Accessing Equality California and Questions About Any New Campaign

Equality California Executive Director Roland Palencia (Photo by Rex Wockner

Accessing Equality California

(Note: I wrote this piece for the current issue of Frontiers In LA, from which this is cross-posted. I have added a list of questions at the end that I was unable to ask EQCA Executive Director Roland Palencia because we ran out of time and the phone connection required that I ask for clarification as we went along. The interview was conducted on deadline late Thursday afternoon, July 21, before the opponents of SB 48, the California FAIR Act, were given the OK to start collecting signatures for their referendum to overturn the new law. STOPSB48 needs to collect 504,760 valid signatures by Oct. 12, 2011 in order to qualify for the June 2012 ballot. – KO)

Much of the LGBT nation was shocked on Dec. 3, 2010, by the announcement that Equality California Executive Director Geoff Kors would be stepping  down on March 31, 2011. Over the nine years Kors served at the helm of EQCA, the LGBT movement in California had gone from tolerating horrific anti-gay sentiments on the floor of the state Legislature in 2002 to tolerating only full equality from all candidates for office starting in 2006.

“We legislators would like you to believe that we’re so clever, we come up with all these great ideas and get all this great work done. Geoff—in many cases single-handedly—conceives of these ideas and brings them to us, and working together makes it happen,” openly gay State Sen. Mark Leno said at an EQCA gala in San Francisco.

Kors offered to help with the transition and Kors’ second in command, Jim Carroll, agreed to serve as interim executive director until a new ED was selected by the board.

There was some internal organizational consternation on how the straight search committee was selected, how they sought input from the community, who would make the final selection and based on what criteria. But in the end the selection boiled down to four candidates, with Carroll and health care advocate Roland Palenica initially pulling neck and neck until Palencia emerged on May 15 as the board’s choice to run the organization.

The immediate reaction was wide-ranging, from shock—many political donors and national leaders did not know Palencia and questioned his legislative, strategic and fundraising experience—to elation from many California leaders, especially among grassroots people of color who had blasted Kors as the ‘face’ of the No on Prop. 8 campaign and for being the quintessential symbol of A-Gay, Inc. Palencia is well-known among LGBT activists in Los Angeles for his years as a grassroots advocate—even appearing on the cover of Frontiers in 1984.

Palencia, who officially assumed the job on July 5, advocates a shift in the EQCA’s focus from legislation towards being more of a social justice organization, a move with which the board apparently concurs.

“Every executive director brings their own strengths and approach to the organization,” EQCA Board Co-Chair Clarissa Filgioun told Frontiers via email. “Roland brings a set of experiences that are unique to him and perspective from outside of the political realm. His experience as a person of color and an immigrant will likely inform the organization in a new way. Overall, all of these qualities will be put to work to continue to build on the great work we’ve already done that our members care about—strong legislation, public education, electing fair-minded candidates, marriage equality and more.”

Ron Buckmire, head of the Jordan/Rustin Coalition, agrees. “Roland shares my values as a progressive activist who truly believes that LGBT equality is just one fabulous thread in the intertwined tapestry of social justice,” Buckmire said on July 21. “He’s only been on the job less than three weeks, but I think he’s doing an excellent job so far and I expect that to continue for years.”

“We have done a lot of work addressing social justice and racial equity issues in both Latino and LGBT communities—work that requires challenging the status quo and thinking beyond our own comfort levels,” said Ari Gutierrez, Co-Chair of the Latino Equality Alliance. “We are confident that having Roland Palencia at the helm of EQCA will make this work less challenging and create opportunities for true collaboration with people-of-color organizations and ultimately create real change in our communities. Already we have seen a big change both in how EQCA relates to our work and how our community relates to EQCA.”

“It is a huge change for a gay Latino to be the head of EQCA and speak candidly about wanting a change in direction,” said longtime lesbian Latino and labor activist Gloria Nieto, who interviewed Palencia for the Latino blog Blabbeando [cross posted on LGBT POV here  and here]  . “I have felt very hopeful about this change—that a different view and a change in direction could benefit all Californians committed to social justice. He would give voice to many who have not felt heard or felt values.”

But Nieto adds, “What I don’t know is the future. Will we continue to be successful in Sacramento with a modified legislative agenda?”

Kors is diplomatic. “I think Roland is off to a strong start as EQCA’s executive director. I have enjoyed getting to know Roland and will continue to be available to him and EQCA in whatever way I can.”

“Roland sought out information about major donors and institutional giving,” Carroll told Frontiers, “and I gave him Top 100 lists, bios and

Former EQCA COO Jim Carroll (photo courtesy Jim Carroll)

ask strategies.”

Carroll, too, is diplomatic about how much Palencia still has to learn. “I think Roland has been on the job for three weeks and has to learn the ins and outs of a complex organization (a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4) organization with an issues PAC and a candidate PAC and a Federal PAC—with a dozen pieces of legislation in play) in a dynamic environment. That would be tough for anyone. So, to date, I think he’s doing fine—and I’m glad to assist in whatever way he needs.

“I think Roland’s social justice vision is a compelling one,” said Carroll, which he says is similar to that of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “I certainly hope that with the battles to pass all of EQCA’s legislation, and whatever ballot initiative and redistricting election challenges are ahead, that Roland can lead the organization to achieve greater justice for all Californians, including LGBT Californians. That seems like a goal we could all sign onto.”

But time is a factor, and the organization is in major transition. Senior strategists with experience—Kors, Carroll and Communications Director Vaishalee Raja—have departed, and Online Community Director Jay Davis may also be leaving. Additionally, longtime board members and major donors Jeff Habor, Gary Soto and Joe Guardarramo, Vice-Chair of the Board, all resigned. Filgioun explained that Habor “would have been termed out this year; Gary Soto told us several months ago that he was resigning, long before Roland was selected; and Joe resigned. … Their resignation emails to me shed no light on the reasons for their decisions.”

But while most of the departures could be anticipated since his selection two months ago, Palencia has not yet put his own people in place. Instead, he says he has been relying on “conversations” with some board members, senior management and coalition partners. Additionally, in a 30-minute interview with Frontiers on July 21, Palencia also noted that he’s been having strategy discussions with Kors “almost every other day.”

But there is a question about who’s making the decisions and what is the organizational chain of command. The model used by EQCA under Kors provided for a strong ED to make decisions—including whether or not to return to the ballot and how to construct a campaign. Filgioun, however, disputes that model, saying, “The board is always critically involved in helping to make strategic decisions about the organization direction, including our involvement in initiatives, and that will continue to be the case.”

Additionally, some in the activist community (including me) were surprised at what appeared to be an initial lack of urgency in EQCA’s action alerts to demand that Gov. Brown sign the FAIR Act.

California State Sen. Mark Leno (Photo by Rex Wockner)

San Francisco-based Sen. Mark Leno didn’t see a problem. “I did not have the impression that Equality California was late to the game,” Leno told Frontiers. “I do know that they got a substantial amount of the communication to the governor’s office. So we had a success.”

Longtime San Diego-based gay journalist Rex Wockner and others, on the other hand, thought EQCA’s initial press release was slow, lackluster and soft. Wockner sprang into action to generate a national outpouring of calls and emails to Gov. Jerry Brown to sign the bill, which he did on July 14.

The next day the Capitol Resource Institute filed papers for a proposed referendum to overturn SB 48, with backing from the ultra-right Traditional Values Coalition. They need to collect 504,760 signatures to qualify for the ballot. Leno was unimpressed.

“I think it’s ill-conceived and will be ill-fated. These folks—the Capitol Resource Institute, among them—are represented by the far-right extreme of the California Republican Party, a Republican Party that represents all of 30 percent of registered California voters. So this is a fringe group hardly speaking for mainstream California,” Leno told Frontiers. “We always have to be vigilant—but we also need to recognize that they are the fringe that they are.”

On July 18, Palencia sent out an “urgent” fundraising email, saying, “We don’t know for sure whether they’ll succeed. But we do know that, as with Proposition 8, opponents of equality are ready to amass a huge financial war chest to misrepresent the law, spread more lies about LGBT people and turn back the clock on equality. To win, we’ll have to match them dollar for dollar and educate the public about the importance of the FAIR Education Act. … We can’t take a ‘wait and see’ approach. If our opponents do qualify for the ballot, we must prepare now to fight back—and win in the public arena.”

The email asked for money but offered no campaign coffer into which the money would go. Instead, Palencia said, “Over the coming weeks, together with our allies and with your input, we’ll begin to put a strategy in place to protect the FAIR Education Act.”

For some, such as Jim Carroll, this provides an opportunity to defeat two prospective initiatives at the same time. “I think if the opposition seeks to overturn SB 48, then we must defend it and therefore the smart thing to do is to overturn Prop. 8 with the same effort and organization and dollars,” Carroll told Frontiers. “It will force the other side into disarray as the different groups seek to control the campaign, it will spread their resources to fight a multi-front battle but allow us to focus our fight against the same ‘kids’ argument they will use. This won’t be another $40 million fight, despite what the nay-sayers think, and our community and our supporters will rally to ensure a win this time, because we’ve done the work to move this state forward.”

During the interview, Palencia continually said that no decisions had been made on strategy about both responding to the SB 48 threat, as well as whether or not to return to the ballot to overturn Prop. 8 in 2012.

He acknowledged that both Kors and Carroll had been “extremely generous and very supportive,” and said he’s had several conversations

Roland Palencai marching with EQCA in the CSW Pride Parade on June 12, 2011 (Photo by Karen Ocamb)

with Kors about SB 48. He also disagreed with the characterization of the initial EQCA message to generate calls and emails to Gov. Brown as being soft. He said they tracked 18,000 responses from the email but couldn’t track the notices sent out via Facebook and Twitter to their 70,000 contacts. He also thanked Wockner and others for “creating community awareness.”

But Palencia would not get specific about questions such as whether there is a “Decline to Sign” campaign in the works and what an initiative campaign structure would look like.

“We are having conversations with our coalition partners on how to respond,” Palencia said. “We will be coming out with a strategy about the kind of help we will need.”

What they are trying to “figure out,” Palencia said, is how to have a “community engagement kind of a structure” that may be divided by regional centers in a way that allows for “regional-related work” so the community “can really take ownership” of the effort.

“There will be community engagement at different levels so we can have the community be really creative and really take ownership of this issue,” Palencia said. “We have to balance community involvement, community participation, community ownership and also the ability to have a team to make certain decisions and be able to facilitate the campaign making decisions at a moment’s notice. So the structure might look like—that we have a team of individuals [that] would keep the campaign manager and consultant accountable. And then we will have community engagement in a way that ideas are really being generated by the community and there’s a tremendous ownership of this issue.”

Palencia said that the people with whom he’s having these conversations are talking with campaign consultants—but he would not name names. He did say one criteria for selection of a campaign consultant or manager is that they have had statewide success with an LGBT initiative. When Frontiers noted that we were unaware of such a success, Palencia said that the person must “get” LGBT issues. He had to go to another appointment before he could answer the question about whether any gays were among those being interviewed for the position—a point strongly underscored by people critical of the No on Prop. 8 campaign.

Palencia could offer no timeline on when or by whom any of these decisions would be made.

On Tuesday afternoon, July 26, Equality California sent out another email about SB 48:

It’s official. Yesterday, opponents of equality got the okay from the State to begin collecting signatures for a referendum to overturn the FAIR Education Act (SB 48).

Today, their signature drive begins. Our opponents have 90 days to collect signatures. They plan to run a multi-million dollar signature-gathering effort to make sure they succeed. We need your immediate support.

Given what we are up against, we must get to work now to make sure Californians hear the truth about the FAIR Education Act, and what it does and what it does NOT do. We can’t protect the FAIR Education Act without you.

1. Give today. Help us meet our $50,000 fundraising goal to launch a statewide education program. Your contribution will help put field staff on the ground and on the phones and recruit volunteers to quickly grow our movement to protect the FAIR Education Act.

2. Join our volunteer force. Together with our coalition partners like GSA Network, our staff and volunteers are working to build a groundswell of support for the FAIR Education Act. In the coming weeks, there will be more and more ways to volunteer from all across the state.

3. Report signature gatherers. If you spot a Stop SB 48 organizer gathering signatures in your community, let us know on Facebook.

Our opponents will use this signature gathering time to make wild claims about the FAIR Education Act — that it will expose children to “gay sex” and force them to “accept homosexuality.” These lies based on prejudice about LGBT people and kids have formed the foundation of every campaign, including marriage equality, they have ever waged against our community and every campaign they will wage — until we stop them.

We can do that by ensuring that the FAIR Education Act remains the law of the land.

Please, give today, sign up to volunteer now and watch for our supporters on the streets and outside local businesses.

When students learn about the accomplishments and contributions of LGBT people, anti-equality advocates will no longer have the power to demonize LGBT people. Their lies simply can’t stand up to the truth of our history.

Thank you for your hard work, hard-earned dollars and voice in support of the FAIR Education Act.

While I commend EQCA for getting into action, the fundraising pitch sure sounds like a unilateral campaign with GSA. So here are some QUESTIONS FOR PALENCIA AND OTHER LEADERS AND ORGANIZATIONS CONSIDERING MOUNTING A RESPONSE TO STOPSB48 — AND FOR THOSE ADVISING A REPEAL PROP 8 CAMPAIGN IN 2012:

1. Is the email above a formal announcement of a Decline to Sign campaign to stop the effort to overturn SB 48 from qualifying for the June 2012 Primary ballot?
2. If the referendum qualifies, should the LGBT community mount a campaign to defeat it? What does current polling suggest is the most likely outcome of such a referendum?
3. Should the LGBT community mount a simultaneous campaign to repeal Prop 8 and if so, for the June or the November ballot?

These 10 questions apply to SB 48 – but must also be asked if there is a movement to launch a repeal Prop 8 campaign, as well:

1. How would the campaign be structured, since there is no indication in the current fundraising email?
2. Would the campaign be structured similarly to or different from the No on Prop 8 campaign – and if the latter, how specifically would it be different?
3. Would the campaign hire “traditional” campaign consultants to make ads and messaging decisions? If so, what is the criteria by which the consultants would be hired? If not, would the campaign take on “alternative” consultants from, say, a grassroots organization and if so, what would that criteria be?
4. What consultants are currently under consideration and why?
5. Who would be the campaign director, what is the criteria for that selection, who would make the decision to hire someone, and what accountability agreement would be reached on how to manage the campaign?
6. If the campaign does not hire a campaign consultant to develop ads and messaging, who would do that under what process?
7. How would the campaign raise funds in this bad economy, who would be in charge of that and why, and what current ties exist between campaign leaders and major donors?
8. Is EQCA or another organization currently doing polling on how best to write a proposed title and summary on all possible measures?
9. How does the campaign intend to best use the polling, messaging and data gathered by Equality California, Vote for Equality and the Courage Campaign to reach out to voters since there seemed to be some dispute over the different surveys.
10. How does the campaign intend to inspire, energize, utilize and lead voters who might be weary of politics?

Tagged as: Ari Gutierrez, Capitol Resource Institute, Equality California, Geoff Kors, Gloria Nieto, GSA Networks, Jim Carroll, Jordan/Rustin Coalition, Latino Equality Alliance, Roland Palencia, Ron Buckmire, SB 48, Senator Mark Leno, Traditional Values Coalition