The Community Foundation of Lorain County and LGBTQ+ Lorain County – the northeast Ohio county’s LGBTQ+ advocacy organization – announced a new fund on Wednesday to uplift the area’s queer community.
The fund would support efforts to educate the public and businesses about the LGBTQ+ community, provide social connection through queer-friendly spaces and Pride events, and create opportunities to connect queer people to resources like LGBTQ-friendly healthcare and legal aid, said Cindy Andrews, CEO of the Community Foundation.
LGBTQ+ Lorain County Executive Director Megan Mikolay said this support is especially needed in the wake of federal and state funding cuts and the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.
“These last few years there have been so many setbacks and so many hurdles to try and overcome that it feels like our wins are just not there,” she said. “I’m excited at a time when this particular community has faced a lot of adversity — like a lot of adversity — in a very short period of time, this [fund] will feel like a win for our ability to better serve them.”
It’s also the Community Foundation’s first new affiliate fund in over 20 years, Andrews said, joining the African American Community Fund, Hispanic Fund, Women’s Fund and Youth Fund. After the foundation centered itself around diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in 2020, leaders realized that they were “missing some folks.”
Working with the LGBTQ+ Lorain County — whose executive director’s salary was funded by the Community Foundation in 2017 — felt like a natural partnership, Andrews said. The LGBTQ+ fund came together over the past eight months and is starting off with enough money to seed the development of an advisory board.
Since community foundations don’t have assets like a corporate foundation, Andrews said the advisory board will be tasked with raising a pool of money. Mikolay will join the Community Foundation’s board and help guide the LGBTQ+ fund’s advisory board. Once that advisory board gets together and starts appealing to community leaders, the goal is for money to start to flow towards professional development and grant-making.
“We’ve got the funds to get things started, but how do we continue to support each other in raising those funds?” Andrews said. “We think there’s a lot of planning that we’re interested in working on together.”
The impact of the funds will be seen through not only new grants and opportunities, but also through “visibility and validation” to the LGBTQ+ community, Mikolay said.
“I’m certain that [five years from now] there’ll be plenty of amazing things we can look back through [with] the programming and the dollars that have been reinvested into the community,” she said. “[But] the visibility and the validation for queer people that they’re welcome here and that they are seen and supported is one of the sort of intangible benefits that is sometimes hard to measure.” 🔥
IGNITE ACTION
- Lorain County Pride is Saturday, June 27. To learn more about the event, click here. To learn more about Ohio Pride celebrations, visit The Buckeye Flame’s 2026 Pride Guide by clicking here.
- To learn more about the Community Foundation of Lorain County, click here.
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