Pride Foundation has made some changes to our staffing structure and staff roles so that we can better support LGBTQ+ communities in the Northwest. While they are a big shift for us as a staff team, it won’t have a massive impact on the way supporters, grantees, and other folks in our communities work with us. Today, we’re excited to share these changes with you!
Our Staffing Over the Years—and Where We Are Now
While Pride Foundation has been serving the Northwest region of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington since the time of our founding in 1985, we hired our first staff outside of Washington just over a decade ago.
At the time, there was a lot less formal LGBTQ+-specific work happening, especially in the more rural areas of our region. Our goal at the time, and ever since, has been to work with local leaders on the ground to figure out how best Pride Foundation can be a partner to grow the work and local support networks for LGBTQ+ people and our families. To do that, in 2011 we hired one person in every state outside of Washington to lead Pride Foundation’s work forward in their respective states.
Movements for equity and justice have shifted dramatically since then—and the incredible leadership of our community partner organizations across the region has grown tremendously in the past 10 years. We’ve been working to reflect on and respond to those shifts in order to best serve our communities and our movements into the future.
The past year has been an important opportunity to reset—to re-evaluate the way we are living out our values as an organization, and to re-commit to doing everything we can as an organization and as individuals to achieve our mission and center racial justice in everything we do.
The changes we’ve made and will continue to make to center racial justice in our work require different support and more distributed leadership in order to be sustainable. Additionally, shifts in how we can use technology to engage with one another during the pandemic have allowed us to utilize virtual ways of being in community with one another, no matter where we’re located.
What’s Next
Our commitment to supporting LGBTQ+ communities across the region has not changed. Neither will our continued focus on grantmaking, scholarships, mobilizing resources, and public education. But how our staff team dedicates their time and energy is shifting in order to deepen our work even further.
As the only LGBTQ+ community foundation in the region, our role as a resource mobilizer and distributer continues to be critical. We know that one of the most effective use of our time, energy, and resources is to raise resources and distribute them where they’re needed most to support this growing work happening across the region.
Our staffing structure is shifting so that we are best poised to fill that role, and to support a more unified regional movement. We are building out our Programs team and Community Engagement team with dedicated staff across the region. Staff who previously focused their work in one state will be switching to focus fully on either our programmatic or fundraising work across the region.
We will still have a team spread across the region and local representation, and we will still have the same people—just some of us will be doing different roles than before.
Instead of focusing on one particular state, each of our regional staff people’s time and energy will be more intentionally and strategically focused on one area of Pride Foundation’s work—either programmatic or community engagement.
For example, Steve, our long-time staff person in Boise, will no longer carry “all things Idaho.” Instead, Steve is now a member of the Community Engagement team. He will continue to work with donors, but now gets to dive more deeply into this work with supporters across the 5-state region. He’ll hand off his work and relationships with community partner organizations to our Programs team, who will continue to grow and deepen those relationships. He’s still in Boise (and likely always will be—Steve is truly “the Idaho guy”), but this structure allows for the entire team at Pride Foundation to support the work in Idaho more meaningfully and from a more unified regional perspective.
This new structure allows us to take a fully regional perspective throughout all of our work, including having staff dispersed across our 5-state area.
The focus of these changes has been on our regional staff roles, but we are also making changes to other roles to build out these teams further and to make sure our staff have what they need to deepen their work and thrive as individuals and as a team.
While this sounds like a big shift—and it is for us internally as a staff team—it won’t actually have a massive impact on the way supporters, grantees, and other folks in our communities work with us. In fact, we think it will help deepen and grow our relationships. But it may mean you have a new point of contact on our team.
Our staff team is excited for the new possibilities that these changes are creating. While change always takes time, communication, and patience, we’re approaching this new staffing structure with joy, enthusiasm, and hope for even deeper connections in our communities.
Meet Your New Teams
Grantees, community partners, scholars, and volunteers will work with the folks on our Programs team, no matter where they live in our region.
Programs Team:
Jeremiah J. Allen, Director of Programs and Strategy
Kim Sogge, Senior Program Officer, Grants
Tylene Carnell, Grants Outreach Program Officer
Eden Shore, Program Officer, Scholarships
Craig Williams, Programs Operations Manager
Agaiotupu Viena, TRANSform Culture Program Director
Donors, institutional supporters, and fundholders will work with our Community Engagement team, no matter where they live in our region.
Community Engagement Team:
Alli Auldridge, Director of Community Engagement
Jedidiah Chavez, Director of Community Engagement
Halley Cody, Data and Donor Systems Manager
Elan Robinson, Community Engagement Operations Manager
Steve Martin, Community Engagement Officer
Chance Wilcox, Community Engagement Officer