Grantee Spotlight

The Southern Arizona Gender Alliance (SAGA) envisions a society where transgender and transsexual people are ensured of their basic rights and can be open, honest, and safe at home, at work, and in the community.

To achieve this goal, SAGA offers support, social, and discussion groups that reflect the various aspects of gender and society. The organizaton, a unit of Wingspan, also provides educational forums and trainings for businesses, service providers, and community members to learn more about the issues facing transgender, transsexual, intersex, and gender-variant people.

SAGA works primarily through volunteer energy. The Alliance Fund has supported SAGA repeatedly over the years. For 2011 SAGA was the recipient of an Alliance Fund award to underwrite a part-time Project Coodinator position.

You can learn more about SAGA at www.sagatucson.org

Open Inn, Inc. has received grants from the Alliance Fund in our annual competitive grant round for the last two years.  The funds were granted in support of programs serving homeless LGBT youth in Arizona, including the establishment of dedicated living space for these kids.  Under guidance from Executive Director Nancy Panico and staff leadership from Ken McKinley and Jason Thorpe, the Open Inn strives to empower youth and their families to experience and develop positive self-worth. 

Open Inn helps 13,000 individuals per year escape homelessness and estrangement from family through outreach, assessment, intervention, case management, shelter, independent living skills, and transitional living programs throughout Southern Arizona.  The Alliance Fund grants to Open Inn specifically targeted support and housing for LGBT kids and young adults in Pima County.  We are proud that Open Inn reports that grants from us helped the organization in “… leveraging these dollars to maintain Federal funding for LGBT youth housing in our community.”

Open Inn provides vital services to LGBT youth and the Alliance Fund is delighted that we can help and that our dollars have helped leverage even greater support for the program.

Learn more at www.openinn.org

VOICES Community Stories Past and Present, Inc., works with youth ages 14 to 21 in afterschool and summer programs that mentor in the documentary arts. Our vision is that all youth have the opportunity to decide what their future look like. Our mission is to provide young people with the safe space, positive relationships and skills training to document real-life stories and the platform to share those stories with the world. Through learning the documentary arts, VOICES youth improve their self-efficacy and critical thinking and literacy skills.

Year after year, VOICES works with youth who, through the responsibility of being in our programs (and in turn, the responsibility of being a published author), are able to change negative behaviors into behaviors that set them up for college, the work world, and being an engaged citizen. We teach that your story is your power. Youth in VOICES' programs are given the freedom to write about and explore all aspects of their world and identities-they tell stories of their culture, families, dreams, struggles, and accomplishments. Funding from the LGBT&S Alliance Fund-which shares our desire to build a more diverse, equitable community-is vital to our continued work and we are so thankful for this partnership.

Learn more at www.voicesinc.org