This month, Angel City is highlighting Equality California, an LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, with the 2025 Pride scarf. We spoke with Program Director Erin Arendse to learn how her organization is creating a just, equal, and healthy world for LGBTQ+ people.
AngelCity.com: What is Equality California?
Erin Arendse: We are a statewide civil rights organization that brings the voices of LGBTQ people and allies to institutions of power in California and across the United States. We are striving to create a world that is healthy, just, and fully equal for all LGBTQ people.
Part of that is our 501(c)4, which is a partner organization that works to pass policy and support the election of pro-LGBTQ, pro-equality leaders up and down the ballot.
Our 501(c)3 organization, where I work, primarily works on public education, so providing information and resources to LGBTQ people and our allies about our rights—how we can access health care, how we access safe and supportive school settings—and also providing public education to people who provide services, like social workers, health care providers, and teachers, so that they can create supportive and affirming environments.
We also work on power building, so developing LGBTQ leaders, people who think they might want to run for office someday, people who are interested in public service, whether that's through government jobs or appointments to boards and commissions, or just people who are interested in playing a leadership role in the civil structure of California and their local region.
And then advocacy is a third major bucket of our work: talking with elected officials about the impact of policies on our community, making sure policies that support LGBTQ people are fully implemented, that people are trained and resourced to implement them, and making sure elected officials and our 501(c)4 equality program have access to stories and information from LGBTQ people so that they can make further adjustments to policies and laws that protect LGBTQ people.
ACFC: What is your role with the organization?
EA: I'm the program director. So I oversee most of our public engagement, power building and advocacy work as it relates to community partners, organizations, and community members. My team works really closely with individual people out in the communities. My job really is to make sure that my team is out in the community sharing information on people’s rights, demystifying government processes, and then also taking back the story of LGBTQ people’s lived experiences, sometimes by creating opportunities for people to physically attend meetings with elected and appointed leaders, where they can share one-on-one about the impact of policies on their lives.
ACFC: Tell us about an aspect of your work you’re proud of.
EA: One thing that comes to mind is our work in K-12 schools. We publish a semi-annual Safe and Supportive Schools Report Card that highlights the successes and challenges that K-12 unified school districts have in the state of California implementing laws and best practices that support LGBTQ students. Through that work, we’re also able to advocate for a budget allocation and legislation that allowed us, in partnership with a number of other folks, to help craft PRISM, which is training on LGBTQ competency that will, starting this fall, be required of all 7th- through 12th-grade certified staff. We're really excited for that.
We've also been doing a lot of work in response to anti-transgender organizing, especially in school districts. As we saw a rise of forced outing policies, we did a lot of work to try and educate people on the impact of that and the importance to families being able to have this conversation when they're ready and not beforehand. We've also done a lot of work around student participation in sports and other extracurricular activities—of inclusion and creating safety for students in those spaces.
ACFC: There’s so much anti-LGBT legislation—especially anti-trans legislation—popping up around the country right now. How are you meeting the moment when it comes to that fight?
EA: Our role on the Institute side is amplifying resources, reminding people that, for example, even though the federal government is planning to remove [The Trevor Project] from the national suicide hotline, the Trevor hotline still exists. You can still call it. You just have to call directly instead of calling the 988 hotline. So just kind of reminding people of those resources that are available. And then with the Skrmetti decision—where the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on trans healthcare for minors—a lot of it is reminding people that Californians still have access to this healthcare, then also pushing back really hard against these types of decisions from the federal government and other spaces.
Another piece is what we call narrative change work, to really highlight the positive impact that access to healthcare has for trans youth, and the power of these decisions that should be made by youth and their families and their doctors, not by the government. So getting out there and trying to help people understand the power that this healthcare access has, the way that it transforms and benefits lives, and the fact that it’s a conversation that should be had with children, their families, and their doctor. That's a lot of our role in the state as an advocacy organization, just highlighting that over and over and over.
ACFC: Anything to add?
EA: I know a lot of people right now are looking to find out how they can help. So if they are LGBTQ and they kind of want to take some agency in the situation, the biggest thing we encourage folks to do is to talk to your elected officials, let them know how policies are impacting your life, let them know budget cuts impact your life, let them know how Supreme Court rulings affect your life. They need that information to be able to put up the fight that we want them to put up in Washington D.C. and in California. For every person who calls their elected official, there's 10 who have the same experience who don’t call. So every story you share is incredibly powerful.
And then the other thing I think is remembering that LGBTQ people have always had to fight for their basic human rights and that this pushback is coming because we have seen such progress. Even between when I was in high school and now, the fights we’re having now would have been unimaginable. Back then, so many people didn’t even believe that trans people existed. We are here because we are winning and we will continue to win. They can't legislate us out of existence. We'll continue to be here, no matter what the federal government says. As a community we've always taken care of each other, so that's the same call to action now: we have us, we've got our own backs, and that's such a valuable part of fighting back.
