Eugene’s first LGBTQ+-focused resource center, the Lavender Network, is opening its doors.
A coalition of resource providers for the queer community is working on the project, expanding and rebranding the HIV Alliance’s Queer Resource Center.
A nearly $500,000 Community Benefit Initiative grant from Trillium Community Health Plan allowed the resource center to expand and include more community service providers.
What is the Lavender Network?
This location will be a space occupied by five partner organizations: Queer Eugene, Eugene Pride, TransPonder, the HIV Alliance and the Eugene Performing Arts Center. Leaders from represented organizations and a Community Council oversee the network.
The new Lavender Network location at 440 Maxwell Road in Eugene will also be shared with current occupants, the Oregon-Idaho Methodist Conference and the BeLonging Space. Current uses of this shared space will be ongoing, so the former Trinity United Methodist Church can still be utilized for its current services, such as daycare, a food pantry, and a seasonal Egan Warming Center when activated.
The plan is for the center to offer resources like Queer Eugene’s clothing site, peer support groups and a space where people can feel comfortable and welcomed as they are. Year-round locations will be established for organizations like Queer Eugene and Eugene Pride, which have not had formal locations in the past. The space is also intended to be used for socializing, fundraising, collaborating and creating in a safe space.
The new moniker comes from a queer news magazine of the same name, published monthly in Eugene from 1986 to 1994.
Brooks McLain is the development director for HIV Alliance and the board president of Eugene Pride. He said the news magazine started in response to Measure 9, which proposed amending the Oregon Constitution to discourage homosexuality. At the time, the queer community in Eugene organized through efforts such as the Lavender Network news magazine and McLain said similarly, today’s queer community is uniting and resisting current backlash to queer existence.
“Having a safe place to organize and resist those efforts is really important right now,” McLain said. “We want to also have this place be kind of a place to collect our history and remember what we’ve done so we don’t repeat past mistakes and we can build from what we already did and create new things.”
The establishment of this new space was a long time in the making. McLain said he worked on the project for two years and had been involved in a prior effort to establish a queer community center. While gender-affirming resources and support centers have existed in Eugene in multiple different forms, the Lavender Network will be Eugene’s first queer community center. McLain said previously, bars like Spectrum, Wayward Lamb and Neighbors operated as LGBTQ+ community centers in Eugene.
“We’ve never had a full-on community center outside of a bar,” McLain said. “This is kind of the fifth iteration of this community trying to get to this point — we’ve just never been able to get the funding for it so we’re really grateful to Trillium for looking at us and saying, ‘we see what you’re doing, we agree.’”
Trillium Community Health Plan provided the Lavender Network with just under half a million dollars in Community Benefit Initiative grant funding, which McLain said covered the start-up costs of renting a space, including hiring a program manager and an office staff member and paying for the next year and a half of rent. According to McLain, the community center aims to improve mental and physical health outcomes by also providing a necessary social component that supports the queer community by providing a place to “just be.”
What’s in store at the new space?
This space will be the first time organizations such as Eugene Pride and Queer Eugene have had formal locations established. For now, occupants will be settling into their new location. With a building nearly 24,000 square feet large including resources such as an interior courtyard, both a commercial and a residential-sized kitchen, meeting space, auditorium spaces and an additional room for programming, the network and its fellow building occupants have plenty of growing space.
Laura Henry, program manager, feels like these partners have had a leg up because of their history of working together with complimentary support services. They said it makes sense to have providers with similar work all under one roof.
“It’s so much simpler to figure out that collaboration than it is to do all the logistics of fully creating something new,” Henry said. “The people are already there doing the work — we don’t need to pretend they don’t exist. We just go all together and do what we can to support each other in that way.”
Starting Friday, Oct. 25, the Queer Resource Center at 1185 Arthur Street will be closed and resources like the library and closet will be moved to the new 440 Maxwell Road location. Services and resources will be available at the Maxwell Road location starting Nov. 4.
For McLain, this queer community center has been a long time in the making and it stands as a symbol of hope.
“The world wants to make us fight each other and not like each other and split apart and that’s how dominant forces stay in control. We’re not only overcoming that but thriving in the midst of it and collaborating really beautifully and working really well together so it’s really inspiring,” McLain said. “It makes me have a lot of hope for our community and for our youth and for what comes next despite the headwinds we’re facing.”
Hannarose McGuinness is The Register-Guard’s growth and development reporter. You can contact her at hmcguinness@registerguard.com.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Lavender Network: New center a safe space for Eugene’s queer community
