Ruby Jade Corado is a D.C. Humanist-Transgender woman, bilingual inspirational speaker, and Executive Director of Casa Ruby Inc.
Ruby was born in San Salvador, El Salvador. At the age of 16, she fled a civil war on a bus that led her to Washington, D.C. There, she experienced human trafficking, homelessness, and discrimination. She has fought hard for LGBTQ human rights, transgender liberation, immigration equality, and access to healthcare, as well as against hate crimes and violence.
When she first arrived in Washington, Casa Ruby’s website explains, “there were no services to support her needs as a young transgender Latina immigrant.” Therefore, she dreamt of meeting those needs and bringing bilingual “resources to historically underserved and under-resourced communities” for transgender and queer individuals to reach their full potential.
At first, Ruby and a group of friends organized and built community “in parks, churches, and businesses, often facing discrimination and rejection.” Then, they established Casa Ruby Inc “despite severe adversity.”
The first Casa Ruby Center opened in Washington, D.C., near Howard University in June 2012. “Today, Casa Ruby employs almost 50 people, providing more than 30,000 social and human services to more than 6,000 people each year.” This center welcomes multicultural LGBTQ youth, as well as their families and the broader community.
Casa Ruby’s mission is to “create success life stories among transgender, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals.” They work toward creating “a world where transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people pursue their dreams and achieve success in their lives without fear of discrimination, harassment, or violence due to their sexual orientation and or gender identity/gender expression.”
During the coronavirus D.C. shutdown, Casa Ruby kept its doors open to guarantee their clients (LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness and vulnerability) a place to go. On their website, Ruby writes that these vulnerable people “need [them] more than ever.”
On the TEDxFoggyBottom 2018 stage, Ruby shared her thoughts on being a social rights activist in DC: “Somebody once asked me: ‘Do you think that there’s social justice in Washington DC?’ and I said, ‘The only thing I could share with you is that I don’t know any other place in the world where a young, immigrant, transgender, homeless prostitute with HIV can have a dream of doing work in her community and uplifting people and making it come true.'”
Ruby knows from her years of activism that “if you believe that your dreams are big when they become a reality, they become bigger when others dream with you.”