Petrelis Files

Tides Center Pisses Away
Cleve-Apalooza Funds on GETEQUAL

As with the political outcomes of the ego-indulging march on DC last October called for by Cleve Jone, which were nil, very little of lasting value will come out of the profit of the event.

The fiscal sponsor of Cleve-Apalooza, the San Francisco-based Tides Center, today announced the names of the three orgs that will receive a portion of the profit. In keeping with the lack of sunshine and community engagement leading up to the DC march, the Tide Center held no open forums to allow for public input into who would get the leftover funds and how they would be used.

The first recipient will send gay youth to the worthless and movement neutering annual Creating Change conference put on the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Remember how the leaders of the now-useless Join the Impact went to the conference and then grassrootsy street protest org devolved into a tame and lame ego-trip for the founders? If you've heard of anything good coming from Creating Change, lemme know.

Second to receive funds are the robustly-compensated co-directors of the GETEQUAL org, which is still struggling for relevancy and a constituency.

The third org getting some funding is an org I've never heard of till tonight, Face Value. It's another niche gay org, with a board of advisers comprised of academics, and the director, was the Northern California campaign manager for the No on 8 effort. Can we talk about that massive failure, which didn't cause a single gay leader to lose his or her job?

Check out the vague purpose of the org:  It is focused on deconstructing the discrimination that LGBT individuals face as roadblocks to equality in their daily lives.

I again wish to thank local gay attorney Stephen Zollman for performing an admirable job of holding the fiscal sponsor of Cleve-Apalooza to account, a year after the march. If only we could clone Zollman and get them work at gay and straight press or blogs, because we desperately more such folks serving as watchdogs.

Here are excerpts of the note Roseanne Stead of the Tides Center shared with Zollman today. BTW, Stead never says how much money is being distributed. Just one piece of non-transparency. She can be reached via: rstead/at/tides/dot/org:

Through a fair and inclusive process, we decided to distribute the funding that was left in the Equality Across America project fund at Tides Center to the following three organizations supporting youth leadership, advocacy, and research and education.

COLIN HIGGINS COURAGE AWARDS
Unlike scholarship opportunities available to youth based on grade point averages or written essays, Colin Higgins Foundation looks to communities across the country to nominate [gay youth ...] Youth Courage Award recipients receive a grant of $10,000 and will be honored at The Trevor Project Gala in New York City. [...] The awardees will also receive a scholarship to attend the National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change presented by the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce [sic] in February.

GET EQUAL
GetEqual works to empower the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community and allies to take bold action [...] To that end, GetEqual will inspire and equip the LGBTQ community and allies to fight back against discrimination [...]

FACE VALUE
Because focusing solely on winning political rights has not led to social equality for LGBT people, the mission of the Face Value Campaign is to eliminate the persistent social stigma against LGBT children and adults by applying thoughtful research methods, traditional and new campaign tools, and collaborative organizing techniques to a deliberate public education campaign that takes place outside the narrow timelines of electoral cycles and the narrow focus of specific LGBT issues.