The Political Advocate
by Erik R. Caban
Mickey MacIntyre wants to help change the world, which is how heroes are usually born. He has taken activism to new heights and even made a business out of it. From an early age, he has been an organizer and an activist and can’t imagine doing anything else.
“I struggle to know what else I would do,” MacIntyre says. “I tried ‘[country] club wife’ but it didn’t take. The husband bored me and I could only shop and lunch so much. No offense to the club wives.”
As president and CEO of realChange Partners, he operates with local, statewide, regional and national organizations across the country. The business specializes in strategic planning with organizations engaged in political advocacy.
One of MacIntyre’s concerns is how fundraisers can better serve LGBT donors.
“Often organizations will not look at LGBT donors and what they bring to the table in the same way they look at others in their donor base,” MacIntyre says.
He summarizes that if you’re going to market yourself as all inclusive, you need to show that or otherwise lose that reputation. He doesn’t push his views on companies, but simply wants to teach businesses how to promote tolerance and sensitivity.
Over the past 20 years he has provided fundraising and organizational development coaching to over 1,000 local and 50 national organizations, including Equality Florida, Equality Texas, Equality Illinois, God’s Love We Deliver, and OUTFest.
From 1995–1999, MacIntyre served as co-director of the Denver-based Gill Foundation. While there, he created The OutGiving Project, an $8.0 million national training and resource program to build better organizations and educate donors. He also worked closely with more than 350 major donors to help them become more strategic and satisfied givers.
Prior to his groundbreaking work with Gill, MacIntyre’s experience was in nonprofit management and financial development. He was the development director for the AIDS Action Council and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, where he quadrupled its annual operating income of $900,000 to $4.4 million in just two years.
Most recently, MacIntyre served as co-chair of Equality Florida’s Board of Directors from 2003-2005.
“Mickey has helped countless LGBT non-profits, including Equality Florida, breakthrough to the next level,” says Stratton Pollitzer, Deputy Director for Equality Florida. “There may be no one else in the country who knows the organizations of the LGBT Equality movement and our histories as well as Mickey McIntyre.”
This year MacIntyre was honored with their “Voice for Equality” award – Equality Florida’s highest honor.
“Activism is my family heritage,” MacIntyre says. “My mom is a civil rights activist that helped desegregate Alexandria, Va.’s public school system and my dad has given his life to community service as a Catholic Priest. It’s not like I would become a corporate attorney or something like that; not with those genes.”
A Battle for Health
Staff Report
Watermark readers in Sarasota feel passionately about their heroes. During the recent WAVE Award voting, readers in the Sarasota area overwhelmingly named Richard Trifari as their unsung hero.
The community health educator at the Michael C. Bach Treatment Center in Bradenton and the chairman of the Sarasota HIV Community Forum has been at the forefront of the battle against HIV/AIDS for two decades, and he plans to continue the battle.
In the early 1990s, health care professionals were still afraid to treat HIV patients and the Sarasota County Health Department tried to avoid treating those infected by limiting resources. Only Sarasota County residents could receive any treatment. That same decade saw one of the area’s only HIV/AIDS specialists leave.
That’s about the time Trifari became more active. He helped land $100,000 in federal Ryan White Funding and lobbied the County Commission to budget $250,000 to help those living with the disease.
Since then he has served as vice president of the Comprehensive Care Clinic, executive director of the AIDS Council of Manatee and as president of AIDS-Manasota.
Many credit him with convincing dentists to serve AIDS patients after he confronted several with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Despite all of his efforts, the 68-year-old is convinced more work needs to be done. In a recent article profiling him in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Trifari voiced his concern that advances in medicine have increased complacency surrounding HIV/AIDS.
“People who become complacent are fooling themselves,” Trifari says. “If we become too complacent, it’s going to happen again, because this virus mutates. If we’re not careful, we are going to fall into a very bad situation.”
The Contstant Fundraiser
by Kirk Hartlage
If it’s an LGBT focused fundraiser, Ed Lally is likely to somehow be involved.
Far more than just someone who simply signs donation checks to the cause, Lally is often the muscle behind the event. In May alone, Lally and his partner Phil Dinkins helped organize the Tampa Gala fundraiser for Equality Florida and also volunteered their time to make the Tampa Museum of Art’s Pride & Passion event an incredible success.
“Charity starts at home,” says Lally, “and Florida is my home.”
Lally, 56, says his activism in the community began around the mid-1980s when many of his friends were contracting AIDS. When he lost close to 50% of his friends to the disease, he began to search for ways to become involved in the fight against it. He became involved with the Bay Area AIDS Consortium, a non-profit group that was among the first to bring clinical trials to Tampa.
“Watching your best friends die can have a huge impact on you and make you want to do something about it,” says Lally.
He later served on the board of the Tampa Aids Network and has headed up the organization’s annual giving program. Lally estimates that since he’s become involved he’s helped or lead the way to raising more than $750,000 in donations for AIDS-related causes.
A senior loan officer at Simons & Leoni, Lally brings nearly three decades of banking experience to his fundraising efforts. After 23 years with Wachovia Bank, he retired in order to devote more time to his charity work. Lally has now focused his efforts on making Florida’s laws more inclusive of the LGBT community. Despite economic downturns, Lally helped make last May’s Equality Florida Gala the most successful Tampa-based fundraiser ever for the group.
Much of the success can likely be credited to the classic “Miss Manners” handbook. Lally and Dinkins asked each of the event’s 25 hosts to forego electronic technology and handwrite personalized invitations to their friends. The tactic worked. More than $70,000 was donated, surpassing the event’s goal by more than 50%.
Lally was also instrumental in raising campaign funds for Hillsborough County Commissioner Kevin Beckner, the first openly gay elected official in the county. Lally and Dinkins hosted Beckner’s first house party in March 2008 and organized a last-push fundraiser closer to the election that netted the then-candidate $11,000.
But Lally says it will take far more than just dollars to help the LGBT community reach full equality.
“The key to our success is each of us to reach out to our family and friends,” says Lally. “We can’t win the battle by ourselves. We have to do a better job of reaching out to our straight allies.”
And whether it’s securing donations or gaining support at the ballot box, Lally says one thing is key: “You’ve got to get out there and ask.”
The Straight Ally
by Kirk Hartlage
Many gays and lesbians could still stand to learn a lesson or two when it comes to securing LGBT rights. Thankfully there are people like Jack Crepeau who is a straight ally and can teach us.
What’s best of all is that Crepeau more than practices what he preaches. He’s worked with Equality Florida since 2002 and has been instrumental in using modern technology to help recruit volunteers for the organization.
“I call Jack ‘The King of Social Network Marketing,’” says Chuck Henson, executive director for the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. “He has found a way to use all the social networking tools out there to drive a lot of the LGBT causes.”
Crepeau, 34, says the gay community can find solace in other minority groups’ fights for civil rights.
“Not that I necessarily support a hierarchal system, but having a strong church base made it easier for the African-American community to organize,” says Crepeau.
Crepeau acknowledges the work that religious organizations such as the Metropolitan Community Church have done in the fight for LGBT equality. But unlike the African-American community, the gay community is traditionally more likely to eschew organized religion.
A sociology professor at Hillsborough College, Crepeau frequently encourages his students to get involved in social issues in hopes of better understanding 
them.
“A lot of my students didn’t know that as recently as 2003 they could be arrested for oral or anal sex through various sodomy laws,” Crepeau says. “And in a lot of Southern states you can still be fired for being gay.”
Crepeau finds that motivation is a driving factor in any minority group’s fight for equal rights.
Despite the challenges that lie ahead Crepeau likes to look at the various battles Equality Florida has helped win: passage of a state-wide safe-schools act and an anti-bullying bill, defeating efforts in Gainesville that would have repealed LGBT protections in that city, and the Tampa City Council’s recent addition of transgendered protections into their local human rights law.
Even during his free time, Crepeau stays true to his passion. He says his hobbies are typically politically oriented, though he’s also been researching his family’s genealogy. That may be, in part, thanks to the recent addition to the Crepeau family tree. Just 10 weeks ago he and his wife Leslie became the proud parents of a baby girl they named Calypso. In the years to come she will no doubt be well-educated in the ways and means of social justice.
