Windy City Times asked the executive directors and board presidents of 10 community agencies to sit down for a forum on race issues. Eight of the organizations agreed.
The agencies who chose to participate were: Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund; Lesbian Community Cancer Project; Howard Brown Health Center; Horizons Community Services; AIDS Foundation of Chicago; Equality Illinois; Open Hand Chicago; and Test Positive Aware.
What follows are excerpts from the second forum. Those who participated in the second forum were: HBHC, represented by Executive Director Keith Waterbrook and Board representative Frank Pieri; Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, represented by Midwest Regional Director Mona Noriega and Cindy Hyndman, national co-chair from 1999-2001, and who currently sits on the Executive Committee, and is chair of the Board Governance Committee; and TPAN, represented by Executive Director Charles Clifton. Next week, Open Hand (now named Vital Bridges), the final agency, followed by analysis and wrap-up.
Question 6. What has been your greatest challenge with regards to race relations in the LGBT community?
Mona Noriega, Lambda: Two things. ... Impact litigations on behalf of a larger community—and though it is usually an individual that represents the issue, we do not provide immediate legal services to everyone who comes to us. The cases we do litigate, and the policy and education work we take on, has a more long-term and enduring effect. We have a bilingual, Spanish and English Help Desk to provide resources to callers free of charge, but we take very few cases, and that is very hard [for our callers] to understand, especially when you are in a crisis.
The second is the fact that the legal system is often viewed as only serving people who can access and pay for the services of an attorney. So people without money don't feel the system is there for them and don't avail themselves or demand what is rightfully their's, such as our right to be recognized in a society that professes equal rights for all. And since income is so linked with race, as well as other issues, our task at Lambda is to make all people, not just people with education and money, but all people, aware of what our rights are, how they work for us, and what to do when we are discriminated against.
Our challenge is to reach communities that might think that Lambda is not there for them, when in fact we are very much there to serve all our communities any way that we can.
Cindy Hyndman, Lambda: And I think especially we are trying to do that through our education and outreach work, and that will feed into our litigation work. Recently the education outreach work has become an equal partner with the legal work in terms of program focus. I think that is the best way to do it because, as Mona explained, as we can outreach to these various communities, then those people become more aware of what their rights are, and can come to Lambda when they need help.
Our Help Desk does provide services to everyone who calls, of some kind, but as she said we don't take very many cases. So people just need to be aware and understand what Lambda has to provide. That way it will also inform the staff of issues that are race-related issues that would impact on our legal work, that are issues we should be addressing on a national basis. So we are going to use the educational and outreach work to feed into the legal work and address those issues as they arise.
Charles Clifton, TPAN: Seven years ago I moved to Chicago—I was in a Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago. To balance the craziness of graduate school, I sought to do some volunteer work here in Chicago, and that's what brought me to to TPAN. At the same time, I became involved with an organization called the Chicago Black Lesbians and Gays. Prior to becoming involved with those two groups, neither organization had worked together on any program—and I just thought it was odd because HIV was an issue for CBLG, and race was an issue that mattered to TPAN.
So my connection to both groups gave them an opportunity to partner together on a number of events. Which they had never even thought that they had in common. I think that that is a challenge that many of the organizations and agencies here in Chicago face—and that is finding common ground to address issues that they may not even know matter to them both, especially in the LGBT community.
And for me personally, when I first set foot here in Chicago, coming into TPAN, I wasn't coming in for support services, but to offer my services, and the same thing with CBLG. So it was almost a matter of trying to educate these two groups that my HIV status shouldn't matter, my race shouldn't matter, it is my ability to help further and help address the challenges that we all face and trying to let these different groups know that we do have issues that we share. That it is important to sit around the table just like we are doing today, to discuss those issues, and find common ground so we can move on and move forward.
Keith Waterbrook, HBHC: My experience, which is relatively short in Chicago, but relatively intense as well; I think our biggest challenge is really to communicate with each other ... have a two-way conversation that we deal with each with sincerity. For example, we often communicate at each other, or through other means, or third parties, and I thought, how could we do that better?
Take a look at the way, for example, we work with the different racial groups as our patients and clients. We treat them with understanding, sympathy, and with confidence. If we treated each other the same way as we treated our patients and clients, we might learn a few lessons about how we might better be able to relate to different members our community. Because I can tell you, the way sometimes we communicate, if we communicated with our patients or clients that way, we'd have no patients and no clients. And I think every other organization at this table would be the same way.
My plea would be that we develop open and sincere communication systems, and if we need examples, then look into our own organizations, how we treat our patients and minorities, how we communicate with them, and use those examples.
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Closing statements
Charles Clifton, TPAN: I'd like to thank [the] organizers of this forum for inviting the agencies to the table to discuss these issues. It is urgently important, given the limited resources all of these community-based organizations face, that we have an opportunity like this to speak with each other, to speak with the public, to communicate the challenges that we are facing, and try to come to a workable solution to break down the barriers along the lines of race, gender, sexuality—and class, as Mona spoke to earlier.
We don't often take time out of our more-than-busy schedules to sit down and talk about these issues. At TPAN, as I'm sure at Howard Brown and Lambda Legal, you are constantly faced with deadlines, shortages of staff, limited resources, and you don't often have the opportunity to sit back and evaluate what your services mean to the communities that you are working with, and how we can improve those and the communications within the agencies themselves.
I think this was a great opportunity to start that conversation, and I hope that there are future opportunities to come back and look at other questions and other issues that we all face.
Keith Waterbrook, HBHC: This was a very big project for [the organizers] to take on, and obviously it is dealing with our entire community and it is dealing with issues that have been in Chicago and in other cities for years and years. I have a lot of respect sitting here, listening to everyone around the table, and we all have very similar values, and we all have similar challenges, and we all feel the need to continue to address these challenges, and to do something. To not only make our community better, but to make the larger community better as well.
My plea would be that we develop open communication with each other, that we have a level of respect for each other, even though we may have different beliefs. But you know something? And I'm sure people in the same group are the same, but you know we are not that far off. We are very close in values, but there are differences, and I think we should respect those differences, and we have to have an understanding of ourselves, and we have to work with each other more closely.
Cindy Hyndman, Lambda: On behalf of Lambda, I'd like to thank [the organizers] and everyone for participating. Just to echo what Charles and Keith have said, I think that one thing I've noticed from this discussion is that there are a lot of challenges facing all of the agencies around issues of race. We at Lambda have a commitment to diversity, and we are really working on it. I think one thing that is helpful about this sort of a forum is for the agencies to be able to talk about how we are providing services to various communities. Because I think sometimes that gets a little bit lost in some of the discussions that are had.
I think that both by the agencies reaching out to the communities and the communities coming to us, we can work together, and it sounds to me like we are all doing that in terms of trying to talk to the communities and hear what it is they need, the services they need and how they would like to have them provided and what their issues are.
We have been doing that at Lambda specifically through our program work with the education and outreach. We've got a big focus on that. It is something that we are very committed to. By letting people know that we are here and we are doing this kind of work, and these are the issues we are trying to address, I think that will help everyone. This forum has been a nice way for us to get our information out to the communities. That we are here, this is what we are doing, and we want to hear from them and have their input into our program work, as well as to our volunteers, staff and board leadership.
Mona Noriega, Lambda: I think this is great. If we don't begin discussing what our differences are, and celebrating and acknowledging and understanding why they are, we have no way of working together. We have many more commonalities than differences, but if we don't acknowledge the differences and the source in the historical context of those differences, we are not going to get beyond them. I'm glad we are doing this. I hope it goes somewhere. I hope there is some ramification, and that it further engages a dialogue that I think is very useful if we want to serve our communities.
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Next week: The start of forum three, the final forum, with Open Hand.
