When Allison and I got engaged, we spent months vetting vendors for our wedding.

We looked at vendors' websites, social medias, portfolios, and anything we could to try and figure out if they were LGBTQ+ friendly. 

When we'd get on calls with vendors, we'd even ask them outright if they supported the queer community. The answer we got the most was "oh yeah! Love is love. We treat everyone the same."

As we heard this more and more, we realized something important.

There's a difference between a business that says they "treat everyone the same," and one that takes intentional steps to make sure that doesn't turn into treating everyone like straight, cisgender clients.

The problem is that business owners were often never taught to notice how their industry's norms assume straight, cisgender clients by default, especially businesses where in-person relationship building is at the heart of their service. 

A wedding photographer may have only been taught poses that make sense when the couple is a bride and groom.

A hair stylist may have been told to offer tiered prices by "men's haircuts" and "women's haircuts," but doesn't know how to set the price when a nonbinary person walks in or when a woman wants a "man's cut."

A wedding vendor uploaded default contracts and intake forms onto their website without realizing that the "bride" and "groom" name fields caused confusion or harm to their queer clients.

A personal trainer was taught how to help people get healthy and get in shape, but was never taught the nuances of how to help a trans man achieve the body shape he wants.

A therapist was taught to help people navigate through difficult family dynamics, but wasn't trained on situations where nothing but someone being queer was at the center of the family rift. 

When queer people say we want to be treated the same, it means we want to be treated with same respect as everyone else, not that we want heteronormative expectations applied to our relationships or cisnormative assumptions applied to our identities.

But where can businesses learn to identify these dominant influences on their work and factor in queer-informed care? 

You don't want to put the burden of education on your queer clients (and you shouldn't), and industry-specific LGBTQ+ professional development is few and far between.

This is why we built the Affirming Business Institute, to gather queer industry experts who want to teach business owners how to recognize these influences on their work and help them close the gap.

Each ABI certification program starts with a course that was developed by an expert in that specific field. The course teaches businesses everything they need to know to deconstruct their ways of working so that they can treat everyone with the same respect, but with tools to affirm what makes each client unique.

It started with just the idea for training, but then we started noticing how hard it was to find queer-informed businesses as queer people.

We felt this personally when we spent weeks vetting vendors for our wedding, and we listened to our friends feel it too every time they had an unaffirming experience with a doctor, a hair stylist, a therapist, a technician, a store owner, a restaurant server, and other businesses they'd given money to only to be misunderstood or treated poorly.  

The queer community needs easy access to queer-affirming businesses desperately so we can stop giving our time and money to businesses who would treat us poorly. 

So we added in a directory arm of our business that was tied to our courses. 

Once businesses successfully complete their course and pass the final assessment, they will be rewarded with a certificate and a badge that they can display on their website AND they'll be listed in our directory.

The Affirming Business Directory is helpful for both businesses and the queer people who are searching for them. Businesses who have completed official training on being queer-affirming get visibility, and queer people have a single place to find them.

Queer people want to be treated with respect, but we don't want to be treated like we need to fit into cisgender or heteronormative boxes in order to receive affirming care. 

We made the Affirming Business Institute to help change this part of the queer experience for the better, and whether you're a business or a fellow member of the LGBTQ+ community, we hope you come along and join us!