Stepping Up for Equality

The cochairs of this year’s major gifts committee are board member Dan Gurley and community volunteer Beth Stringfield. The other committee members are board members Ivan Canada, Rod Goins, and Cris Rivera; community volunteers Michael Edwards and Lorraine Johnson; and staff members Kay Flaminio and Ian Palmquist. Our team facilitator is Mickey MacIntyre of realChange Partners, a consulting organization which has helped numerous LGBT rights organizations build their organizational capacity to achieve their dreams.

Initial pledges include two generous leadership pledges of $10,000 each from committee member Michael Edwards, whose gift is in honor of Ed Farthing, along with our good friends Angela Haas and Melrose Edwards of Haas McNeil and Associates, P.A. The committee will be seeking additional major gifts through the end of May.

Equality Council members make gifts of $600 or more per year to make it possible for Equality North Carolina to achieve its ambitious goals. This year alone, our goals include:

• Secure passage of our historic anti-bullying bill with enumerated protections for both sexual orientation and gender identity;

• Hold back an anti-marriage constitutional amendment for the fifth year in a row, keeping North Carolina as the LGBT oasis of the South and saving our activist community millions of dollars for other battles;

• Significantly increase our efforts to end workplace discrimination against LGBT employees statewide;

• Raise $80,000 or more for LGBT and pro-LGBT candidates across the state through Equality NC PAC, making us an increasingly important player on the state’s political stage; and

• Hold our second annual Equality Conference & Gala, this year to be held November 15 and once again hosted at Duke University in Durham.

And those are just our program goals! We are also continuing to strengthen our organizational capacity by securing adequate office space for our growing corps of staff and volunteers (we currently have five people sharing two rooms!), hiring our first full-time community organizer to build our activist base, and making significant progress toward adding staff positions in the critically important areas of policy and communications. All of these goals require dedicated activists and donors to make North Carolina an LGBT-embracing state of which we can all be proud.

Equality North Carolina is already at the forefront in the nationwide state equality movement. The valued members of our Equality Council give us the edge we need to achieve full equality for everyone in our community.

If you’d like to step up for equality by joining the Equality Council or increasing your level of giving within the Equality Council, please feel free to contact Kay Flaminio. She can be reached by calling our office at 919-829-0343 or emailing her at kay@equalitync.org.