History
Selisse Berry, founding executive director of Out & Equal was hired in December 1996 as director of the Building Bridges training program. Berry ran the program and built coalitions as a single-person staff working out of the Pacific Center in Berkeley, California, and by September 1997 she moved into the United Way Bay Area (UWBA) offices in San Francisco.
The Building Bridges program worked under the United Way Bay Area and developed partnership with fellow LGBT organizations around the Bay Area.
By 1998, three LGBT workplace organizations merged in an effort to effectively collaborate on their common mission of creating safe and affirming workplaces for LGBT individuals—called the Pride Collaborative. These organizations included Building Bridges, A Group of Groups (AGOG), and Progress.
In 1999 The Pride Collaborative merged with COLLEAGUES, a national organization that sponsored the annual Out & Equal Summit aimed at human resource professionals and LGBT employees, to form Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, and the current organizational structure was born. That same year, Progress’s Leadership Summit and COLLEAGUES’ Out & Equal Conference combined resources to produce the annual Out & Equal Workplace Summit, one of the keystone programs of the organization. In January 2004, after years of being supported by the United Way of the Bay Area, Out & Equal Workplace Advocates became an independent 501 3 organization.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)