Seth Owen knows what it’s like to fight for yourself. The 18-year-old from Jacksonville, Florida, made headlines when a GoFundMe for his college expenses went viral and landed him on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. A class valedictorian, Seth was forced out of the house by his parents for refusing to attend their church, leaving his collegiate future uncertain, until his fundraiser raked in $141,000 — seven times what he had originally sought.

Now, Seth has used that money (and an extra $25,000 kicked in by DeGeneres and Cheerios) to start a scholarship for LGBTQ+ people of color. With another GoFundMe in the works as part of an effort to secure an endowment, he hopes the Unbroken Horizons Scholarship Foundation can do a lot of good for a long time. For Seth, it was important that the foundation prioritize not only LGBTQ+ youth who are at an elevated risk for homelessness, often due to family rejection, but also young people of color who find themselves at the intersections of discrimination.

“I was told by a mentor of mine I would not have received the same support if I were a student of color,” Seth says of the help he received paying for college. He explains that he views white privilege as a “reality of society” and says it’s his responsibility “to actively do something about it.”

“I can't just say that I'm not racist because I don't act that way,” Seth says. “I have to actively do something about it. That's my own conviction, my own obligation, that I feel is my personal responsibility.”

“There are kids out there who have demonstrated that they are resilient in the face of marginalization, and we're looking to make sure that they have every chance to succeed,” Seth says of LGBTQ+ students of color. “It just makes me so happy to know that I've been given the opportunity to help someone.” Seth says the scholarship will ask students to tell their stories both as an antidote to checking boxes on the application and as part of the foundation’s larger mission to “give students a platform to speak out about their experiences.”

For Seth, the chance to talk about one's experience is personal.

“For me, a form of healing that I have been participating in is writing about my experiences,” he tells Teen Vogue. “When I was in the college application process, writing those stories about my experience and turning it into something positive, something that I can use for good, was very helpful to me.”