About Us
Queer Humboldt is grateful to the Wiyot, Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk and neighboring tribes for their leadership, stewardship and many cultural contributions, both historical and present day. We affirm Native sovereignty. We pledge 1% of our annual budget to the Wiyot Tribe through the honor tax program.
Queer Humboldt is a community center for Queer people, including those with multiple marginalized identities, such as Queer people who are young/old, Jewish, Muslim, living with disabilities, Black, Indigenous, Latinx/Latine, Asian, and/or Pacific Islander. We respect the dignity of all our relatives and are, therefore, against systems that don't, such as those that are white-supremacist, settler-colonialist (the practice of destroying people/nations in order to replace them), ableist, sexist, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, fat-phobic, anti-islamic, anti-semitic, ecologically exploitative, and ageist. While there are those who seek to make caring for one another and our planet politicized, respecting our natural world, valuing diversity/equity/inclusion, and being intolerant of intolerance are not radical political stances; they are a foundation for being kind and respectful community members who honor the dignity of all people. Queer people exist in all communities therefore Queer liberation will never be complete without our collective liberation from all forms of body terrorism.
At Queer Humboldt, we believe decolonizing heteronormative ideals of love/family/sexuality is necessary for the health and restoration of our world.
Intersectionality
Queer Humboldt believes in the importance of cross-movement solidarity, and aims to follow the 10 Principles of Disability Justice.
Learn more here
Why 2S/LGBTQIA+ instead of LGBTQIA2S+?
In short, because Two-Spirit people were here first and this is a way that we honor First Nations.
Here is an article on this topic:
https://twospiritjournal.com/?p=1054
Why Queer?
From the November 2003 Multicultural Queer Studies Minor Coming Out Party at Humboldt State University, by Eric Rofes:
Why “queer”? For many this term is an epithet, an insult, a threat. For many, the word has been reclaimed, much like the pink triangle, which came from the Holocaust but now is deployed and displayed as a symbol of gay and lesbian pride and activism. The insult behind the word “queer” is to say that someone is not normal. In reclaiming “queer,” activists and academics declare that there is value in challenging the norm. For many the word is more inclusive, more plural, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other categories and refusals of categories. For many the word is more politicized, more radical, than the other options.
Our Collaborative Leadership Model
Queer Humboldt's collaborative leadership model is inspired by the structure designed by Cooperation Humboldt for building solidarity economies.
The system involves three leadership bodies that each bring their own unique skills, experiences, and prospectives to program visioning, assessment and evolution.
Examples of one-off interactions are: people who attend a training with us, people who interact when we are tabling or in the community, people who reach out with a question, and people who comment on our social media.
Examples of ongoing interactions are: people who work with us on an ongoing project, clients of our mental health clinic, schools we are contracted with, and people we frequently collaborate with.
The Board of Directors is in charge of fiscal management.
The Staff Collective includes ongoing employees.
The Community Advisory Council is a group of esteemed community partners and elders who are vested in this work as it interconnects with social justice work locally and beyond. This group is still in the formation stages and is the final aspect of the system to be implemented.
Internal Organizational Structure:
For our internal operations, we use the metaphor of a plant: our office team is the Mulch, managing resources and nourishment for the organism as a whole. The Orange is our clinical lead. The Apple is our education lead. The Flowers are all the wonderful staff who are out there doing the work, our clinicians, interns, trainers, youth leaders, etc. This is how we conceptualize our organizational structure.
