Hey everyone, and happy Pride! This is Fiona, Partners for Impact’s design consultant, coming to you in the newsletter this month. I’m not usually the one writing in this space, but I asked for the chance to write this month because I’ve been thinking and feeling a lot about Pride, the work I’m a part of with Partners for Impact, the work I feel called to take up in this current fraught political moment, and my place in the much larger continuum of changemakers past and present as we all strive to bend the arc of the universe towards justice.
This past week Stan Holt shared with our marketing team an article he wrote in 1996 about his experiences growing up as a closeted gay man, and eventually coming out and living his truth as an openly gay man in his professional as well as personal life- what he calls being a “professional queer” in the article. You can and should read it here. I was deeply moved reading the article and really experienced that almost overwhelming sense of being part of a community so much bigger and older than my own lived experiences. As a bisexual woman myself, I feel so humbled when I think of how my own lived experience has been made smoother and easier by the work of the queer elders who made space in the world for me to exist authentically before I even arrived here. At the time Stan’s article was published, I was only nine months old! (Sorry, Stan!)
While I relate to all the difficulties that Stan grew up with, they’ve been much smaller and less harmful to me, existing mostly at a remove from myself, something that existed visibly in the wider world but never penetrated the embrace of my community to harm me directly. When I started coming out to trusted adults in my life during high school, I remember being met with concern that I would ‘make life harder for myself’ by being openly queer, but I was never shamed for my attraction to other women, nor made to feel that I was in any way wrong as a person for being queer. I know that I owe that to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and other queer people older than me, whose courage to exist openly and demand their space in this world paved the way for the blissfully anti-climactic experience of my own coming-out story. It’s because my parents, teachers, and community members had gay friends and relatives, because they saw Pride parades in the news, because the queer community as a whole has spent so long advocating for their right to live and love, that I found myself in a place in time where my community was ready and able to accept me—not perfectly gracefully, true, but without causing me harm.
Likewise, I know I am blessed to live in the time after the AIDS crisis, and my queer peers and I have been able to explore, date, break up, hook up, make out, and more, all without the specter of a horrible early death looming over us. I know this, too, is because of the efforts of the queer community that came before us, and the gratitude I feel to my queer elders who endured and survived that time is hard to properly express. Knowing that Stan not only lived through that time as an out gay man, but was actively working to protect and heal his community, makes me incredibly proud that I have the opportunity to work with him now.
The other thing in Stan’s article that really strikes me is how I can see the development of the community-oriented ethos that he brings to Partners for Impact’s work today, and how necessary and relevant it remains to address changemaking work with a community focus. I’ve learned so much about what goes into successfully changing systems since I started working with Partners for Impact in 2019 and have been able to see so clearly how our most successful clients are the ones who embrace that community ethos and lean into real relationships with us, within their own teams, and with the communities they strive to serve. The same dynamic of genuine interpersonal care, with empathy and space for the complications of human life—the calendar mishaps, the childcare emergencies, the days when you’re too burnt out to do one more thing— also exists within our teams at Partners for Impact, and exists expressly because Beth and Stan made that community a priority when they created the company. I can’t imagine ever going back to working for any company that doesn’t center community and humanity like this, because knowing I have that genuine and human support has enabled me to take chances, speak up about the issues that matter to me, to not fear failure because I know I can try again with the full support of my collaborators to iterate until our efforts and our vision are finally aligned.
Let me leave you with this final thought: Pride has been many things over the years, but at its most joyous it is a celebration of a community with space in it for everyone to be their most authentic self. That is the community that we all deserve, and the community that Partners for Impact seeks to foster. It’s a community that can only exist when we all loosen the grip that shame and fear holds over us, when we embrace being imperfect so that we can relax into honesty, and when we give the people around us the opportunity to support us when we stumble so that they know that we will support them in turn.
Proud to be here, proud to be queer, and proud to work with Partners for Impact,
Fiona W. Dunn, Design Consultant