A glorious view of the City of Chicago as seen from the offices of Jenner & Block served as a fitting backdrop for the nonprofit advocacy organization Chicago House and its partners to announce the launch of the Proud2Share at a March 31 event attended by some of the most prolific LGBT activists and advocacy groups in the city alongside philanthropic leaders and a slate of elected leaders.
According to its literature, Proud2Share is an "annual, federated campaign that has a primary goal of creating a new source of pride and unity within the LGBT community. The secondary goal of the campaign is to raise awareness and funding for those living in LGBTQ poverty, thus dispelling the myth widely held about LGBTQ affluence."
One of the campaign's key supporters is the Alphawood Foundation, whose staff took part in an initial planning session three years ago and have remained integral to the formulation of the campaign.
Critical support has been also been provided by a number of nonprofit organizations and corporations including The LGBT Community Fund of the Chicago Community Trust, The Polk Brothers Foundation, Jenner & Block and the nationwide digital marketing agency Razorfish.
"We thought about the issues that are out there that would interest and excite LGBTQ people," Alphawood Executive Director James D. McDonough said. "Youth homelessness, elder care, trans isolation, bullying, immigration and asylum issues, disproportionate incarceration—the list goes on. The common thread is LGBTQ poverty. The assimilation of LGBTQ people into the mainstream is one thing, but it won't make much of a difference if you're poor."
Congressman Mike Quigley ( D-IL ) was recognized for the role he has played in helping to create visibility for those LGBTQ people who are suffering from poverty.
"Every once in a while, it's OK to take a bow," Quigley said. "It's great to have legislative victories. It matters. But the world changes so quickly around us and, at the same time, the scenery is changing behind us. We're reminded that any of these victories can be taken back. The tenacity of hatred that I have watched since 1981 just percolates up in so many different forms."
Quigley had a message for legislators in states like North Carolina and Mississippi which have enacted or are on the verge of enacting horrific anti-LGBT laws.
"When Lincoln spoke of the Constitution, he always insisted that you read it alongside the Declaration of Independence—that the two were intertwined," he said. "Holding truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and, among those, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
"All those rights don't matter if that pursuit is blocked," Quigley added. "No one is guaranteed anything but you have to have those same rights."
Quigley quoted documented figures including those reached by The National Transgender Discrimination Survey which states that transgender people are four times as likely to have a household income of under $10,000 and twice as likely to be unemployed.
He noted that an estimated 1.6 million youth experience homeless each year and up to 40 percent of them are LGBTQ. African American same-sex couples are three times more likely to live in poverty than white same-sex couples. More than one in four LGBTQ individuals experienced a time in the last year when they did not have enough money to look after themselves or their families. More than 43 percent of LGBTQ adults live in poverty.
The congressman credited Chicago House CEO Stan Sloan for initially raising awareness of those numbers to the LGBTQ caucus which Quigley co-chairs. That awareness began to spread through Capitol Hill.
"For the first time, there were discussions and hearings on these particular issues in the halls of Congress," he said. "Those initial discussions have made a big difference."
More2Share is designed to do the same thing by elevating that awareness on a nationwide level.
The fight will begin with LGBTQ support.
Proud2Share program co-managers Ayanna Armstrong and Anthony DiFiore stated that 95 percent of LGBTQ people do not donate to LGBTQ causes.
"That is a problem, not only in Chicago but nationwide," Armstrong said. "There are also factors in Chicago that make it the right place to start changing that trend."
"We have all these amazing networks in place to help and motivate and reach our people," DiFiore noted. "There really is a chance that we can change the poverty in our community."
The mechanics of the campaign as designed by Razorfish include both digital and physical elements. There will be a social media hashtag and logos, along with opportunities for people to literally walk in the shoes of poverty-stricken LGBTQ individuals.
The In Their Shoes initiative will report the real stories of LGBTQ people living in or trying to overcome poverty. The shoes they wear will be photographed across the city in places they have had to live and sleep. Donors will be asked to swap-out one of their own shoelaces for those used by an impoverished LGBTQ person. The message will be "Swap a lace. Change a life."
"We've all heard the phrase that 'if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach a person to fish, you feed them for life,'" Sloan said. "We don't want to feed them for a day. We don't want to feed them for life. That's not their biggest problem right now. Their biggest problem is that, even after they learn how to fish, they're not given access to clean waters where fish actually live. The campaign's goal is to break down the divisions within our community that keep people from that chance to get to clean waters."
For more information about Chicago House, visit www.chicagohouse.org .
For more information about Proud2Share, visit www.facebook.com/Proud2Share .
