2020 In Reflection
Reflecting on 2020, I would like to thank our many donors, partners, and supporters for all that they do in moving the mission of the Lavender Rights Project forward. In response to the call of community organizers in the summer of 2020, following the brutal murder of George Floyd, Lavender Rights Project has expanded our mission and restructured our organization to serve more of the Black community. We have more than doubled the size of our staff, shifted organizational programming, completed an overhaul of our policies and procedures, recruited a new Board of Directors, and restructured our fundraising and development to prepare ourselves to fulfill this call.
Our mission statement:
“Lavender Rights Project (LRP) advances a more just and equitable society by providing low-cost civil legal services and community programming centered in values of social justice for trans and queer low-income people and other marginalized communities.
Through direct representation and community programming, our by-and-for services aim to radically re-imagine the legal landscape for LGBTQ+ people while building community resilience, encouraging self-advocacy, and asserting the rights of marginalized populations.”
In an answer to our mission and vision, LRP leaned into reimagining the legal landscape and building community resilience for TLGBQ2SIA people. It is clear in our mission and in our work that we are not just a legal service organization but a queer/trans & two-spirit service organization. Our legal service work continues and grounds our social justice work, but our priorities have shifted from identifying ourselves by our attorneys and the law to a concern for community resilience and intersectional justice. We have been called to eliminate anti-Blackness in our work, communities, and personal lives. And that is exactly the path our organization is on.
In 2020, Lavender Rights Project’s programming work has shifted dramatically towards the protection of Black life, mostly due to the leadership of the WA Black Trans Task Force. The WA Black Trans Task Force is not a fiscal sponsee of Lavender Rights Project, and is not simply a program of Lavender Rights Project. The WA Black Trans Task Force is the Lavender Rights Project, programming work is not mutually exclusive of the legal work we do for the wider non-Black TLGBQ2SIA community, it is an enhancement of this work. We are one organization. The task force guides the entire organization on the path of building community resilience and protection from violence for all TLGBQ2SIA persons, especially Black Trans Women and Femmes.
Our organization has shifted from a mostly white, queer and trans organization to a Black-led organization composed of a majority black staff. Identity matters, but mere inclusion by numbers will not result in effective change, in order to counteract our history and become a truly Black-led organization we must invest in our Black leadership at Lavender Rights Project and support Black staff in shifting our legal services, programming, operations, and human resources.
We practice law better when we center the elimination of anti-blackness and trans-misogynoir in our work. We fulfill our mission better when we zero in on the need of Black Trans women and femmes who are facing genocide. When we get it right for them, for us, we get it right for the entire TLGBQ2SIA community.
Our work continues in spite of Covid-19. We have experienced changes in terms of funding, programming, and staff capacity. Although we continue to grow as an organization, we are prepared to address reduction of our grant funding. In spite of these reductions, we are fully funded in 2021, but we must meet aggressive fundraising targets. Our staff morale is good, though we individually struggle in this difficult moment in history. We continue to meet with clients remotely, we are working hard to have meaningful programming in a digital environment, and the needs of the community grow increasingly as the pandemic continues; especially the needs of BIPOC Trans and Trans non-binary persons.
Immediately before the spread of Covid-19, and in an effort to reach more BIPOC clients, we opened our second office in Tacoma and moved our Seattle office to the Pioneer Collective in Pioneer Square. Our office materials and files sit in boxes awaiting our return to our new office. The pandemic is allowing us time to develop a Pierce and South King County outreach strategy.
Disrupting violence at the intersection of identities is the work, our focus on Black Trans Femmes in programming is simply because this is where intersectional violence is the most obvious. Our work with the wider community in family law, identity documents, civil rights, employment protection, know-your-rights workshops, and etc. are all intended to disrupt intersectional violence for all queer, trans, and trans/nonbinary persons. This work is needed, especially now, and we are well positioned to meet the challenges of these times.
-Jaelynn P. Scott,
M.Div., Executive Director