Leading by Listening
Twelve years after moving to Minneapolis, Ann DeGroot was hired as the executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Action Council. Although she'd worked at the University of Minnesota and been involved in organizing several Take Back the Night Marches, DeGroot admits, "The truth is, I didn't really have a lot of experience."
Nearly a dozen years later, DeGroot oversees the largest GLBT advocacy and services organization in Minnesota. Recently renamed OutFront Minnesota, the nonprofit has a half-million-dollar budget and provides counseling referrals, legal assistance, antiviolence programming, education, and outreach to queers across the state.
DeGroot, meanwhile, has risen to a place of prominence among queer-community activists. "Ann is well-known for her level-headed, good-sense, calm ability to lead a room of strongly opinionated people through difficult conversations," says Richard Burns, director of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. "When Ann runs those conversations, people trust that they will be heard, so they don't have to scream."
In fact, when organizers of the Millennium March on Washington, D.C., drew fire for their unilateral approach to planning the march, they not only retrenched, they also asked De-Groot to cochair the planning committee. The activist's easy-going personality and Midwestern attitude (she grew up in Wisconsin) were viewed as a possible panacea to the problems of group divisions. DeGroot says Minnesota is in many ways a model of cooperation: On the whole, queer groups in the Twin Cities cooperate with each other to build coalitions and make things happen. "We share information with each other," DeGroot says, citing relationships with such groups as District 202, the U of M GLBT Programs Office, and MAP. "There are horror stories in other parts of the country about groups fighting over $10,000."
DeGroot has heard plenty of those kinds of stories. The Twin Citian helped found and now serves on the steering committee of the 60-member National Association for Gay and Lesbian Community Centers, which meets twice a year to exchange information and to network. She has met informally with other executive directors of GLBT organizations at an annual conference for more than a decade. This fall, the Human Rights Campaign awarded $5,000 to OutFront Minnesota and appointed DeGroot to its field cabinet, a tool it hopes to use to build grassroots support for federal legislative issues affecting GLBT people. "If something local happens, we let them know," DeGroot says. "If something national happens, they let us know."
Such national ties benefit not only OutFront Minnesota, but all local GLBT organizations, DeGroot says. "I now know people all over the country, so when something happens in Minnesota, we can network with people from all over. I think that really strengthens our work here at home."
