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Christopher Kaufman
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by
Mark Melchior
BURLINGTON
- On August 4, Christopher Kaufman left his position as founding Executive
Director of the R.U.12? Community Center after four years in that role.
During his tenure, Christopher oversaw a dramatic expansion of the center
in serving Chittenden County’s LGBT community, and in its statewide
advocacy on behalf of Vermont’s “queer” community.
This fall, R.U.1.2? will merge with
SafeSpace, and will become more closely affi liated with Equality Vermont,
a political lobby organization focusing on LGBT issues.
Shortly before he left, I sat down
with Christopher to discuss his role in R.U.1.2?’s development,
the challenges of queer community organizing and fundraising, and his
own personal journey through it all. Here are excerpts from that interview.
Mark: Give us a sense for how far R.U.1.2? has come since you were hired
as the founding Executive Director, by telling us some of your earliest
memories of the organization?
Christopher: As I think back on those early days, I’m really struck
by how genuinely grassroots it was, and how much passion we felt in creating
something new and exciting. It really pulled people into the queer movement
who had never been involved before. These were not the elders of our movement
who led the charge. It was younger people I’m thinking of [names]
who have since become elder statespeople of the next generation and involved
widely in the queer movement.
And I remember the enormous
amount of resistance, too, that came from within the community. I heard
many times, “this isn’t something people want,” “you’ll
never be able to raise the money,” etc. And we proved them wrong.
Mark: What did you say to people then - and what do you say today - when
you hear, “I don’t think we need a community center. I feel
very integrated into my community.”?
Christopher: I say the same thing now that I said back then: “The
people who need the community center are the people who work on it.”
The people who created R.U.1.2? created it for themselves because they
felt something was missing.
I think it’s probably true that
many people may not need the services that we offer. They may have good
friends and a supportive family network.
There are many people in our
community who don’t have those same resources available to them...
maybe they are just coming out and don’t have the supportive friend
and family network in place, maybe they have less disposable income for
socializing.
Mark: Looking back, what were two or three decisive events that brought
the community center to where it is today?
Christopher: I think the first would have to be the Gill Foundation grant
that we got in 2000. It came after a very diffi cult year for several
of our board members who had done a lot of work and were struggling to
see how to keep things going. The grant was a wonderful validation for
the work that had been done to that point, and more than anything, it
said we value rural communities, which was important for all of us to
hear at that time.
I think the next big watershed
moment was when we were able to develop our relationship with the Department
of Health and were able to demonstrate to them that yes, we are able to
doing public health work in the queer community.
That relationship has been built up
over time, with small grants here and there. We were commissioned to create
a guidebook for health care providers around LGBT issues, for instance.
This has led to us doing a full-fledged health program here, which involves
HIV prevention, tobacco cessation programming, mental health screening
and providing assistance to health care providers in LGBT friendly care.
The Health Department work was a substantial step in getting us to the
point of developing our infrastructure and moving into our own building.
The third “moment” I would pick
is the Dialogue Project. [The Dialogue Project brought together artists
and longtime activists and elders in the LGBT community to tell their
stories in new forms such as music, poetry and painting. For a long time
we were seen as the new kids on the block and that wasn’t, frankly,
always seen as a good thing. We needed to do a lot of relationship-building
with people who were not us, a younger group of activists and organizers,
and the Dialogue Project helped R.U.1.2? build networks and bridges to
other groups in the community (...).
We had strong statewide coverage in
the media which was also important for us as we began to organize around
the gender identity bill which was the fi rst LGBT specific legislation
passed in Vermont since the civil union legislation.
Mark: With these strides in the development of the Center, have you seen
a corresponding response in terms of support from LGBT identi- fied donors?
Christopher: I think one of the big challenges in the coming years for
the Center is developing a strong base of individual support for the Center’s
activities. Start-up funding is easier to get than funding which sustains
over the long term. Foundations want to see sustainability in the organizations
they fund, and the best way to show that is through community support.
Mark Melchior of Guilford, VT is the departing Chairman of the Board
at the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont. You can reach him at marmel@sover.net