The sudden resignation of Twin Cities Pride’s last Executive Director in May, a month before the Pride festival itself, raised as many eyebrows in the community as did TC Pride’s decision to hire Jessica Mork in January. Some say the decision to hire the former head of the Twin Cities chapter of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs, who had little prior connection to the LGBT community, was driven by attempts to build connections with LGBT communities of color .
According to the Chair of TC Pride’s Board of Directors, Jordan Roberge, Mork was hired for her experience running a the non-profit NSHMBA branch. Mork’s connections to the Latino/Latina community through the MBA association were “a bonus”, Roberge told TheColu.mn in an interview, as the Board had decided late last year to dramatically increase TC Pride’s efforts to reach out to communities of color.
Roberge said Mork resigned voluntarily in May, and wasn’t fired, but he wouldn’t comment further citing TC Pride personnel policies. However, he indicated that the organization’s so-far-limited outreach efforts were stunted by Mork’s departure.
In the case of the Latino/Latina community, Mork’s connections don’t seem to have panned out for TC Pride – in Roberge’s words, they were “working on” the issue, and so far, Twin Cities Black Pride has been the only beneficiary of sustained outreach efforts. According to Earnest Simpkins, co-chair of Black Pride, Mork approached Black Pride earlier this year, giving them a booth at this weekend’s Pride festival, and working with them in other ways as they planned their own event, to be held later this summer.
Roberge said TC Pride’s wants to build relationships with workplace diversity groups at local corporations as a starting point. He promised an expanded outreach effort next year, and said the board would work to improve the board’s racial and ethnic diversity.
“We want to see if we can get community leaders [in communities of color] to talk more about gay issues…showing that it’s a conversation that’s ok to have,” Roberge said.
What outreach work Mork did accomplish in her short tenure is only a small part of the bridges that need to be built: Stewart Van Cleve, a researcher at the Tretter Collection in LGBT Studies at the University of Minnesota and author of the online Guide to the top 100 Queer Places in Twin Cities History, says Pride has a lot of historical baggage to overcome.
For many years, Van Cleve said, its organizers were predominantly drawn from former members of Fight Repression of Erotic Expression, the University of Minnesota’s 70’s-era LGBT student group.
“The Pride Committee was predominantly, if not exclusively white, University-affiliated people,” says Van Cleve, pointing out that it was founded at a time when communities of color – particularly the black community – were fighting to simply gain entry to the University, and fighting racially discriminatory hiring practices that didn’t really bear on the LGBT community.
This segregated birth, combined with concerns in the 1990s that the organization would go bankrupt paying for a free event whose attendance quadrupled in less than ten years, Van Cleve said, lead to deep skepticism from some when TC Pride announced it would be trying to increase its outreach in the early 2000’s. “[B]y that point a lot of folks were kind of dissatisfied with how it had been for the last 30 years,” he said.
If Pride would like to “build relationships with workplace diversity groups at local corporations as a starting point” why don’t they partner with Quorum’s Workplace Alliance, an organization that does just that?
I would like to see Twin Cities Pride build relationships with ANYONE. The Pride organization doesn’t even interact with, let alone, support the other year-round GLBT organizations in this community! This organization is totally isolated and seemingly makes little to no effort at outreach other than for the one weekend per year they have an event. I think if this organization had leadership who were ACTUALLY connected in some way to the rest of the community who works year-round for glbtqa equality, they would realize how far off the mark they actually are.
Before you start to condem an organization, you should get your facts right. Twin Cities Pride is involved with the other LGBT organizations in the area. They were at the June Quorum WPA event at General Mills earlier this month. They had representation at the launch of Quorums new brand. At the Multicultural Workplace Forum held in Minneapolis in March, one if the largest diversity conferences in the country, TC Pride participated in the resource fair with many other non-profits. Members of TC Pride also meet regularly with other LGBT non-profits, such as District 202 and Rainbow Health to see how they can better work together. Pride also uses their extensive contact lists and web page to promote community events through out the year.
So instead of
Twin Cities Pride is in bed with too many big businesses to care about our community.
Can you imagine if they spent as much time fundraising for District 202 as they do pandering to Delta, Target, & Budweiser, how much better our community would be?
As a very active part of the Twin Cities LGBTQA Community, my partner and I have worked with TC Pride this year as we have the previous two years. The TC Pride Organization is ALWAYS looking for people to lend a hand and provide input on how things are done. Have you ever looked on their website to see all of the open positions to be filled? Has our community such as the bars, who really receive the grand financial benefit, given ANY percentage of their sales over the MONTH(pride month) back to the TC Pride Organization as a “thank you”? Without the Festival, none of the bars would have their bottom line in June each year. My own business made a $36.00 profit this month, however, we did give back to TC Pride and ate a lot of Ramen Noodles this month. If any of you can do it better, than do it. Lavender Media isn’t involved with the TC Pride organization at ALL but our “community” still supports Lavender. Twin Cities Pride works hard for us. Show your appreciation and let’s come together and be a community. There are enough people who are against us already.
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