Community Centers at the Core of LGBTQ+ Care

Dear Ron,

June 12, 2025

Every gift you make is more than a donation—it’s a declaration of what kind of Texas you believe in. This Pride Month, we’re honoring the real, often quiet work your generosity sustains: the local LGBTQ+ centers that show up daily with compassion, resources, and refuge. Here’s a closer look at how your support helps keep these spaces alive—and why that matters now more than ever.

Anchoring Pride Across Texas: 

Sustaining the heartbeat of LGBTQ+ community care

Behind every Pride flag waving in a rural town, every open-door counseling session, and every emergency pantry visit in underserved regions of Texas—there’s someone like you, choosing to invest in the future of LGBTQ+ care. Community hubs are emerging and expanding across Texas with urgency, creativity, and heart—from long-standing institutions like Resource Center Dallas, to newer efforts like Alphabet Army in East Texas, to Frisco Pride’s budding brick-and-mortar aspirations. Each reflects a deep truth: local leadership, when resourced, can transform entire regions.

At the Funding Forward 2025 Opening Plenary, Texas Pride Community Foundation Program Director Robert Salcido Jr. spoke to the evolving landscape: “We recognize that Pride organizations in small to mid-level communities are stepping up to offer services far beyond what their missions were originally started as—because there’s a need.” That need stretches across rural and urban lines, encompassing basic services, mental health support, youth programs, and affirming spaces for those who have nowhere else to turn.

As Robert noted, “We step in and provide that critical service that they need.” That support doesn’t just sustain—it allows communities to grow their own infrastructure, shape their own futures, and create affirming networks close to home.

Texas Pride Community Foundation understands this ecosystem. Some groups, like Alphabet Army and Frisco Pride, are planting their roots, turning momentum into lasting physical presence. Others, like Resource Center Dallas and Montrose Center in Houston, offer statewide models of sustainability and scale. And centers like Borderland Rainbow Center represent the expanding middle—organizations bridging gaps in access, capacity, and geographic equity.

Stan Sloan, a longtime nonprofit leader and current board member of Texas Pride Community Foundation and board president of Borderland Rainbow Center, describes the stakes clearly: “For smaller towns, the emergency services are much harder. We serve on a daily basis people who have no other alternatives because those alternatives are closed off to them.” But with support, these centers become beacons of access. “What the Texas Pride Community Foundation does is so significant—and it’s needed in ways that it is just not needed in larger cities.”

As we mark our 10th anniversary, we carry forward a clear commitment: “to ensure LGBTQ+ Texans in every zip code have the resources, recognition, and respect to thrive.” Your giving is not just about sustaining programs—it’s about seeding power in every corner of the state.

Thank you for investing in the people and places that are anchoring pride in Texas—today and for generations to come.

Questions? Ideas? Comments? We are all ears. 

Write to us at info@texaspridecf.org.