Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

We are in the midst of several ‘giving’ projects, including supporting our LGBTQ community groups for the holidays. We need gift cards, socks, backpacks, board games, cookies, volunteers, and more. These are important projects.

That being said, #AMPLIFY is also an important project. I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on the unexpected deaths of five LGBTQ community elders this past year, two of whom completed the AMPLIFY Q&A and three of whom did not. I’ll be publishing something soon describing why it is heartbreaking to lose those first person accounts of our history.

For now, I’ll remind you that we need funding to continue on. There are things to print, website work to be done, certified transcriptions to be paid for, gas to buy, volunteers in need of refreshments and supplies, outreach efforts to be done. Then we have to process everything with the power of social science tools to take hundreds of individual qualitative stories and find patterns, trends, common ground and more. That’s the aggregate data that makes this project unique – it won’t be sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere. It will be crunched, compacted, and converted into information to help community building AND sit on a not-so-dusty blog for years to come.

For example, the only thing that has almost near unanimous support among any topic addressed in the Q&A is the fact that we need statewide inclusive nondiscrimination protections in Pennsylvania that cover housing, employment, and public accommodations. That is a shared wisdom, a shared priority. And it is the only point of near unanimity, suggesting hopefully that the breadth of the current contributions covers a lot of ground.

There are more stories to be told and it will take more money. #GivingTuesday is the day when I am supposed to ask you to give money so here I am.

We have options for you.

You can read most of them here.

And you can donate to our new crowdfund. Your donation will be sent to our fiscal sponsor, Persad Center. You’ll receive a receipt through Crowdrise that you can use for your purposes. And you’ll have the choice of using your name or not.

Would you like to help us preserve more stories?

Support The #AMPLIFY LGBTQ Project on Crowdrise