As many of you know, TheColu.mn is in the running for a $25,000 Pepsi Refresh grant that would let us build a network of LGBT community journalists throughout Greater Minnesota.

The “Not the Only One” project provides lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Minnesotans living in non-urban areas the opportunity to share their lives with readers across the state and to confront homophobia in their communities. The project will recruit and train 15 community members from small towns and tribal reservations throughout the state in journalism, community organizing and new media in order to promote tolerance, confront homophobia and create safe spaces for members of the community in often hostile environments, and help the writers build a local LGBT blogs to bring community together and serve as clearinghouses of information. At the end of the year, we will publish 500 books showcasing these writers’ best work, to be distributed at Pride events throughout the state in the summer of 2011.

Here’s where you, our readers, come in: Pepsi will be giving out 10 grants in the $25,000 category, based on which of the 188 proposals in our category receive the most votes over the course of February. We need your votes. You’ve seen the great reporting we do, even on a shoestring budget and after only a few months of existence. You’ve seen us cover the Sexual Violence Center, same-sex marriage protests of all kinds, December’s hate crime in Northeast Minneapolis, LGBT rights in the race for governor, and the dramatic rise in rates of new HIV cases long before the Star-Tribune ever thought about the issue. You know we will bring the same passion and teach the same skills to the citizen journalists we recruit as part of “Not The Only One.”

You can vote only once a day, for your 10 favorite ideas, but you can still vote every day of the month until this month’s contest closes at midnight on February 28th. You will have to create an account with Pepsi’s refresheverything.com website, but we are told Pepsi will not share your email – it is simply to make sure you are only voting for a project you support one time per day. Or you can use Facebook Connect which simply uses your Facebook account to verify your identity.

So sign up at refresheverything.com, and look for our project in the $25,000 grant category. We need your vote today, tomorrow, and every day in February to make this wonderful project a reality. We’ll thank you, and so will your fellow LGBT Minnesotans.

Yours,

The Editors: James, Andy, and Keith