2022 Capital Pride Center Updates Let's face it, these last few years have brought a lot of lemons. From figuring out how to navigate supporting the LGBTQ+ community through aa international pandemic, to having to cancel our PRIDE festival two years in a row- we've done a lot of reflection on how we can grow with the times. So, here's how we're turning these lemons into lemonade.
Executive Director Announcement The Capital Pride Center envisions a Capital region that is truly LGBTQ+ affirming, for all LGBTQ+ folks, including those who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, regardless of ability status or educational level, despite socioeconomic upbringing or documentation status, or the many other barriers people face because of who they are. By prioritizing education and community partnerships, we strengthen the Capital region's understanding of the LGBTQ+ experience, and the needs of our community because of it. As we move toward this exciting first Pride season in three years, we look forward to your partnership to help it grow; we need you to spread the word, organize a group to march in the parade, join the 5K or one of the many performances, collect a donation through your job to give to the Pride Center, and anything else that reminds the community we need your help in order to support all the LGBTQ+ folks of this region, and the allies, parents, kids, teachers, doctors, cousins, pastors, and many others who love and support them! - Nathaniel Gray
Letter from Board President, John Daniels WOW and Welcome to 2022! We can still say that in March, I believe. I want to start with a BIG THANK YOU. A Thank You to all of you in our community for remaining there for the Pride Center. A BIG Thank You to our donors and supporters that helped to keep the Center running throughout the heights of the pandemic. A Thank You to our amazing staff and volunteers who elevated their game to keep support services for our community going at a most critical time. A Thank You to our corporate partners, many of which are locally or regionally owned businesses. You all helped us keep the doors open and even assisted our team to pull off some amazing events in the last year. Those events provided the funding fuel to ensure our core support and mental health programs were available to our LGBTQ+ community. More to come! Let’s roll the clock back to March of 2020, when the state of emergency and shut down took effect. Tipping everyone on edge. We all thought that in a few weeks this thing would pass, then after a few more weeks, it kept going. The Pride Center like many notfor-profits was in a meltdown phase. The events and other sources of income we relied on were stopped. The services we needed to offer were ceased. We have staff, we have a building and expenses. We, like many organizations had to make difficult decisions to help us through the uncertain times, we needed to pivot. We cut costs dramatically, including our top leadership role, the Executive Director. We decided to have the Board Volunteer leadership operate the organization. Sounds easy on the surface, then, as they say, peel back the onion. The Pride Center operated on a virtual basis continuing to offer two critical components of our mission. Free Mental Health Counseling and support groups via online meetings. Our core base staff and volunteers helped us keep these services available for our community. As we all know our LGBTQ+ community was hit especially hard on many levels during the height of the pandemic. At this time, we also needed to identify some creative fundraising opportunities. We had just held a reduced 50th Anniversary Gala at the Jericho, not the glorious 50th-anniversary event we had hoped and envisioned for. But in Partnership with the NYS Museum, we completed a 50-year history video and amazing informational displays. Please check it out on our YouTube channel. We also identified some opportunities to have smaller events following the then public health protocols, in conjunction with online streaming events. Like many other organizations, it was time to get creative to be sure we had revenues to maintain the baseline support services and keep the building under basic repair and operations. Our amazing volunteers and staff again came to the rescue. In addition to offering our baseline services, we held smaller fundraising events. For Pride in 2021 after many start and stop, changes and postponements we held a reduced Pride Block party closing off Central Avenue, and we also held our largest 5k run where we added family and walk options. These smaller events helped to keep us moving forward through those trying times. As we started to see some light emerging out of the pandemic, we started our hunt for a new Executive Director. After some months we were able to identify an individual that has an amazing passion and love for the LGBTQ+ community and has ambitions that are refreshing. Nathaniel Gray came to us from connections made via Pride. As the NYS Governor’s office Pride Liaison across the state and then an employee of NYS OCFS, he created programs and policy around LGBTQ adoption. More on Nathaniel is found in the press release on our website. In his first weeks Nathaniel came out like a race car, tackling historical communication challenges, relationship challenges with the Pride Center and other parts of our community while also building upon the services and programs in place. And now here we are starting up Pride 2022. Yes, PRIDE 2022 is happening with many events and activities planned and the BIG festival
and Parade on June 12. Mark your calendars. We are also planning events in surrounding communities as well as our 5k run and family walk. be sure to visit www.518capitalpride.com for all the pride event(s) information. To meet Nathaniel, connect on our center Facebook pages, give us a call at the Pride Center, or stop in, and say hello. Additionally, we are planning a Meet the Executive Director event Thursday, March 31 at the Franklin Terrace in Troy. More will be forthcoming on this event. What does 2022 and beyond look like? You all will help shape that. We plan to hold a community informational and workshop session in the coming months to listen to you. Those constructive conversations will help us shape the programs and services we will be offering as we emerge from this post-pandemic time. Much has changed and we need to be certain we are addressing as much as we can. We are looking to restart our connection to our long-time supporters, those of many years ago and those of more recent times. Also, increase partnering with other LGBTQ-focused Not-For-Profits. We will be reaching out to rebuild those conversations and ties. We cannot lose sight of the building blocks that helped to create the Center while we are looking ahead to what the new Pride Center will become. We are seeking board and volunteers. Please take a moment to consider helping. Your knowledge and support will help to create a better Pride Center for everyone and help to guide us forward. We look for financial support. Please consider joining our Friends in Pride or Partner in Pride (see the giving section of our website). If you were a member and the Partner in Pride or friend in Pride donations stopped, please go to the website, complete a new form and update us with your information. We updated our financial system to the cloud and unfortunately, that broke the integration of our donor system. We still need you and your support. Our community needs you. This is our first newsletter since late 2019 when the pandemic hit. It is the first of many methods we use to keep everyone updated. We urge you to check out our Facebook pages and Website(s) for information on the center, of our programs and services and of course for Pride season. Our plan is to have two other newsletters available in 2022. The center has an open-door policy, please stop by and see what’s new. Meet our amazing staff. Come meet people at an event like the Business Mixers, these will be starting up again early this year. I sincerely hope we will be blessed with your support which will enable us to grow our programs and services and reshape the Pride Center's path going forward. Sincerely,
John Daniels John Daniels Board President
Let’s meet Nathaniel the Pride Center’s new Executive Director! Join us to celebrate and mingle When: Thursday March 31, 2022, 6pm Where: Franklin Terrace Ball Room 126 Campbell Ave, Troy Let’s meet Nathaniel the Pride Center’s new Executive Director. Come join us for an enjoyable evening of great food and cocktails, get to know Nathaniel a bit and hear from him on the Pride Center 2022 plans. $50 per person Hors d'oeuvres, Cash Bar, Music, raffle giveaways
Click Here to Register for this Event I was recently asked what my successes and challenges have been as the mental health provider at the Pride Center; my response was to reflect on the successes of individuals I work with on their journey to mental wellness and on the challenges we face in providing mental health services to everyone who needs them – which in a perfect world, would mean not having a wait list. Since bringing back free mental health programming to the Pride Center in 2018, over 100 individuals have sought our services. This number not only reflects the ongoing need of LGBTQ+ individuals and families to access affirming quality mental health services, but also the severe lack of such services in a community that is clearly in need of support. This need has only grown as we have navigated the COVID crisis. As a License Master Social Worker and an openly gay, gender nonconforming individual, I strive to challenge other mental health providers to work toward cultural humility and practice affirming mental health services; encouraging those to seek continued education and training opportunities, as well as to engage in affirming supervision and consultation. In order to remove the barriers to this critical care, all mental health providers need to recognize that LGBTQ+ individuals of all shapes and sizes, walks of life, and various backgrounds seek mental health care; and in order to provide this affirming care, all mental health providers need to seek out ongoing education and training. In addition to witnessing the mental health journey of the individuals I work with, I am also rewarded by providing education and training to local community members. As the Director of Operations and Programs at the Pride Center, one of my multiple hats is to provide LGBTQ+-inclusive trainings to providers, especially those in other helping professions, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, and anyone else who works with the community. Through this, I am able to be an active advocate for the LGBTQ+ communities and give back the visibility and support that has so freely been given by others before me. Entering my graduate program to gain my Masters of Social Work, I would have only dreamt of working with the LGBTQ+ communities as a profession. Today, I can proudly say I work for the Pride Center of the Capital Region and am honored to continue my work with LGBTQ+ individuals, families, friends, and allies. If you are interested in learning more about the Pride Center’s training opportunities, please reach out to me a jmaleywheeler@capitalpridecenter.org.
I am Paris Palmer. I am 18-years-old; I'm a junior at Albany High School and bi-sexual. You are probably wondering- how was it coming out to people? When did I do this? How did my friends and family react? Well, for starters, I found out that I was attracted to girls in the 6th grade, but I constantly told myself that it was just a phase. I could not see myself dating a girl. I had that mindset because my father, who was against people of the same sex dating, put that into my head. He only wanted to see me with a boy- and he did not even want to see that at my age- so you could imagine how hard it was coming out to him. My relationship with my dad was not the best. I feel like he dislikes me sometimes, and he thought that I was not living up to HIS potential or his standards. I do not know why he wanted me to be so perfect. I felt like your average teenager- a B-average student who loves running track and being myself. I was also scared to tell my mother, but I felt like I had to because I lived with her and shared an incredibly close bond. She had just started working at the Pride Center of the Capital Region at the time, so she had gotten a better understanding of what it meant to be bi-sexual, and she completely understood where I was coming from and how I was feeling. She didn't stop me from being myself, and she even introduced me to the Youth Pride groups that they had at her job, which helped me feel more comfortable with myself. I felt stuck in the middle of two worlds and two decisions: dating girls or boys. You are probably thinking: "Why not just become bisexual?" Well, to answer your question, I did not know about being Bi at the age- it was either one or the other, in my head at least. My 9th-grade year was when I started attending Albany Leadership for Girls, which, as you can tell by the name, is an all-girls school. That alone really made up my mind with my preference for dating. That is when I started dating a girl. We will call her "A" for now to respect her privacy, but this girl was amazing. She was funny and different, and pretty. I felt like I could be more open than I could be with any boy. We dated for a good three months. Then January of 2019 came around, and we went through some rough times in our relationship- just like any regular couple. Long story short, we got into a flawed argument, and soon after, we broke up. Now that I look back, I think that things could have gone very differently. I do not believe I was as mature then as I am now. I take responsibility for the things that I said in our relationship. I stopped dating for a while and started finding boys more attractive again. Me and "A" stopped speaking for a time, but we recently started connecting again, and it has been clear we missed each other, and we have both matured. We have been able to develop a friendship. Now I am 18, getting ready to graduate high school, and taking classes in the nursing field. To this day, I have NO regrets about coming out to those I love or expressing myself for who I truly am.
Hi, I’m Valerie (she/they)! I’m currently a graduate student at the University at Albany, School of Social Welfare and I have a Bachelor's degree in Human Services from Cazenovia College. I’m passionate about working with LGBTQIA+ adults, adolescents, and children. I’m also dedicated to working with individuals, families, and communities that have experienced or are experiencing crisis and trauma. It’s such a passion that I’ve been volunteering with Albany County Crime Victim & Sexual Violence Center (CVSVC) for about six years now. When I’m not going to school, interning, and volunteering I like spending my spare time reading, crafting, watching horror movies, and hiking. Hello! I’m Laurie DeJong Zuverink (she/they) – an MSW/PhD intern from the School of Social Welfare at UAlbany. I moved to Albany in August, 2020 from Grand Rapids, MI to pursue my studies and be a voice for marginalized communities. For several years I worked as a counselor, mentor, educator and advocate with underserved and under-resourced urban families in Grand Rapids. It is a privilege to be here in Albany working as part of the Capital Pride Center team serving with the LGBTQ+ community through counseling services, advocacy efforts, and educational events. I am looking forward to experiencing Capital Pride for the first time!
Keep an eye out for Yoga Classes coming soon! These classes will be provided in person, as well as streamed virtually, and will focus on serving members of the LGBTQ+ community, all body types and all levels. Kristi Plunket will be providing these classes as our resident volunteer instructor, and has generously raised nearly $2,000 to cover costs for equipment and space renovation. We can’t wait to find center and balance after these very destabilizing couple of years.
The Pride Center of the Capital Region is excited to announce the return of one of the Capital Region's largest events, the Capital PRIDE Parade and Festival and a rejuvenated Capital Pride 2022! After two long years of unimaginable consequences, stress and uncertainty, we are all anxious to come together and celebrate once again! Capital PRIDE 2022, scheduled this year from Wednesday June 1st with our Flag Raising and Kick Off event, right through the return of the Capital PRIDE Parade & Festival on Sunday June 12, 2022 from Noon to 5pm in Albany's Historic Washington Park. At Capital Pride 2022, not only we will celebrate our accomplishments, we will continue to give voice to inequality, inequity, injustice and inspire positive change for all. We will work together to support and expand the critical programs and services the Pride Center of the Capital Region provides to those most in need and work together towards our mutual goal of a greater future for everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community and beyond!
Capital PRIDE 2022 - Show us Your PRIDE! Click here to Register your group or organization! Please join us in 2022 by marching in the Capital PRIDE Parade, Advertising your business in the Pride Guide, becoming a Festival Vendor, a Corporate Sponsor or enjoying the day at the Capital PRIDE Festival!
REGULAR PROGRAMING Check out our website for virtual links to join groups over zoom
MEN’S PRIDE (MSM ages 18+) Mondays, 7:00-8:00 pm TRANS PRIDE (ages 18+) Tuesdays, 6:00-8:00 pm WOMEN’S PRIDE (WSW ages 18+) Wednesdays, 6:00-8:00 pm Youth Group (ages 12-18) Fridays, 4:00-8:00pm Albany Queer Reads (ages 18+) Second and fourth Sundays 2:00-4:00pm
FOLLOW US Questions? Contact us today (518)
462-6138