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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE October 16, 1992

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L.A. Center director Torie Osborn named NGLTF head

by Lisa Keen

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has announced that it has hired Los Angeles lesbian activist Torie Osborn to replace Urvashi Vaid as its executive director.

The group's board of directors made the announcement on September 25 during its quarterly board meeting in Washington. At the same meeting, the board also voted to increase the group's annual budget by a dramatic 29 percent.

In announcing the selection, NGLTF Board Co-Chair Susan Allee said Osborn will take over as head of the organization on March 15. Vaid leaves the position on December 1, and Peri Jude Radecic, the group's legislative director, will serve as acting director until Osborn comes on board.

For the last four and a half years, Osborn, 42, has served as head of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. Prior to that, she was the L.A. Center's finance director for one year. The L.A. Center, believed to be the largest such center in the country, has an annual budget of almost $8 million and a staff of 150 employees.

By comparison, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is a much smaller operation, with an annual budget of just over $1 million and a staff of 14.

In brief remarks to the board following the announcement of her selection, Osborn said she feels like she has been “in training all my life for this job."

Fundraising will likely be an important attribute for the new executive director, especially since the board voted to approve a 29 percent increase in its annual budget for next year. The group made a similar move five years ago, predicting, that the 1987 March on Washington, the group's theh-15th anniversary, and other unique fundraising opportunities would easily accommodate a dramatic increase in fundraising. But those opportunities fell through, and the group had to cut back some staff and hold the budget to a more modest growth.

On September 26, The board approved the 29 percent increase over what the organization budgeted for this year. A budget statement made available at the meeting, however, showed that NGLTF expects to finish this year's budget with an income total of $1.2 million--or about $72,000 more than anticipated. The board approved a budget for 1993 of $1.6 million.

In an interview with the Washington Blade, Osborn said that, despite NGLTF's previous stumble with the earlier attempt at dramatic growth, she is "fully comfortable" with the funding projections for next year.

"The group has a lot of assets now that it didn't have [five years] ago," said Osborn. Among those assets, she said, are a "solid" development staff, a major donor program, and "an executive director willing to work" on fundraising.

"I have substantial fundraising background and fundraising management and

strategy background," said Osborn. "I feel fully comfortable with the proposed increases. I like fundraising.”

Asked why she was willing to move from the Center, with a multi-million dollar budget and large staff, to the smaller operation of NGLTF, Osborn said NGLTF "is smaller in budget and staff, but much more expansive in mission and political reach."

"The Center is a local organization; this is national; this is step up for me,” said Osborn. "Specifically, it's political and organizational, and I am, at my core, a political organizer. It matches me quite perfectly."

Politically, Osborn said it is too soon to say just how she will differ from Vaid.

Some mainstream activists found Vaid too militant and criticized her for interrupting a speech by President Bush and for pushing NGLTF to take a public stand against the Persian Gulf war. Some of the more militant gay activists, however, criticized Vaid for being too entrenched in the political system. They criticized her for supporting the work of lobbyists in a slowmoving federal regulatory process and for meeting with Bush's campaign manager about gay issues.

Osborn said she has mixed feelings about the debate this year over the 1993 March on Washington's original 55-point agenda. Some say the agenda is too broad because it includes an endorsement of a number of non-gay or AIDS goals--such as opposition to English as the United States' official language. Others say it properly reflects the diversity of the community and its priorities.

"My perspective is that developing the gay and lesbian movement means being accountable to, and responsible for, our issues first," said Osborn. "It means representing my community of communities, and here's where it gets tricky... If we are going to be true to representing a broad range of communities within the gay and lesbian movement, we have to keep tuned into the broader range of issues. But if we're not putting our issues first, nobody else is going to do it."

Referring to the 1993 March's platform, which now has at least 53 planks, Osborn said, "I think it's ridiculous to have a 53point platform."

"Very often, our movement plays to a kind of lowest-common-denominator game of inclusiveness at the cost of focus," she said. "We add on the laundry list of everybody's pet issue until it becomes meaningless. Do we want to focus and to prioritize? Of course, but we don't want to focus ourselves in so narrow a way . . . of gay rights, gay rights, gay rights--which becomes a code word for white gay men's rights--that we miss an opportunity to expand the movement.'

"I," said Osborn, summing up her stance in the debate, "believe both things."

Reprinted with permission from the Washington Blade.

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