prototype and refinement phase, developed through the USC DSW process in connection with the California Homeless Youth Project (CHYP). This stage is focused on preparing the project for partnership outreach, organizational use, and future dissemination through CHYP's You Count Data Hub.
Ethical governance
The intervention follows a community-grounded ethics framework: consent at every point of contribution, the right to withdraw stories or feedback at any time, a digital archive with explicit preservation and removal protocols, and transparent partnership and funding disclosures.
The Design Lab is part of this governance process. It functions as a consent-governed review and reflection space that helps keep the project accountable, accessible, and shaped by lived, professional, family, and community-based knowledge before broader release. People closest to the work hold meaningful influence over the tools, language, and materials, so shared expertise and community accountability are built into what gets shared, not added after the fact.