QEJ Pleased to Announce New Strategic Directions, Staff Transitions
QEJ Board: Miriam Yeung 917-306-4404
Media contact: Roberta Sklar, 917.704.6358
QEJ Pleased to Announce New Strategic Directions,
Staff Transitions
Co-founder Amber Hollibaugh and Kenyon Farrow to Co-Direct Organization in coming months, open search for new Executive Director
Queers for Economic Justice is pleased to announce that as of September 1st, 2010, Amber Hollibaugh has joined the staff as its interim Executive Director. She will share this position with Kenyon Farrow, the current Executive Director until he transitions out of the position at year’s end. She will remain the interim Director until a search is complete and a permanent Director is in place.
“We are thrilled to have Amber join the staff at QEJ. As a founding member of this organization, her vision has been critical in articulating and shaping our activism since the beginning of the group.” said Kenyon Farrow. “Amber is recognized throughout LGBT and progressive movements as an uncompromising voice for a new agenda of LGBT activism and organizing, one centered through the priority of race and class at the intersection of sex and gender. Her long history of activism in many social justice movements will serve QEJ well in this period of transition.”
Kenyon added, “I have been honored to work as QEJ’s Executive Director and look forward to my partnership with Amber as I make this transition. For over five years, I have been a part of QEJ, beginning as a volunteer in the Shelter Project. As Executive Director, my mission was to help expand QEJ’s reach as a major voice both locally and nationally in lgbt and progressive politics. Now I look forward to committing more of my time to writing projects to which I am committed, and potentially pursuing a PhD. I believe deeply in the work that QEJ does and hope to stay involved in QEJ in the future.”
Amber Hollibaugh explained, “I am excited to join Kenyon as QEJ’s interim Executive Director. The work that I will be able to do here as a staff member is work I’ve believed in all my life. Helping to move forward an LGBT agenda that actually represents the majority of queer people, most of whom are not wealthy, and are often from communities of color, to have an organization that speaks clearly about the class position of the majority of LGBT people and communities as the framework for its activism, is even more essential in these hard times. I am thrilled to join the staff of the organization.”
Currently QEJ’s work in the NYC shelter system continues to grow. Their welfare organizing project released a groundbreaking report on the lives of low-income LGBT New Yorkers this past June. Nationally, QEJ?s public education and national network project, Building A Queer Left, continues to give tools to LGBT organizers to advance racial and economic justice issues in local communities and at the national level through monthly teleconference calls, publications, and advocacy.
QEJ is continuing to evolve and broaden. We are expanding our shelter and welfare work to look at other vulnerable queer populations’ access to resources and benefits, including LGBT aging work and queer people working in the “informal economy.” We are planning more of a focus on economic justice and capitalism, which will include political education on the impact of globalization, neoliberalism and late capitalism on queer people in the US. QEJ is developing popular education materials to make understanding of the current recession and the economic system under which we live more accessible to a broad range of queer people. QEJ’s voice is critically important to the future of social change work both in New York City and nationally and will continue its unique role in radical, queer, visionary organizing.
