Participating Organizations

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Snohomish County

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RAINBOW CENTER COMMITTEE
Are you looking for a meaningful volunteer opportunity in the GLBT community?  Do you have interests or skills related to community organizing, writing or web site management?  Please send us an email detailing your interests and skills care of our webmaster.

WEB LINKS
If you wish to create a link to a web site that you believe would be of interest to the local GLBT community, please email us care of our webmaster.

PAID ADS
As the new virtual bulletin board, we offer paid ads to local businesses and organizations of interest to the GLBT community. For ad rates and submission guidelines, please email us care of our webmaster.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS
Local non-profits may be eligible to place public service announcements for events and activities of interest to the GLBT community. For submission guidelines, please email us care of our webmaster.

The Rainbow Center began as an effort to create a physical community center in early 1998. After years of many different efforts by a wide range of groups and individuals to create such a center, the Rainbow Center began as an off-shoot of the founding of Black Hills Pride, the local Pride Statewide community project of the Pride Foundation. The Rainbow Center's mission was to create a community center to provide a physical location for the many events and groups that in turn serve the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and allied communities. Our original goal was to broker a mutual-aid agreement with other local GLBT groups to join us in the pursuit of a well located building to share as a community center. This joint venture would allow us to share our financial resources and bring all of our groups more space than we could afford alone. Early on, our needs assessment identified a strong community interest in bringing groups together in one building. We were awarded a Black Hills Pride grant of $5,155.00 in the year 2000 to do everything necessary to open the doors of a Rainbow Center.

We were successful in establishing a Washington State non-profit Corporation dedicated to creating and maintaining a safe, nurturing and positive community center intended to serve local gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning and allies of all ages, races and affiliations.

In the course of developing our business plan, we discovered that our prospective partners were already secure in their independent locations and no longer interested in a joint venture. Re-evaluation of community needs showed us that creating a "Virtual Community Center" on the web would provide the greatest benefit by facilitating the critical element of networking the many people, events and groups of our thriving and diverse GLBT & allied communities.

Another issue that arose from our reassessment of community needs was that our only GLBT community newspaper, Capitol Q Magazine had recently folded, leaving a significant void. there is a clear need for a way to disseminate information about what's happening. Thusly we have revised our application to define what we have determined is the most viable role.

Since the early 1970's, it has been a goal of local community activists to create a GLBT community center. The first effort in the early 1970's resulted in an Evergreen State College (aka TESC) campus-based center first called the Gay Resource Center, which has primarily served the campus-based GLBT community continuously since its founding in 1973. Given the lack of other resources and the hostility of greater society, many community-based folks found themselves attending events at the Evergreen Gay Resource Center (aka GRC) because it met the need for a gathering place. The GRC became a vibrant hub for a broad range of social contact, community organizing, cultural events and political dialogue.

In spite of the oasis at Evergreen, there has been a persistent need for a GLBT place beyond the pale of the relative safety of the campus and situated in the more stable community-based GLBT community. Given the homophobic climate that was a fact of life in the 1970's and 1980's, there was an acute need for safe places to hold meetings for local GLBT groups, events for organizations, and a keen desire for a place to start a local GLBT resource library. There has always been a need for a physical location that folks new to the area or just coming out could go to find the "Gay Community" which can be so elusive to outsiders. Many locally-owned businesses such as the Intermezzo Coffee House, the Rainbow Restaurant and Hard Rain Printing served as defacto community centers by allowing a safe space for people to come together. Through-out the 1970's and 1980's, many people found a sense of community in the GLBT organizations of that time like Matrix, the Feminist-Lesbian Magazine, which gathered many community people every month to put out a monthly magazine.

During the early 1990's, local activists recognized the need to make small towns GLBT-friendly. Big cities like Seattle or San Francisco were great to go visit on Pride day, but always left a void on the return home to the smaller towns where it was still not safe to come out. These activists correctly realized that changing that small town closet-mentality would require coming out of the small town ghetto of coffee houses, bars and other shielded oasises. They organized the first ever Olympia Gay Pride parade and rally in 1991, bringing gay pride home to Olympia. Their efforts also gave rise to a local GLBT magazine called Sound Out, which served as hub for the GLBT community. Several Sound Out writers began actively pursuing a community center to be based in Olympia. Their goal was to create a space to provide the bedrock for our other GLBT organizations to build upon to meet the diverse needs of our community. Unfortunately, the financial and human resources were not yet strong enough to make a GLBT center a reality.

This most recent effort by the Rainbow Center committee has found, ironically, that while the timing seemed right to finally create a center, other organizations had found the same success in mobilizing their resources to create physical locations for their needs. And so we find our Rainbow Center occupying a well situated "cyber-real estate" location, finally achieving what so many have worked for. It is our hope that the Rainbow Center will become a touch stone for all local GLBT folks seeking to create the equality in society, an equality that will some day make the need for safe GLBT space obsolete.