(Image from One Orlando Alliance’s Facebook)
The One Orlando Alliance has completed its first-of-its-kind, LGBTQ-focused survey in Central Florida to collect comprehensive data on the area’s queer community.
The “We Belong Here” survey — funded by Contigo Fund and facilitated by Polis Institute — launched earlier this year as a way to gather information in an array of areas including basic demographic data, household size, education level, annual income, health care access, mental health access, stigma, sexual and gender identities, housing stability, religious affiliation, family makeups, citizenship status and more.
“In a season where, at a state level we are under sustained attack legislatively and there is this push for us to be less open and less visible, it is important that we have this kind of information we’re getting from this survey,” says Josh Bell, the One Orlando Alliance’s executive director. “We know they are doing these attacks in specific places right now like schools, but we know the people behind it want that everywhere. They are going after drag queen story hours and that doesn’t have to do with the schools at all. They’re coming after our trans siblings’ health care, it’s across the board. So we have to find ways to stand up to say that we’re here, that’s incredibly important, and the best way to do that is with information.”
This survey builds on the One Orlando Alliance’s work and mission that it has been focusing on since its inception. The organization strives to unite LGBTQ-serving organizations in Central Florida through advocacy, community transformation, organizational development and resource sharing.
The One Orlando Alliance started its work 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 in 2020.
Since it began, the One Orlando Alliance has grown from an 18-group collective to a coalition of more than 40 Central Florida organizations who are all working toward a safe, welcoming and inclusive community for all LGBTQ people.
Among its early 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.
“One of the earliest things the One Orlando Alliance realized it needed to do was to create the Alliance Agenda,” Bell says. “From pretty early on we were interested in knowing this is what our community is dealing with. That’s been really in our DNA.”
The Agenda highlighted work needed to be done in the areas of coming out, hate crimes, health care, homelessness, immigration, racial inequality, transgender and nonbinary individuals, vulnerable populations, workplace equality and queer youth. The 2020 iteration would change racial inequality to anti-racism and add the community’s addressing of COVID-19 in response to those major issues being in the spotlight that year.
“The Alliance Agenda, co-created by members of the One Orlando Alliance, honors the Pulse victims and builds on our promise to them of looking to the future. By staying true to the fundamental values of inclusivity, respect, communication and collaboration that originally brought us together, our coalition commits to purposeful action to ensure our community thrives in the future,” the One Orlando Alliance states on its website.
The work on the Alliance Agenda is what led the collation to create its survey.
“When I came into this position, we were looking at the Alliance Agenda and I recognized a lot of great work had been done but there wasn’t a lot of local data,” Bell says. “So the data that was in the Agenda was mostly national numbers. What we wanted to be able to do is create a more robust version of that document that’s very focused on Central Florida. So that was the origin of this project.”
Bell says that once One Orlando Alliance started moving forward with the survey, he knew he wanted the Polis Institute to be involved. Polis is a nonprofit that focuses on research and engagement primarily working on social issues.
“I was familiar with Polis from some of the previous work I had done in nonprofits and I knew they did good work,” Bell says. “I knew they were focused on what is called asset-based community development.”
Asset-based community development is an approach to sustainable community-driven development. Beyond the mobilization of a particular community, it is concerned with how to link micro-assets to the macro-environment.
“That is very true for the LGBTQ community,” Bell adds. “We are such a huge spectrum of identities and life situations and backgrounds that the help that we, and that certain segments of our population, need is already present but we just need to know where it is.”
Dr. Bahiyyah Maroon, the Chief Executive Officer at Polis Institute, has provided research and strategy insights to Intel Corporation, the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Education, Harvard University, Columbia University, the U.S. Department of Labor and more. Facilitating the One Orlando Alliance’s survey was something that she was eager to get on board with.
“The Polis Institute deeply believes in community partnerships to bring about change,” Maroon says. “So ensuring that organizations dedicated to vulnerable populations have great data is part of our mission.”
Gathering this information was also important for Maroon on a personal level being a queer, Black woman.
“I have access to the astonishing power of data. Big data sets, rich data sets, quantitated data, quantitative data; and the power of data to transform social issues into social solutions is exponential,” she says. “Being able to contribute my knowledge base and skill sets to transforming opportunities for equity and equality is what I get up every day for. It’s what I love about my work, it’s what I love about partnerships like this one.”
This information will provide insight into areas of the community that were previously unavailable, at least on a local and state level, because a survey like this hasn’t been completed.
“The reason why our community doesn’t have comprehensive data sets is because we are only two generations into living openly,” Bell says. “When The Pride Chamber was founded, they didn’t publish their membership lists because you could get fired for being out. So now that more of us are living out in the open and we’re proud enough and out enough, we are able to answer a survey. Even though most surveys are anonymous as this one was, that was a huge hindrance of gathering data on our community. Also the surveys that are out there are more specific or more targeted, and we wanted something broader.”
“I have been working on LGBTQ data sets since probably 2008 or 2009, and they have always been very limited,” Maroon adds. “Funders will provide limited funding for a particular, focused area such as middle school or high school students, or college students, or homeless folks. Typically funding for surveys about our community have been woefully limited, so historically funders have provided money for work, for activities, for policy, for advocacy, but they haven’t provided substantive financing for research. I think what we are seeing in the LGBTQ funding community is a new hunger for being able to tell true stories based on real data.”
Crafting the survey started with identifying the best questions to ask participants.
“As social scientists, we could ask 7,000 questions and be very happy to keep you locked up for a weekend and get the answers,” Maroon jokes, “but people only want to respond to a limited number of questions.”
One Orlando Alliance began with a Central Florida Foundation initiative called Thrive.
“The Thrive initiative takes the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Determinants of Health and creates categories around those,” Bell says. “So that initiative was an initial skeleton in terms of making sure we were asking questions that could tie into larger data sets so that we could compare the realities of our community with larger sample sizes.”
“These are questions that have been tested out on other surveys with tens of thousands of respondents, so we know they are good questions that will get us to honest answers,” Maroon says. “What we did is we identified over 10 different national and international survey instruments and we picked those questions within each instrument that the LGBTQI community in Central Florida believe is most important to be aware of.”
This was done by bringing the One Orlando Alliance coalition together to get input from each of its member organizations.
“We invited anyone in the coalition who wanted to come to meet with some of the folks at Polis to talk about what data would be most helpful for them,” Bell says. “That was an important piece of this puzzle.”
“Josh put together an entire roundtable of people to speak to, ‘Do we need to know more about HIV/AIDS?’ ‘Do we need to know more about housing?’ ‘Do we need to know more about income levels?’” Maroon says.
The survey had nearly 800 respondents with the bulk coming from the Greater Orlando area, although they did have responses from all over the state, Bell says, from Tampa to Jacksonville to Miami.
“I feel like it was a great first time in terms of responses,” Bell says, “and when we take that information and show how we will be using it, then I’m confident the number of people taking it will go up. Right now, the goal is to repeat it in two years and then two years after that. There might be some drill down specific surveys in the meantime, but the big omnibus survey would be repeated probably every two years.”
So why is this kind of survey important? According to Maroon, it is because the more data you have, the more compelling a case you can make for your cause.
“Whether that’s advocacy or intervention or fundraising, you need data to be able to tell your story,” she says. “How we understand issues shapes how we resolve those issues. The loudest voices in the room are not necessarily representative of the most important voices, the most vulnerable voices. A truly well-done survey is the most democratic instrument any community has to give all voices within the community the ability to shed light on what is most critical in the community, what most needs funding, what most demands advocacy, what most requires attention. That’s what a good survey provides. That’s what good, rich data offers. And that’s what is going to come out of this survey. What do funders fund, what do policy folks advocate for and what do community partners act on? That is what is going to come out of this survey.”
It also comes down to funds, Bell adds.
“The importance of having this information is because dollars follow data,” he says. “If we want more funding for our community and the work that we are doing out here we have to be able to show people these are the needs and do that in a statistically reliable way. This data is going to strengthen the grant applications that our organizations write and unlock more sources for our community.”
The results of the survey will be shared with Central Florida’s LGBTQ community during an event called “The State of the Central Florida LGBTQ+ Communities,” held at Orlando’s City Hall Nov. 15 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. The data will be presented by Bell and Maroon with a panel of local LGBTQ nonprofit leaders sharing their impressions of the implications of the data to follow.
“This will be an opportunity for all of our community leaders to come together and say ‘hey, this is what we’ve learned so far,’” Bell says. “This will be just an initial snapshot of the data. Then the goal is for the Alliance to convene the conversations and dig down and say hey this revealed something we didn’t know what was going on or this finally gives us numbers around something we’ve known anecdotally. I don’t expect a lot of bombshells in the data, I expect it will confirm what our community has already observed.”
This information is the first step in moving towards having very strategic conversations for the first time based on data in Central Florida’s LGBTQ community.
“I cannot begin to express how vibrantly powerful this survey is going to be for Central Florida because the respondents are from so many walks of life and so many age groups,” Maroon says. “That is 100% because of the incredible work One Orlando Alliance has done around getting the word out to all partners possible to distribute the survey.”
The State of the Central Florida LGBTQ+ Communities will be at Orlando’s City Hall Nov. 15, 6:30-8:30 p.m. It is a free-to-attend event; however you must register for tickets. To register go to Eventbrite.com/e/the-state-of-the-central-florida-lgbtq-communities-tickets-444088951007.
