Happy Women's History Month! | |
This month, LGBT Meeting Professionals Association is honoring Women's History Month! During the entire month of March, LGBT MPA's Weekly Insider will provide articles all about Women's History Month and highlighting LGBTQ+ Women's History! | |
20 Game-Changing Queer Women to Celebrate Women's History Month | |
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The roots of Women's History Month began in 1981 when Congress authorized a Women's History Week to begin on March 7, 1982. For the next five years, Congress authorized a week in March to be set aside as Women's History Week. Finally, the Women's History Project got involved and petitioned lawmakers makers to name an entire month to honor the achievements of women. March 1987 became the first Women's History Month.
For Women's History Month, we celebrate the accomplishments of queer women who moved the needle forward for generations to come through their activism, grit, and in many cases by just being unapologetically themselves in the face of sexism and anti-LGBTQ oppression.
These 20 people including Lorraine Hansberry, Lorena Hickok, and Dorothy Arzner all helped push toward wider acceptance of LGBTQ people through their contributions to their fields of expertise and through their legacies.
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LGBT MPA Celebrates Global Meetings Industry Day | |
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Join LGBT MPA's Executive Director, Dave Jefferys, at the National Coalition of Black Meeting Professionals' session, "Are DEI Efforts Working?" on March 30th at 11:30am EST. Get a fresh perspective from Laura Cyrille, Account Director, Development Counsellors International, Connie W. Kinnard, Senior Vice President, Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, Eric H. Kearney, Director, Diversity & Inclusion, Ohio Chamber of Commerce and David Jefferys, CEO/Executive Director, LGBT Meeting Professionals Association - who will share their unique insights!
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Calling all LGBT MPA members in the NYC/DC/Philly Tri-State area! Please join us for Global Meetings Industry Day in Philadelphia on Thursday, March 30, 12:30pm-6:15pm ET at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. LGBT Meeting Professionals Association is a Supporting Partner for this meeting and we encourage our members to attend. This GMID event will focus on the importance of meetings, future
trends, timely issues and practical solutions. The meeting will start with a panel looking at the data around current trends in the meeting industry and future directions. A second panel will follow to discuss why meetings matter, how they create impact, and tactical solutions for current challenges. Speakers will hail from all corners of the industry, and will speak on topics such as: travel trends, changes in trajectory of meetings, CEO decision-making on how meetings fit into larger organizational goals, staffing and workforce issues, sustainability, social justice issues, and more.
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When Parents Are the Activists: PFLAG Celebrates 50 Years of LGBTQ Advocacy | |
A mother's unconditional love and support for her gay son turned into a national organization celebrating a half-century of LGBTQ advocacy.
In 1982, David Holladay was 16 years old and about to come out to his mother. They lived in a small town in Oklahoma and attended a Baptist church. This was the era of Rock Hudson and Elton John and Billie Jean King, people whose names, he said, “were never far away from something derogatory.”
When Holladay considered his future as a gay person, he saw it only as “the fog of the unknown.”
What Holladay didn’t know then was that a movement was brewing that he and his family would be a part of for decades to come. He hadn’t yet heard of PFLAG, the first LGBTQ ally organization for queer people and their families. But Holladay would eventually realize that by coming out, he wasn’t only doing something for himself but also for his parents: He was giving them an opportunity to stand beside him.
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Capital Pride Reveals 2023 Pride Theme | |
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Over 300 people turned out Thursday night, March 16, for the annual D.C. Capital Pride Reveal celebration, which organizers say served as the official kick-off of the LGBTQ Pride events for 2023 in the nation’s capital.
Among other plans for the 2023 Pride events, including the annual Pride parade and festival, organizers announced this year’s theme for the Pride festivities will be “peace, love, revolution.”
The event took place in one of the large ballrooms at D.C.’s Kimpton Hotel Monaco at 700 F St., N.W.
Officials with Capital Pride Alliance, the group that organizes D.C.’s annual Pride events, also announced at the Reveal celebration that the 2023 Pride events will set the stage for 2025, when D.C. will serve as the host city for World Pride 2025.
World Pride is an international LGBTQ event that takes place over a period of several days that usually draws a million or more visitors from countries throughout the world to the host city.
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The fully integrated hybrid future predicted in 2021 is probably not the predominant model for 2023. Producing an in-person and virtual event simultaneously where everyone feels engaged is just too hard, not to mention expensive. But that doesn’t mean we are leaving behind all those hard-earned skills from the pandemic years. If we squint a little bit and play with the definition of hybrid, we can see variations on the theme at companies all over the world as pre-event Zoom orientations, recorded keynotes and 360 communities pop up to leverage the energy of those fast-returning in-person events.
Some have said that we will know the new technology has reached maturity when we stop calling interactions “virtual” or “hybrid” or “in person” and just refer to the universe of ways to connect as events.
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Destination DC: Fact of the Day | |
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DID YOU KNOW: There are 13 quotations in a U.S. Passport, only one of which is attributed to a woman.
Her name is Anna Julie Cooper and she spent much of her life in Washington, DC.
The solitary quote from Cooper is on page 26. It reads:
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind and the very birthright of humanity.”
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GO DEEPER: Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), who lived in LeDroit Park for 40 years, was a prolific writer and a civil and women’s rights activist who saw academic education as essential to achieving equality for African American women and men. Born into slavery, Cooper first came to Washington in 1887 to teach at the acclaimed Preparatory School for Colored Youth (now Dunbar High School). As the school’s principal from 1902 to 1906, Cooper defied her white supervisor’s demand that her students be trained for vocational, rather than academic pursuits. Instead, she sent several students to the Ivy Leagues, and during her tenure at the school, Harvard accredited it. It was also during this period that Cooper helped found the Colored Women’s League of Washington.
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LEARN MORE: At age 57, Cooper adopted her brother’s five children, motivating her purchase of a gracious Queen Anne house at 201 T Street NW in 1916. She later completed her doctoral studies at the Sorbonne. Cooper was also instrumental in sustaining Frelinghuysen University, a night school for poor and working-class adults founded in 1906 and originally located in a private home on Vermont Avenue NW. Cooper’s 1892 publication, A Voice from the South, is a collection of her speeches and essays promoting black women’s equality. Cooper lived to the age of 105 and passed away in 1964, just months before Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. She didn’t just witness the transformation of a nation, she was a part of that transformation. | |
Celebrate Women's History Month in Loudoun | |
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March is Women’s History Month – a celebration of the contribution of women to events in history and contemporary society.
Women have made a more than significant contribution to Loudoun in the development of the county as a renowned restaurant, craft beverage and tourism destination. Here we profile some of the dynamic female entrepreneurs who make Loudoun such a unique and appealing place to visit.
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Cheryl Strasser & Bre Grant, Cowbell Kitchen | |
Hands down one of the most elaborate salads in all of Loudoun is the seasonal Farm Bowl – a delectable mélange of roasted veggies, farm fresh greens, grains, beets, harissa, hummus, felafel and more – made at pocket-sized café and bakery Cowbell Kitchen, downtown Leesburg. Fans of “The Bowl” can thank Cowbell owners Cheryl Strasser and Bre Grant, the all-woman team who run the business. They formed a close bond after Bre’s sister, Kaeley, tragically passed away in 2018. Cheryl and Kaeley had started the original Cowbell Kitchen on Market Street. Together, Cheryl, a baker of 30 years, and Bre, a marketer, keep Kaeley’s dream going at their King Street spot, making sweet-smelling cakes, cookies, pastries and pies on top of cheese and bacon filled breakfast sandwiches, avocado toast, quiche, buckwheat pancakes and that incredible Farm Bowl – all ingredients sourced from regional farms. Magnificent. | |
Dana Alfahham, Dana’s Cake Shoppe | |
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Ten years ago, Syrian native Dana Alfahham was studying cake decorating in Dubai and working as a baker at a British school, considering a move back to Damascus with her husband and children. Syria was at war, however, and not the best place to return to. An opportunity arose to move to Virginia and after several years making and baking wedding cakes in the DC region, she and her husband opened Dana’s Cake Shoppe in the Village at Leesburg in 2020.
The now wildly successful enterprise makes everything from cakes and gourmet pies to macaroons, cheesecake, cookies and fruit tarts and employs an all-women team of 12 bakers, cake decorators and baristas. The shop recently expanded to offer baking and cake decorating classes.
“Everything I bake is from scratch,” Alfahham said. “I’ve developed my own recipes for the best texture, using high-end ingredients and European-style batter. As for decorations – you tell me what you want, and I will design it.”
Who is her inspiration this Women’s History Month?
“My mother,” Alfahham said. “She baked for me all the time growing up in Syria and gave me my passion.” The future is in good hands, meanwhile. Dana’s three young daughters can often be found helping her in the cake shop. “I hope they find their American Dream here like I did,” she said.
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Lori Corcoran, Corcoran Vineyards & Cidery | |
California-born Lori Corcoran wanted to be an FBI agent and studied Administration of Justice at college. Instead, when she and her family relocated to a farm outside Waterford in 2002, they planted vines, started making wine (and later beer and cider) and never looked back. The FBI’s loss has been the craft beverage scene’s gain. Corcoran, the wine and cider maker at Corcoran Vineyards & Cidery, has an affinity for the whiskey barrel-aged port she makes, one of which she has cleverly titled USB. (USB port – get it?) While the family sold the beer business in 2017, they have ramped up cider production, making crisp, dry champagne-style ciders with names such as Sinful (“so good it must be a sin”) and the barrel-aged Knot Head with hints of vanilla. “The skill is finding alchemy between art and science,” Corcoran said. “The chemistry is in the balance; the art is in the finish.” What’s it like being a woman in the beverage industry in Loudoun? Corcoran said she doesn’t see any difference, only that people are more amazed when they realize she does it all herself. She has heard women are supposed to have a better palate than men. “Who knows, but if we understand flavor profiles better maybe that’s one of our innate advantages.” | |
Manisha Shah, Stone Manor Boutique Inn | |
It’s 8,000 miles from India to Loudoun but that didn’t stop immigrant Manisha Shah from bringing a taste of India to DC’s Wine Country®. In 2018, Mumbai born Manisha and her husband Prashant bought the beloved 1905-built Stone Manor Boutique Inn in lush countryside outside Lovettsville. Manisha, a marketing professional and architectural school graduate, has introduced a distinctive Indian finesse to the interiors and a dynamic flair to the events the property is known for. On top of hosting overnight guests, she caters as many as 45 weddings a year, preparing delectable Indian dishes for the occasion. "I have been cooking for family and friends as long as I've been in America, since the 80's,” Shah said. “Stone Manor allowed me and my family to spread our love of food and weddings to others.” | Holly Chapple, Hope Flower Farm & Winery | Loudoun women are leaders in the local craft beverage, food and restaurant business, but they also drive the county’s blooming flower scene. A stone’s throw from the quaint village of Waterford, Hope Flower Farm & Winery is the sweet-scented floral business of long time Loudoun native Holly “Flower Mamma” Chapple. Her mostly all-women team offers everything from pick-your-own to flower arranging classes, ready-to-order garlands, bouquets and wreaths and subscriptions to a floral CSA. They also host festival weekends to celebrate Tulip Days, Peony Days and Dahlia Days with live music, picnics, flower-picking and glasses of farm-made cider and imported wine. Upcoming events to look out for? Tulip Day on April 8 (try the "Jack Cat Hard Cider" after picking your tulips) and a Flower Moon Party on May 9 – so called because the Full Moon in May produces the densest bloom. | Dana Green, Restocked Sneakers | |
A destination sneaker store is not the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks of Loudoun. Waterford resident and longtime “sneakerhead” Dana Green changed all that when she opened Restocked Sneakers in late 2021, an upscale sneaker boutique opposite Raflo Park in downtown Leesburg. The trendy locker-sized shop stocks the latest athletic pumps from Adidas and Nike as well as rare Jordans, Kanye West's Yeezys and hard-to-find, lesser-known brands. They also collect and trade rare and vintage sneakers.
A former Secret Service agent turned serial entrepreneur – she and husband Reggie owned a cement mixing business and shares in a gymnasium franchise – she attributes her entrepreneurial flair to her grandfather, a barbershop owner.
“I always knew I wanted to own my own business,” Green said. “He was my inspiration.”
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SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR PARTNERS | |
LGBT Meeting Professionals Association, 755 North Taylor Street, Philadelphia, PA 19130 | | | | |
