NEWS

Regional LGBTQ center in the works

Chris Balusik
Reporter

CHILLICOTHE - New resources to help members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community across a 19-county area should become available in the next couple years if efforts to establish a Southeast Ohio LGBTQ Community Center based out of Athens take root.

"I can't define how excited I am to see this thing coming together," said Mike Straw, chair of the committee working toward opening the center, which would include Ross and Pike counties in its coverage area. "It started as just an idea and it turned very quickly into a thing that has an amazing amount of support, very positive support from everybody we've talked to. I think it's going to be a very exciting thing."

The center is in the early stages of planning, with a core committee and board having been established and with a public information meeting set for 7 p.m. Monday at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens to try to drum up volunteers and donor opportunities.

Much of the first year will be spent establishing a temporary home for the center in Athens, obtaining recognition as an official nonprofit organization and conducting a needs assessment of the LGBTQ communities in the counties it plans to serve to target priorities for programming.

The hope is to have a permanent central location in place sometime in 2018 with a core set of services and programs that can then be expanded across the region.

The idea was born out of efforts of the Ohio University LGBTQ center to extend beyond the campus into the community at large, but it faced limited staffing and resources to make the move. Straw, who works on campus and had used some of the center's services, emailed the center's director asking about the possibility of opening a center to serve Athens and got a positive response.

"We started talking and actually expanded the vision to realize there is a need for the greater Southeast Ohio community to provide that safe space and that area where people can come in and have an advocate and access to resources," he said.

The menu of services the center will eventually offer will be based heavily on what organizers learn through the needs assessment. One likely offering, Straw said, will involve providing a safe physical space where people can "hang out, feel free to be themselves without pressure from anybody."

Advocacy work with schools and communities will be another likely function, as will building a network of resources for members of the LGBTQ community within the counties the center would serve.

"If a trans person needs hormone therapy or if a gay kid in a house is working on coming out or just needs to know how to handle a situation, we can tap them into those resources," he said. "We have a lot of ideas for programs, but the first thing we want to do — because everyone has their own thought about what they need — we want to find out where the real needs are in the community."

While the center may, looking years down the road, consider opening satellite locations in counties it serves if the interest and resources exist to do so, it will still call Athens its permanent home. Athens, Straw noted, is "a safe city" for the LGBTQ community with specific protections built into its laws that create a solid base of operations from which outreach into other counties can be done.

LGBTQ issues were brought to the forefront last summer in Ross County when the Chillicothe City Council began looking at creation of a possible anti-discrimination ordinance that would build sexual orientation and gender identity into the list of protected classes. After a pair of public meetings covering hours of debate, the sample ordinance was tabled. A fresh attempt at figuring out whether a new ordinance is needed or whether provisions of federal law need to be incorporated into existing city law was begun earlier this month.

Counties the center plans on counting within its primary service area are Ross, Pike, Athens, Belmont, Coshocton, Gallia, Guernsey, Hocking, Jackson, Lawrence, Meigs, Monroe, Morgan, Muskingum, Noble, Perry, Scioto, Vinton and Washington. Straw noted that if someone from another county were to need help, the center would do what it can to try and offer that assistance.