Last Friday, on National Coming Out Day, over 100 guests gathered in Southeast Portland to celebrate the opening of the Marie Equi Center. The new community resource is designed to serve LGBTQ+ people who have low incomes or are experiencing homelessness.
Metro’s voter-approved supportive housing services fund paid for most of the building’s renovation costs and will fund a significant portion of its operations, contributing $857,390 in the current fiscal year. Staff at the day center will offer peer support, services and systems navigation, gender-affirming care referrals, help with finding housing, recovery support and more. The center is the first of its kind in greater Portland.
Dr. Angela Carter and Katie Cox founded the Marie Equi Institute in 2014 with a mission to provide culturally responsive medical services to their community, working out of a space in the Q Center. Their work eventually evolved to include advocacy and research around the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people in Oregon.
The Marie Equi Center is the next step in their vision, and is the result of research the organization collaborated on with a collective of other community groups. The report found that data on homelessness for LGBTQ+ people in the Portland area is incomplete, and that are a lack of appropriate resources needed to support this community.
Read more about Marie Equi
The 13,000-square foot day center in the Brooklyn neighborhood will offer drop-in services during the week. In addition to supportive services, guests can access showers, restrooms, snacks and places to relax or exercise. Design firm Gensler helped create welcoming spaces throughout the center, which features colorful walls, murals, framed art and warm lighting.
In her opening remarks, center director Cox shared a history of their organization’s work and how it led them —as a member of the LGBTQAI2S+ Housing Collaborative — to meet with local elected officials and advocate for more culturally specific housing and support services. “A beautiful thing happened,” she said, “They listened: They saw the urgency and understood what we were building. And today we are standing in what that advocacy has made possible.”
The center will be a place where guests can access not only healthcare, housing resources, and social services, but connection to community “and most importantly, joy,” Cox explained. The space is intended to feel like home, which is something many queer and trans people have had to build for themselves.
“We have created a space to reset the nervous system, a place to belong, to support and to feel safe space for mutual aid, safety, healing and resilience,” said Cox. “We are changing what support for our communities look like, looks like by challenging traditional systems and offering a model rooted in queer and trans liberation.”
Program director Madeline Adams reflected on the power and value of creating connection and community for LGBTQ+ people, who have often been excluded and marginalized. “We are the center,” she said. “The building, the furniture and the programs are really helpful, but those all are just coming and flowing out of the people and what we're doing together.” Adams urged future guests to “bring your problem, bring your realness, bring your rough edges and bring your radical, exquisite beauty.”
Sister-Brother Cryptid Apoca-lips and Sister Shiso Panda of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Portland chapter blessed the center at the opening celebration.