Departure at PFLAG
Local PFLAG chapter's executive director announces exit
Lindy Perry-Garnette, executive director of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays of the Metropolitan Washington DC Area (Metro-D.C. PFLAG) announced Tuesday, Jan. 12 she will be leaving the organization at the end of the month. ”The main reason is that our kids and our grandkids are living in south-central Virginia and we need to be closer to them,” Perry-Garnette told Metro Weekly.
Perry-Garnette and her partner, Alma Perry-Garnette, currently live in Brunswick, Md. She has accepted a job as the executive director of the YWCA in Greensboro, N.C. Her final day at Metro-D.C. PFLAG will be Jan. 22.
”There is a succession plan being put into place, so there will be somebody functioning here after I’m gone,” she says. ”Our board is looking at many possibilities. We’ll be meeting on the 20th, and they’ll be making an announcement after that.”
For the past year Perry-Garnette has been furloughed one day per week as ”a cost-cutting measure.” Therefore Metro-D.C. PFLAG’s new executive director will be probably be hired on a part-time basis.
David Hoover, co-president of the board of directors at the chapter — the nation’s largest — says the board is currently in negotiations with Perry-Garnette’s likely replacement, though he declined to name that person.
The mission of the organization, Hoover adds, will remain the same under the new leadership.
”We need to continue the basics of our support groups and our outreach to families, and keep our basic programmatic mission going,” Hoover says. ”And also, like all nonprofits, try to make sure that we’re fiscally responsible and have enough fundraising base to sustain our two staff people and our mission.”
Perry-Garnette applied to work at PFLAG three years ago as a tribute to her grandmother.
”I have two sisters, both of whom are lesbians, and we were my grandmother’s only grandchildren,” she says. “She just embraced us from the very beginning and just thought we were the greatest thing in the world…. We eulogized her at the funeral [in June 2006] and it was really cool because people kind of ignored the fact that we were all gay, and kind of zeroed in on the relationship that we all had with my grandmother.”
For more on Metro-D.C. PFLAG, call 202-638-3852 or visit pflagdc.org.
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