June 30 will mark the end of a fiscal year that has been the most difficult we have seen in a decade.

As we approach it, I want to express The Center’s deeply felt gratitude – to you. On behalf of the clients we promised to serve, the members of the board of directors, the volunteers and staff, I thank you for your generosity. Your unwavering commitment to building and sustaining our community has enabled the survival of our vital services in an incredibly challenging year.

Last summer we experienced together a time of unbelievable hope and promise. We watched many of our community’s most deeply committed couples finally able to legally wed. The bright hope and tenderness embodied by their love and the bold bravery of their longterm, against-all-odds commitment brought tears to even the most cynical among us.

As summer moved to fall, and the November elections drew closer, our collective anxiety deepened as we realized – some of us for the first time – that those who would deny us equality really do live right next door, and that they really do believe our love is neither worthy nor equal to theirs – an unbelievable vote of “the people” on our love and basic rights.

Then came a night of soul-crushing disbelief as we simultaneously watched a new hope for America rise, while our individual dreams shattered. We were unable to fully celebrate an historic moment in our nation’s history, as one chapter of discrimination ended and another continued. The grief and rage left many inconsolable and threatened our own community’s ability to move forward together.

And then, in a perfect storm, came the economic collapse of the global financial community. Friends, corporations and foundations lost an unbelievable portion of their assets; our neighbors began to lose their homes and their jobs. Traditionally, December is a strong month for charitable contributions, but last year giving plummeted to its lowest level in decades, and the organizations we had all worked so hard to build were deeply threatened.

Here in San Diego it also meant that, after almost a decade of growth and development, The Center was forced to implement unprecedented layoffs, salary and health care benefit cuts, and furloughs in an attempt to preserve the services and programs the community had spent a more than a decade building.

In the midst of this incredibly challenging, devastating year, you made a difference we will all remember gratefully for decades. This is a story that doesn’t end the way some might have predicted. This is instead a story of a community that found a way to protect, sustain and support itself in the midst of that perfect storm.

Your continued support, your words of encouragement on the very darkest days, your offers of help, your willingness to increase your volunteer hours and your incredible ability, even as you yourself had less, to find ways to continue to give have sustained The Center’s programs.

While we are not yet out of the financial woods, because of you we believe we have largely managed to weather the worst of the storm.

This last year has taught us all much about our vulnerabilities – much about the deep resistance to equality that still pervades even “progressive” California, much about the fragility of some of our alliances and the need to broaden, deepen and strengthen all of our coalitions and relationships, and much about our real strengths and the real heart and soul of The Center: you.

Thank you for your continued commitment to ensuring that our seniors, our youth, those living with HIV/AIDS and cancer, our Latino community members and our families have the support and services that they need.

You are the embodiment of the hope we all need, and we are deeply grateful for your compassion, commitment and deep loyalty to community.