Santa Clara County Awards Record $1M to LGBT Programs

Santa Clara County supervisors awarded a record $1 million to LGBT and HIV programs in their new fiscal year budget that began on July 1.

The money is going to pay for a wide array of services, from programs for LGBT youth and people of color to prevention measures aimed at ending HIV transmission in the South Bay.

"I think it is great that the county is moving in this direction," said Maribel Mart�nez, the manager of the county's 7-month-old Office of LGBTQ Affairs. "The LGBTQ community is definitely one that has been historically underserved."

According to California Health Interview Survey data, Santa Clara County estimates that 4 percent of its 1.9 million residents aged 25 or older, approximately 47,000 adults, identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. About 3 percent of adults identify as lesbian or gay and about 1 percent as bisexual.

As for the county's transgender population, the Santa Clara County Public Health Department estimated in 2013 it numbered 3,500 adults based on national estimates that 0.3 percent of the U.S. population is transgender.

(The numbers are vastly higher than those in a Gallup survey released in March 2015 that looked at LGBT residents of the country's top 50 metro areas. It pegged the LGBT population in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area at 3.2 percent, or 3,368 residents age 18 and older.)

The total amount the Board of Supervisors allocated for LGBT programs came to $1,032,087. It is largely due to the creation of the county's LGBTQ office and the launching of its own Getting to Zero initiative to reduce new HIV infections.

Supervisor Ken Yeager, a gay man who lives in San Jose and is the only LGBT member of the board, pushed for the funding in the county's Fiscal Year 2016-2017 budget.

"I would call this a record amount," Yeager told the Bay Area Reporter in a phone interview last week. "We needed to fund new programs and keep existing funding going. We also had additional revenue we were able to find to do the funding."

The LGBTQ affairs office was awarded $75,000 to create a standardized baseline LGBTQ 101 training for all county staff. It is also receiving $92,272 to hire a third full-time staffer who will handle community outreach efforts. The position should be filled by the end of the summer.
Office of LGBTQ Affairs director Maribel Mart�nez. Photo: Courtesy Maribel Mart�nez

"We want to move through the process as quickly as we can," said Mart�nez, who lives with her wife in downtown San Jose. "This position will allow for a person with some dedicated time and skill for outreach. That would be of great benefit to the entire county to get the information out that our office and different programs are available to the LGBTQ community."

The bulk of the funding, at $526,815, is designated for the county's Getting to Zero efforts and matches what county health officials had requested back in May to fund implementation of the initiative. It will partly be used to hire two staff members tasked with linking clients to services as well as fund community organizations providing HIV care and conducting prevention efforts.

In 2014, the most recent year for data, there were 155 newly diagnosed cases of HIV in Santa Clara County and an estimated 378 people who are infected but not yet aware of their infection. Based on those numbers, there are now likely 4,391 HIV-positive residents in the 15 cities under Santa Clara County's jurisdiction.

The county's Getting to Zero plan, so far, is vague about a target date for eliminating new HIV infections, and instead, is focused on expanding access to PrEP and PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis), increasing HIV testing, retaining HIV-positive people in care, and reducing the stigma around HIV.

With rates of HIV and STD infections in the county disproportionately found among Latino men who have sex with men, the supervisors budgeted $40,000 to update the http://www.N2Men.org website operated by the county's Health Trust. The money will also go toward creating a Spanish-language micro version of the site.

The second largest allocation, at $264,000 over five years, will fund the Youth Space and allow it to continue operating till at least 2021, according to Yeager's office. The program, which operates out of a downtown San Jose space, annually serves 4,000 LGBTQ youth at a total budget per year of $600,000, 60 percent of which comes from a contract with the county's behavioral health department.

It had seen the other 40 percent of its county funding cut in half last year, said Yeager.

"It wouldn't be able to stay open with half of the funding," he said.

The program is now expanding its reach to serve youth in Palo Alto and in east side San Jose. It is also launching an LGBTQ Wellness Speakers Bureau with $2,500 it is receiving from a separate pool of funding the county board awarded to numerous local nonprofits working with marginalized LGBTQ communities.

"We are extremely grateful to Supervisor Yeager to immediately responding to our needs for funding," said Cassie Blume, the Youth Space's director of LGBT Programs. "The Board of Supervisors as a whole didn't bat an eye and is extraordinarily supportive of our work."

Other groups receiving a portion of the $28,000 set aside by the board include the African-American Community Services Agency, the Project MORE Foundation, and Tadaima, which are each getting $2,500. Song That Radio is receiving $3,000, while Colectivo ALA, the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center, and Adolescent Counseling Services' Outlet De Ambiente Program will each receive $5,000.

The supervisors also budgeted $6,000 to the Community Health Partnership in order to convert restroom signage at 21 nonprofit community health center clinic sites in the county to be inclusive of all genders. The participating clinic organizations include Asian Americans for Community Involvement (two sites); Gardner Family Health Network (four sites); Mayview (three sites); North East Medical Services (one site); Planned Parenthood Mar Monte (six sites); and School Health Clinics (five sites).