In a first-of-its-kind meeting, The Center hosted an open forum to report on its progress toward meeting the needs of the increasingly diverse GLBT community. Hosted Monday by the Ernest Green Diversity Council (EGDC) at The Center, “Growing with San Diego” showcased The Center’s current client and staff demographics, highlighted past successes and outlined future goals.

“For many people, The Center really is the center of our community. We are the connector of the community,” said Richard Valdez, The Center’s board chair. “We connect people to our services, we connect people to organizations within our LGBT community and outside the community, and we connect people to people. Therefore, it’s really important to have a good grasp of who the people are in the community.”

While the information presented has been available in The Center’s 2005 annual report, Valdez said the forum was an opportunity to open a dialogue with members of the community.

“It’s really an important program for us because it gives us an opportunity to report to you our efforts in responding to a changing and evolving community in San Diego,” Valdez said to the more than 40 people attending the event. “It also is really important to us because it gives us the opportunity to talk to you and answer any questions you might have.”

The Ernest Green Diversity Council is charged with making sure that The Center serves the diverse GLBT community, said Joel Valenzuela, chair of the Ernest Green Diversity Council. “This is our first annual report out, but we want this to be the start of continuous dialogue with the community,” he said.

Delores Jacobs, The Center’s chief executive officer, reviewed the gender and race of four key demographics gathered by the EGDC.

“The EGDC looks at some basic components of diversity within the organization,” Jacobs explained. “One of that is the diversity of our clientele, the customers that we serve. The other aspect is the diversity of our volunteers, the board members and also the diversity of our staff.”

The EGDC compares the statistics of the clients, volunteers, staff and board of directors to San Diego County’s population data. Those statistics, according to Jacobs’ presentation, show that 55 percent of the county population is Caucasian and 51 percent is male.

“We are comparing what we have [at The Center] against the population of San Diego as kind of the gold standard. That’s where we need to be,” Jacobs said. “That’s not to say that we need to exceed it. It is to say that when we are below it, we still are not serving the amount that exists.”

According to the 2005 figures, The Center’s clients are 50 percent Caucasian. The remaining categories are people of color: Latino (27 percent), African-American (10 percent), Asian Pacific Islander (5 percent), Native-American (2 percent) and other/mixed (6 percent). Jacobs said The Center has had a steady increase in serving the communities of color, and now exceeds the county benchmark.

“When we talk about gender, 57 percent of our clients are men, 42 percent are women and 1 percent of our clients are transgender,” Jacobs said.

Using those figures, Jacobs said The Center is not yet serving the benchmark number of women. However, she said, the number of women being served at The Center has made dramatic improvements in the past two years.

Compared to The Center’s client demographics, which are relatively close to the demographics that comprise the residents of San Diego County, the volunteers, staff and board of directors are out of balance with the local population.

For gender, the majority of the volunteers and board of directors are men (both at 64 percent), while the staff has a higher percentage of women (55 percent). For ethnicity, the staff is very close to the county benchmark at 58 percent Caucasian. However, the board and volunteers are 64 percent and 68 percent Caucasian, respectively, both more than 15 percent higher compared to the clients they serve.

“We’re not doing nearly as well with volunteers as we are with clients,” Jacobs said. “Clearly there is more than a little room for improvement here. This is a category that has been targeted for more outreach and more improvement.”

She said that getting more women and people of color on the board of directors are priority categories for the coming year.

In contrast, Jacobs said the struggle for the staff is to fairly represent the male population.

“The staff numbers flip in part because the number of women serving in nonprofit organizations, particularly in social-service ones, can be female-heavy,” she said.

There are currently 17 people on The Center’s board of directors. It employs 57 staff members, and works with more than 430 volunteers, according to statistics in the 2005 annual report. Last year, The Center provided direct services to more than 15,000 community members.

Jacobs explained that several community advisor committees help guide The Center in its efforts to obtain more diversity in its clients as well as the staff, volunteers and board that serves them. Current advisory boards focus on women, the Latino community, the transgender community, youth, seniors and the HIV/AIDS community. This year, Jacobs hopes to add African-American, family and interfaith advisory committees to that list.

The advisory boards “are just one of the mechanisms we use, as well as targeting outreach [and] expanding our outreach with a variety of community organizations,” Jacobs said. “We audit all of our programs for all of this at least once a year, some of them quarterly, to see who is being served and who is doing the serving. Those are some of the mechanisms we are using to try to get better and better.”

“We have to be responsive to the L, the G, the B and the T, and all of the various subgroups within each of them,” Valdez said. “Consequently, we have to understand how San Diego is changing, how it’s growing, how we can be more inclusive to everyone.”

For more detailed statistics from the 2005 annual report, visit www.thecentersd.org or call The Center at (619) 692-2077. To make a comment to The Center and the EGDC regarding diversity at The Center, e-mail AJ Davis, director of public policy, at adavis@thecentersd.org or call (619) 692-2077 ext. 212.