Dear friends of Prism,
It’s been a stressful year. We hope that you’ve had the time and ability to care for yourself and the people you love.
Prism put its in-person support group gatherings on hold in March. Since then, we’ve continued interacting with over 30 LGBTQ+ teens & preteens through our virtual gatherings. Currently, we provide three weekly gatherings (“Virtual Hangout,” “Virtual Event Day,” and “Prism DnD”) for the teens and one bi-monthly gathering for the preteens. Gatherings are still led by our trained facilitators. The youth express how much they miss meeting in person on a regular basis.
As to when we’ll resume our in-person meetings, the Prism board is paying attention to what the local school systems are doing while deliberating about what’s best for Prism. We’ll update you by email and Facebook when we have more information about when and how our in-person support groups will reconvene.
You Give Us Hope
Because of the pandemic, our two major annual fundraisers have been postponed. This reality comes at a challenging time—in less than a year, Prism has grown by two new programs (Prism Preteens & Prism Families), a new chapter (Prism Fairhope), and twice as many volunteers as we had in our 2018-2019 fiscal year. In other words, our comprehensive workload is increasing exponentially while our estimated fundraising has taken a major hit. It’s an unsustainable equation.
So we launched a fundraiser in May. With your help, we raised $2,000. We couldn’t be more grateful to belong to a community that cares about the work we’re doing.
Prism’s new fiscal year begins next month. We still have a long way to go to make up for the necessary delays of Come Out Mobile and Bent Broadway, but you’ve given us hope that we can. As you celebrate Pride Month, we hope you’ll consider making a contribution to Prism United.
Acknowledgments
Kudos to our friends at Rainbow Mobile for this beautiful mural. The mural was painted by our very own Sarah Fischer, the site director for Prism Fairhope, and Hannah Georgina Legg who came up with the design.
One of the first decisions we ever made at Prism was to use the colors of the Philly Pride flag in our logo, which include black and brown stripes. We wanted to acknowledge that the story and struggle of the LGBTQ+ community isn’t monolithic—there are real differences of lived experience within our community, and those differences matter. How can we adequately care for one another if we don’t know each other’s stories? Prism is a data driven organization, and the data is clear: black folk in our LGBTQ+ family face victimization and its consequences to a more severe degree than white folk. Prism is committed to listening to the stories of black LGBTQ+ youth and growing in a way that is informed by those stories. We believe that the liberation of the LGBTQ+ community isn’t possible until the liberation of the black community is.
Black lives matter.
In solidarity,
Prism United