Mission
The mission of  This Is H.O.W. is to create opportunities and environments that empower Trans people to recover, to succeed in accomplishing goals, to reconnect with themselves and others, and strive for a purpose in life, making them healthy, vibrant and whole.
Goals
1. To help Trans women and men connect to themselves and their community
2. To ensure that Trans women and men find supportive work environments that will sustain them financially.
3. To ensure and stabilize access to care for Trans people of all colors, genders, and backgrounds.
Trans
This is How’s mission statement and goals do not provide a definition of Trans. They simply state our job is, in the simplest terms possible, to make life better for Trans people. They do not say “some trans people”, they do not say “just the trans people we like”.
As an expert organization, This Is How provides charitable services to the entire Trans community without regard for the kind of Trans person they are or even how they may identify as an individual.
Our target community is best defined as follows:
Persons who do not conform to US culture’s expectations of how someone of their physiological sex assigned at birth is supposed to be in this culture and society.
By be, we mean live, act, behave, engage, and similar activities that revolve around a peson having an active existence.
As a matter of practicality, and using the most widely held and recognized terms in social justice and medicine, we provide services to transsexual, transgender, and other gender variant persons, in accordance with the Standards of Care as published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
We recognize that there are many differences of opinion relating to how individuals identify and the appropriateness of such. Within our own organization there are many differences of opinion on those same matters.
TIH is not about identity politics within the trans community and opposes efforts which rely on the stigmatization of others to further identity group divisions within our target service group.
We support the efforts of others to create spaces on their own that may appeal to some members of the broad community that TIH serves, but require that you do not make  statements regarding who is and who isn’t a part of a particular identity group on our pages, in our offices, our residences, or our programs.