The work of the One Orlando Alliance was started within the first few days after the Pulse tragedy that took 49 lives, injured and impacted countless more and left members of all marginalized communities feeling attacked and frightened.
The first Alliance meeting took place June 16, 2016 and was a collection of 18 LGBTQ organizations in Central Florida who came together to help fill gaps in resources for those impacted by the tragedy. Jennifer Foster and Carlos Carbonell were the original conveners of the Alliance.
“Carlos and I just jumped in and said, ‘what needs to be done?’ The first year was just us responding to the tragedy and making sure things were getting accomplished,” Foster said in an interview with Watermark last July.
In the four years since its launch, the Alliance has changed and grown from an 18-group collective to a coalition of 43 Central Florida organizations who are all working toward a safe, welcoming and inclusive community for all LGBTQ people. Among its many initiatives, the Alliance launched Acts of Love and Kindness, a movement to honor the lives taken at Pulse by showing expressions of compassion in the 49 days leading up to June 12; held community discussions on a variety of topics impacting Central Florida’s LGBTQ community; launched fundraising efforts to assist members of the LGBTQ community in need during the COVID-19 pandemic; and established the Alliance Agenda, an annual report that lays out the 10 most critical issues impacting LGBTQ inclusiveness in Central Florida.
In 2020, the Alliance announced changes to both of its top leadership positions. Foster, who had served as the Alliance’s executive director for the last two years, stepped down in October and Josh Bell was named as the new Alliance executive director.
Felipe Sousa-Lazaballet was also announced as the Alliance’s new board chair starting this month, taking the role over from Robin Maynard-Harris, who has served as the board chair for the last four years.
As we move away from one of the most trying years in recent memory, we sat down with the Alliance’s new leadership duo to talk about where they came from and the focus of the Alliance as we move into 2021.
The Executive Director
Bell was born and raised in a conservative area of Northwest Florida.
“That’s where I was first exposed to the idea that if you’re gay that’s not what God wants for you and you’ve got to pray really hard and work to change that,” Bell says.
He attended the University of Florida where he got his degree in classical studies with plans to go to seminary and become a pastor.
“I went to a conservative seminary here in Orlando which today would not admit me as a gay man,” Bell says, “and then I spent four years in Clearwater as an associate pastor and spent four years in Lake Nona as a lead pastor.”
Bell came out as gay in 2018 but says the path to living his truth began in part on a Sunday in 2016.
“I was getting ready for church and that was the weekend Christina Grimmie got shot at The Plaza, it was already an awful weekend and I was trying to figure out how to address that with my congregation and then I start seeing that there’s been a shooting at a club,” he says.
Bell addressed the shooting during church service and pastored members of the church affected by the tragedy.
“I was always compassionate and God loves you as you are, but I couldn’t extend that to myself,” he says. “I just wasn’t there yet and what happened at Pulse chipped away at that a little bit.”
The following year, at the tragedy’s one-year mark, Bell woke up at 2 a.m. with a sharp pain in his leg.
“It’s never happened before and it’s never happened since,” he says. “But I knew that Joy Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and St. Luke’s Methodist Church were going to be at the site from 2-5 a.m. holding what they called prayerful presence. I looked at the clock and thought they’re down there right now, and I did something that is not my normal faith practice but I got down on the floor and I said ‘God, it’s 2 a.m. if you want me to drive downtown, you’re going to have to make it really clear.’”
At that moment, Bell says he received a text from friend and St. Luke pastor, Jad Denmark, which read: “Are you here?”
“I told him I was on my way and headed down there,” Bell says. “Being there that night was another milestone in my journey, of that compassion and that love, just kind of breaking through my own lack of self-acceptance.”
Bell says that he reached a breaking point in 2018.
“I had to wrestle with it and come to terms all the different collateral pieces of that with my profession with my family relationships. Everything changed,” he says.
Bell took a personal leave from the church and began doing nonprofit work with the Community Hope Center as well as working with Valencia College’s Peace and Justice Institute (PJI). A coffee meeting to discuss PJI programs is how he met Foster.
“I got to know Jennifer a little bit and I heard about the Alliance,” Bell says. “I thought this is really amazing work … then when Jennifer’s term was finished and the job was posted and I love the mission so I went for it.”
The Board Chair
Sousa-Lazaballet was born in Brazil and came to the U.S. when he was 14 years old. Six months after his arrival, Sousa-Lazaballet lost his immigration status in the U.S.
“I was an undocumented immigrant for about 15 years and in that time I was witness to and experienced a lot of injustices, both because I’m an immigrant and also because I’m part of the LGBTQ community,” he says. “That’s how I began my life as an activist.”
After attending an immigrants’ rights march in Miami in 2006, Sousa-Lazaballet founded the Florida Immigrant Coalition. He also helped found the organization Students Working for Equal Rights and was part of a larger organization called United We Dream.
In 2010, Sousa-Lazaballet was one of four students who participated in the Trail of Dreams, a 1,500-mile walk from Miami to Washington, D.C. to promote human rights, stop the deportations of current undocumented students and to support the DREAM Act.
“Each town we walked through, we stopped and we would meet with the people of the town, those who supported us and who were against us,” Sousa-Lazaballet says. “At one point we even had the KKK protest us in Georgia.”
Sousa-Lazaballet says that was when he realized the importance of addressing “intersectionality” even before he knew what the word was.
“In the context of immigrant rights the discussion is around the family; don’t separate our families, those are the narratives you hear often and when they’re talking about families, they’re not talking about same-sex couples,” he says. “We created this whole movement called the ‘undocuqueer movement’ — undocumented immigrants who are queer — who are coming forward and saying we are facing these issues in a very different way and we deserve to have a space here.”
Sousa-Lazaballet’s work in the undocuqueer movement took him to California where he was involved in a developmental workshop with an organization that works on affordable housing in Los Angeles. One Sunday morning in 2016, he awoke to dozens of text messages about Pulse.
“People knew I’m from Florida. When you grew up in Florida, no matter where in the state you live, there is always a connection to Orlando,” he says. “I felt like my home was on fire and I needed to come and figure out how to help.”
Sousa-Lazaballet, along with other friends with ties to Florida, came to Orlando to help. Through philanthropic connections they were able to raise $2 million which became the funds to help launch Contigo Fund.
“That’s how I met Jennifer,” Sousa-Lazaballet says. “She told me about her vision of what the Alliance, at that time called the LGBTQ Task Force, could become. I loved the idea.”
Sousa-Lazaballet also got a job working with Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer’s office on the long-term recovery from Pulse. It led him to his current position as the Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Senior Specialist for the Office of Multicultural Affairs for the City of Orlando. He joined the board of the One Orlando Alliance in 2018.
“In the summer of 2020, Robin started having the conversation with me about being the next board chair,” Sousa-Lazaballet says, “then we discussed it with the board and in September we voted on it.”
The Alliance
The changes in the Alliance’s leadership positions came in a year highlighted by racial inequality across the country and a pandemic that has drawn attention to the health care and economic disparities in marginalized communities, especially in communities of color and the transgender community.
This led the Alliance to adjust focus in several sections of its Alliance Agenda in 2020, changing the section titled “racial inequality” to “anti-racism” and adding in a section dedicated to the impact of COVID-19. These areas, along with transgender issues, will draw much of the attention of the Alliance heading into the new year.
In June, the Alliance established an anti-racism committee, which meets monthly, to address the issues of systemic racism in Central Florida’s LGBTQ community.
“We are committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment for all who reside and visit here,” the Alliance stated in a press release at the establishment of the committee. “Since the senseless murder of George Floyd, our nation and our local community have asked that individuals and organizations take a deep look at what they are doing to be neither complicit nor perpetuate the ills of structural racism.”
One thing created within the anti-racism committee to help the Alliance address this issue is an anti-racism scorecard.
“We are moving forward with having people use that in all of their organizations, including the Alliance, and asking hard questions like ‘how diverse is your staffing?’ and ‘Who is or isn’t represented within your organization, within the people that you serve or within your funding structures – and how is that money allocated?’” Bell says. “It’s a really comprehensive document to help people take a good hard look at themselves.
“The anti-racism scorecard is the thing that we’re hitting the hardest because we want to weave that into our DNA,” he continues. “We see the struggles of this past year, that fight for racial justice, there’s really a mandate to address this reality and the LGBTQ+ community is definitely not immune to racism – the number of people who experience racism within the LGBTQ+ community is way too high, so I think that there’s a variety of factors that make that a very powerful piece of what we’re going to be doing in 2021.”
The Alliance is also supporting several initiatives focused on the transgender and gender nonconforming communities. They are the R.I.S.E. Initiative – a program focused on sustainable employment and income – and the Gender Advancement Project (GAP), a trans-led movement dedicated to the progression and inclusion of transgender and gender nonconforming individuals in all facets of society.
“The Alliance is focused on making sure that conversations about anti-racism and transgender issues continue because I don’t think representation is enough,” Sousa-Lazaballet says. “To just have people for the sake of having people at a table, I believe is tokenism.”
Sousa-Lazaballet says that more than just having a “seat at the table,” empowering members in marginalized communities to take over these leadership jobs is the goal.
“My dream is for a trans woman of color to one day become the chair of the board of the Alliance. That is what I would like to see happen,” he says, “and it’s my duty to mentor, to work with communities that are not represented and that don’t have ‘institutional power,’ so they too can have the power that, as an undocumented immigrant, I just felt like I didn’t have.”
“I think one of the pieces for me is how we frame the conversation,” Bell adds. “Shirley Chisholm, who was the first African-American woman elected to Congress, her saying was ‘if they don’t give you a seat of the table bring a folding chair.’ There’s this model of inclusion work that focuses on getting people a seat at the table, and that is a huge step up from not having a seat, but for me, and for a lot of people, I think it’s not the end goal.
“Having people at the table is not the final step because even if you have that seat, who’s deciding how many seats are at the table? Who’s deciding what’s on the menu or on the agenda? Who’s deciding what color the chairs are or what color the walls are?” Bell says. “Who owns the space? We can have people in a room and we can look around and say, ‘wow, what a diverse room,’ but when you look through lenses of power, you see that the power is still in the same places that it has always been.”
Bell acknowledges that while he is gay, as a white cisgender male, his privilege is pretty extensive in almost every area of his life. That’s why one of his goals as the executive director is to more equally distribute that power in a way that more voices are speaking with authority in the Alliance.
“Within the Alliance, we looked around and saw that there wasn’t enough representation from different groups; from Black communities, from Latinx communities, from the transgender community,” Bell says. “We looked around and saw there are people that should be at this table that aren’t and so there’s been very deliberate work over the past couple of years to invite, include and to create spaces and opportunities for those voices to be heard and listened to. That is woven into who we are as the Alliance and it only happens if you do it on purpose; none of this happens by accident.”
“A word that really resonates with me is the word solidarity,” Sousa-Lazaballet says. “Solidarity means standing with, not only in words or in conversations, but through action. I really think that’s what true solidarity is. It is thinking about not only where we are today but what specific actions we’re going to do personally and how we’re going to leverage our roles to not only add people but to truly include them so they can have a voice and they can be empowered to take action with us.”
While the focus of the Alliance has changed from those early days after the Pulse tragedy, and changed more in the midst of a global pandemic, Bell and Sousa-Lazaballet agree that the mission of the coalition today remains the same as the first day it was established.
“I see a really clear line between my understanding of how the Alliance started, where we are and where we’re going,” Bell says. “And that’s all about bringing people together around making this community better for all LGBTQ+ individuals, and clearly that was in a moment of extreme crisis and tragedy, but creating that synergy between different organizations, between different entities, between different sectors of the community. I think is still very much part of who we are and what we’re doing.”
For more information on the One Orlando Alliance, visit OneOrlandoAlliance.org. To read the full 2020 Alliance Agenda, visit OneOrlandoAlliance.org/Alliance-Agenda.
