October 9, 2024 
By Rob Phelps – May 13, 2024
Massachusetts
June 15, 2024 is an important date for the LGBTQ+ community of Greater Lowell.
That’s when the first local nonprofit organization will receive the first-ever grant from Greater Lowell Community Foundation’s LGBTQ+ Fund.
The ceremony—complete with a festive brunch, mimosa bar and DJ Mocha—coincides with Greater Lowell’s Pride parade and festival, which immediately follows so guests can march, stroll, sashay or otherwise easily make their way from one joyful event to the next.
“We’ll have some breakfast, some fun, maybe some dancing if people feel up for it at 10 a.m. I sure will be,” says Susu Wong, a marketing executive at Tomo365 and cofounding member of the Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce. She and her wife Julie Chen, the first LGBTQ chancellor in the UMass college system, donated $25,000 to start the fund.
A short speaking program, featuring History UnErased Founder Deb Fowler, is also on the agenda. “Deb is magic!” adds Jennifer Aradhya, GLCF vice president for marketing, programs and strategy. “As a former teacher in the Lowell school system, someone dishonorably discharged from the military [prior to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] who recently reconnected with the military, and all she is doing with History UnErased [with its mission to put LGBTQ history “in its rightful place—the classroom”], she’s got an incredible story.”
But most exciting for Wong and Chen is to see the dream of the fund they envisioned, announced just one year ago, become reality.
Life partners for more than 30 years, they started the fund as a way to give back to their local LGBTQ community. Only 5 percent of the fund’s endowment will be awarded annually, but the plan is to grow that endowment so that 5 percent will get bigger, the grants larger and the community ever-so much stronger.
The greater goal?
To support and improve the quality of life for LGBTQ+ people in all of the region’s 21 cities and towns—from Ashby to Wilmington east to west, and Dracut to Concord north to south. And they’ll do that through annual giving to nonprofits providing legal, health, education, advocacy and other high-demand services and programs like the one to be announded at the brunch fête on June 15.
“We have a lot of places that really need help,” notes Wong. “Today’s world is very stressful, and things aren’t going the way we want, so it’s important that we all be activists and support one another,” she told Boston Spirit earlier this year. “There are still communities near us that don’t recognize Pride, that have trouble raising their Pride flag.”
Providing guidance and support is the Greater Lowell Community Foundation where the fund is managed. Since its founding in 1997, the GLCF has awarded more than $35 million to the region’s organizations and more than $500K in scholarships annually, and manages some 400 other funds as well.
“This is the first endowed fund that has been established in the five years I’ve been at GLCF, and it is the most important one as far as I’m concerned,” says Aradhya.
“So I’m going to say this in front of Susu. What was so generous is, many people who give funds keep it as a donor-advised fund. They want to keep the control, they want to determine who it goes to. But by doing an endowed fund, [Wong and Chen] are giving the control to the community. We are going to have a selection committee, volunteers from the community with particular interests and experience, do the selection of the grants annually. That will go on long after I’m around, longer than Susu and Julie are around—forever.”
