Affinity at 20: Marking two decades of grassroots accomplishments

It is late on a Wednesday evening. While the darkening streets of Chicago have long since emptied of commuters on their way home, at the Affinity Community Services offices located just off a modest Hyde Park shopping center, the small cadre of staff and volunteers are still at their desks.

Just as there was 20 years ago when a group of determined advocates organized around a dire need for services and social justice geared toward the Black LGBT community on Chicago’s South Side, there is still far too much to do.

On one wall of a long, narrow conference room adjacent to Affinity’s set of confined offices, a dry erase board notes upcoming tasks and projects. There is no space at the bottom to add anything else.

Yet despite the overwhelming list and cramped surroundings, the space is infused from end-to-end with energy, determination and an immediate sense that no matter what the race, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity, age, economic or social background of anyone who cares to stop by, they would find Affinity’s door wide open and inside safety and an exuberant welcome.

Chris Smith was one of the nine people who founded Affinity in 1995. She was to remain with the organization for 13 years in the capacities of co-chair and then president.

“Some of the initial thinkers were rooted in larger community processes,” Smith told Windy City Times. “There were folks like me who were part of other organizations around the city, Black LGBT folks in particular, who were contemplating the allocation of LGBT resources and services throughout the city.”

They envisioned advocacy and assistance on the South Side of Chicago delivered by and for Black LGBT people. “We began to hammer out a mission, vision and developed the social pillars of what would become Affinity,” Smith recalled.

She became a co-chair of the organization alongside accomplished non-profit consultant Lisa Marie Pickens. In the summer of 1995, Affinity’s list of tasks and projects required to engage the community began to form.

Remembering the initial challenges in the accomplishment of that list Smith said “what is old is still new and what’s new is old. We were thinking about how we would engage our own constituents around the issue of visibility, service delivery and advocacy. We had to think about how to approach funders, a strategy of organizing around a lack of service and visibility. We couldn’t decide which issue to focus upon—youth, LGBT health issues. As we grew, we evolved many of those arms and expanded our approach but we started with a broad mission that focused on our lives as people of color.”

Finding donors who would help Affinity get off the ground and nurture its fledgling programs was not easy. Smith said that the organization functioned without a major source of funding until the Crossroads Fund stepped up in 1997.

“We had operated for two years out-of-pocket or with in-kind donations,” she said. “Even when we moved from our donated space to a place with a lease there was still the business of constructing enough resources to keep the organization growing. Funding was and continued to be an ongoing source of vigilance around what was required to keep Affinity’s doors open. There was this notion that you needed to have enough recognition to even get funding and once you were in the pipeline you needed additional partnerships and deliverables. We were always in this nexus of trying to make the leap from one level of funding stream to the next. Even after we developed a track record and history beyond five or 10 years there were still [national] foundations who felt we were too small, too focused or didn’t represent a large enough swathe of the community.”

Yet in the tradition of Affinity’s decade-long event Burning Bowl, the organization’s then-all-volunteer team dispensed with the challenges that stood in their way. They hosted drop-ins, research projects and eventually went on to programs such as Affinity Scholars, providing youth with training in social justice, community organizing and nonprofit management. Those youth in turn wrote the pledge of safety and affirmation that would form part of Affinity’s call to action during It Takes a Village: Breaking the Silence on the Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of our Youth.

“There was a passion that was in all of us for many years,” Smith said. “Our work was dependent upon how we were able to fund our advocacy efforts. But we organized around our passion. We recognized that there was not as much focus or interest around Black women and girls to develop themselves politically, emotionally, spiritually, educationally and socially. There was always a need for us to spend time in quite aggressive education. A huge part of our work early on had to be how to empower our own constituents and create our own agenda. All of this was being done by the hands of women of African descent.”

One of those women was to effect operational change in Affinity so profoundly that the disciplined financial management and models for budgeting and accountability she instituted continue to this day. Smith’s mother Barbara “Robbie” Smith was a founding member of the volunteer-led Affinity Trail Blazers, which centered upon the challenges facing the community’s seniors.

“Her accounting and her capacity around nonprofit management gave us the tools we needed to organize and build our mission, which was very important to us in terms of our passion and our work,” Smith said. “Her business acumen around the ways a nonprofit needed to look for people of color was right on point. We didn’t get to be just Black lesbians who wanted to organize but we managed that work, the funding associated with it and with an intentional approach to give a voice and a capacity to a community of folks who didn’t have it.”

Robbie passed away in February of this year. Her legacy is not only to be found in Affinity’s business practices but in the multitudes of people whose voices are amplified from the diminished and ignored to a power that now resonates and is heard not just within the boundaries of the LGBTQ community but in state and national political arenas.

The organization was initially based at Mother Drexel Hall—a community site that was to serve as the first of Affinity’s four homes. “That community was one folks would not have traveled to otherwise,” Smith said. “It was not as racially diverse as Hyde Park and there were safety issues because of the violence towards LGBT folks. But they showed up—some driving, some biking and some on public transportation. That for us was a signal of the need for a public space for community.”

Smith remembers a thousand moments that signaled she was part of something both vital and historic. “There were just these small and large ways,” she said. “When a woman leaving her marriage found her way to our location and to programming; frightened to come in but encouraged to find her way there. When we marched in the Bud Biliken and Pride parades together, when a parent brought an LGBTQ youth to a group so fearful but acknowledging the support that was needed. There was trust on so many levels that individual lives would be protected and nurtured [at Affinity]. The organizing just began to grow and mushroom in a way that was going to live beyond its founders.”

Smith said she is proud of the leadership at the helm of Affinity throughout and following her tenure there. “They are young women on fire,” she said. “They are politically active and organized in ways we didn’t think about 20 years ago—passionate, structured and with a critical thought approach on how to engage communities.”

Next week: Part two of Windy City Times’ feature on Affinity’s 20th-anniversary year will involve a talk with two of the group’s officers: Executive Director Kim Hunt and Board Vice-President Anna DeShawn.

Second part of two-parter on Affinity at 20:

windycitytimes.com/lgbt/Affinity-marks-20-years-of-grassroots-accomplishments/51538.html.

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