JQY (Jewish Queer Youth), a nonprofit that supports and empowers LGBTQ youth from Orthodox, Chassidic, and Sephardic/Mizrahi homes, has announced a $1 million gift from Paul Austin and his partner, Dalip Girdhar, to expand social services to LGBTQ youth in major Jewish communities across the country.

The largest gift in JQY history will support the expansion of the organization’s Drop-in Center initiative, an in-person clinical program that operates in New York, to local Orthodox communities in New Jersey, Baltimore, Chicago, and South Florida; as well as the increase of staffing in the organization’s crisis phone line. In recognition of the gift, the program and warmline will be renamed the JQY Paul Austin and Dalip Girdhar (the P. Austin Family Foundation) Drop-in Center and Hopeline. Drop-in centers will include bright artwork, games, kosher dinner, a Jewish queer library, and social workers on-hand for individual counseling.

Austin is a Toronto-based real estate developer and CEO of the Salpam Group, while Girdhar works in information technology at TD Bank.

“Our Drop-in Centers are places of celebration, safe environments where young people can reaffirm their self-esteem and self-worth,” said JQY founder and clinical director Mordechai Levovitz. “Gender and orientation do not have to be a catastrophe; in healthy and positive settings, they can be things about ourselves that we learn to explore, express, engage with, and even love.”