SF LGBT Community Center Plans Upgrade, Expansion

The San Francisco LGBT Center works every day to create a home for the community—a vibrant and welcoming place where people, relationships and ideas can flourish. The building is an important resource for so many of us, and is an integral part of the Center’s programs.

The Center’s founding board and donors began dreaming of the building over 20 years ago, and worked hard to design and construct a lasting resource for the LGBT community. Today, it welcomes thousands of visitors each month who come to seek support in finding jobs and housing, access to critical safety net services, and cultural programs.

While our community has achieved progress in many areas, many of the needs identified by the Center’s founders remain the same: each day more LGBT young people arrive in San Francisco and struggle to find jobs, housing and healthcare; transphobia continues to result in high rates of unemployment and violence for transgender individuals; and LGBT people continue to face significant financial, health and social disparities.

While many of the needs of our community as outlined by the Center’s founders remain, the context and tools that all of us have to address these challenges continue to evolve. As a result, the staff and board at the Center have listened to community feedback about the building, and have been working to find opportunities to make the building an even stronger resource. They are currently exploring an opportunity to do some renovation work on the structure that would allow them to better address evolving community needs, including:

• Providing a broader array of on-site resources—such as health and wellness services and access to housing—through expanding partnerships with non-profits that provide services within the Center’s walls
• Addressing the critical lack of space for non-profits, particularly those that provide safety net services for people in the greatest need of support
• Creating warmer and more welcoming public spaces and more social and cultural programs that would help to bring our diverse community together
• 

“We are very excited to explore a project that would create an opportunity to make the Center an even stronger asset for our community and create a resource that will continue to address the needs of the LGBT community for future generations,” Rebecca Rolfe, Executive Director of the Center, told the San Francisco Bay Times.

Rolfe added that she and her team are honored to have received a planning grant from the City that supports a process to evaluate the options available to them in better meeting evolving community needs. They look forward to sharing more information about the plans as those become available.