 Welcome, friends. We're really delighted that you're here today to learn more about the Kahn Hogan Award for Entrepreneurial Leadership. I'm Cheryl Mitchell. I was one of the people lucky enough to work with Kahn. I was his deputy for 10 years at the Agency of Human Services and really had a chance to come to admire his leadership style but also his ability to include many people and really to get things done for Vermonters. So we set up this award in his name and this is the last chance you will have to nominate people. This is year 10 and it's been my total pleasure to finally have a chance to meet HB Lozito, who I've heard about and never had a chance to see him person. So thank you very much. Well, thank you so much and it's lovely to meet you and be with you as well. Cool. OK, well, what I thought we'd do for the next maybe 10, 15 minutes is learn a little bit more about your work and how you came to that work. And then we'll switch gears a little bit and talk about the award. But maybe you could start by just sharing the work of Out in the Open and how you came to be doing it. Yeah, absolutely. I love talking about Out in the Open and about our community and work. So always happy to start there. Yeah, HB Lozito. I'm the executive director. It's actually coming up on 10 years that I've been in my position actually on April 15th of 2014. I started in this role. And we are an organization. We're based, I live in Brattleboro. We do a lot of work in southern Vermont. But we also have staff across Vermont and now also in mid-coast and central Maine, which is where I grew up, which is really exciting for me. And we are a multiracial grassroots, mostly working class organization focused on movement building and capacity building for rural LGBTQ people. So we really focus on building up the community and connection, visibility for our community, and making sure that our folks have access to the power and kinds of resources that they need to live happy and connected and fulfilled lives. So that's the work of our organization. We do that in many, many different ways. It's something that I've really loved about being Out in the Open. Our community and my board members and our coworkers have really trusted me to follow my interests and passions and now the interests and passions of the staff members that we have as well and knowing what it is that we need and then manifesting that in work that supports the community to hopefully get their own needs met as well. So some of that is through creative projects in oral history and looking at how are we using cultural practices and arts-based practices to gain access to power and do community organizing. Some of that is traditional peer support programs, so identity-based things where people are offering peer support to each other and connecting around that. Some of it's just fun going swimming and sharing a meal together and some of it's advocacy and all manner of different things, but really looking at that primary intersection of ruralness and LGBTQ experiences. You said that you stopped by at the State House lawn. Yeah. Was that part of something you were involved in getting going? No, but we do enjoy a lot of really positive relationships with the many other LGBTQ focused organizations here in Vermont. So that's being put on by our friends at Outright who do work with LGBTQ youth. And I love when I don't have to put something on and I can just stop by and support and see some folks that I know and care about and do some cheerleading for our youth. So we didn't have a part in that, but it was really nice to be able to be up here and stop by and say hi to folks. So can you tell us a little bit about your youth? You said you came from Maine. What brought you to doing this work? Yeah, so I grew up in rural central Maine where my mom's side of the family has been for many, many generations. And I had a really positive experience as a young person living there. I'm still really close with all of my best friends from high school and a lot of them are LGBTQ folks now as well and that's been really exciting to be able to grow and learn together and support each other both as young people and now as adults. And yeah, did a lot of creative work as a young person as well, really supported to just explore what it was that I was interested in and passionate about actually being at the state house was reminding me of some of the work that we did when I was in high school in eighth grade. We called it, then we called it the civil rights team and I wasn't out at that time but I was really interested in what they were doing and talking at that time as well a lot about support for LGBTQ youth in the state of Maine. And yeah, it was a lot of my early experiences and being exposed to that community and just starting to learn about LGBTQ people and starting to learn about LGBTQ people in rural places and I think that for me coming to out in the open was not explicitly part of the work the organization was doing and so brought that in of really being able to say like, okay, when I was living in the city I felt like I couldn't be my full self who had rural interests and wanted to live in a rural place and when I was living in smaller communities also not always having the amount or type of LGBTQ community that I wanted and so feeling like, all right, let's put those things together. Yes, exactly and build an organization that worked for all kinds of people who were having the same kind of shared experience that I was. So what brought you to Vermont? I had been farming actually after about 10 years on the West Coast was back in central Maine in freedom doing some organic farming there and then it was November and I didn't have a job anymore and was sort of looking for, okay, what's next? And some folks, friends that I knew from that had been living in San Francisco, Bay Area but grew up in Vermont had bought a house in Brattleboro and it was really big and they needed some people to come and stay in it so I thought, let me come down and check it out and yeah, for folks who haven't been to Brattleboro it's a very close knit and really wonderful community so pretty immediately sort of met my people and was like, all right, there's a lot of folks who are And very creatively oriented too, right? Absolutely and just really interested in being with each other and supporting each other and figuring out what does community really mean and enacting that and so that was about 13 years ago and it's really felt like home ever since. And has there been involvement with the retreat farm? Yeah, we were one of their, gosh, what did they call it? It wasn't community roundup but they do every week in the summer they have a food truck roundup where they have, it's a great community event and last year they started doing having nonprofit partners come and so we were one of the recipients of that last year which was great to be able to share more about out in the open with the folks who were there to enjoy some music in a beautiful spot so love the retreat farm. I'm there with my friends' kids pretty much every day when they were little so we are all mourning the loss of Carlos the Ox but it's a beautiful spot to be. But aren't there two little, what are they, getting two calves? Yeah, they did just get some calves, yes they did. Yes, they did. So talk about out in the open grew pretty fast once you were the director. Can you talk about your leadership in making that happen? Yeah, it's really interesting to hear that as people's perspective. I've heard that quite recently and I think from my perspective I'm like, oh, we grew pretty slowly. So when I started it was a half time job. I was there 20 hours a week and often working two and three other jobs at the beginning and really getting things going and I think we've, I don't know, Yankee ingenuity is always a phrase that's in my mind and I feel like we employed a lot of that especially in the early time. Let's figure out how to do what we wanna do with the amount of resources that we have. A lot with a little to make a lot of folks in nonprofit world do and really relying on what are, what are the skills and knowledge that I have? What are the skills and knowledge that our community members have and what can we make happen with that? So it was, I was our only paid staff person for the first five years that I was there and then we got a wonderful capacity building grant from some folks in a national LGBTQ network called CenterLink to hire our second full-time person. Just really exciting and that sort of has really springboarded us into the growth that we're experiencing now. Last year we were nine full-time staff, now we're seven full-time staff and really exploring, yeah, what is the right size for us? I think we don't wanna grow for growth's sake. We wanna keep being led by, what do we need, what does our community need and what's the right size to meet those kinds of things. So yeah, have really just tried to follow that and maintain a high degree of flexibility and know that, yeah, I think if we're, we've been able to do that work by being our genuine and authentic selves and knowing that will attract people to us who can and wanna support the work in many different ways. And moving your services back to Maine as well as from what New Hampshire, when did that start? Yeah, it was something we'd been thinking about for a really long time. I had wanted to do more work in the places where I grew up and the only person in my family who doesn't live there, so I love having an excuse to be there very often but also sort of seeing, yeah, knowing there were people there who needed the kind of support and programming that we offer. We were lucky enough to receive a large national grant from a new funder called the New Pluralists, which is a consortium of different funders and they funded us for two years to expand work there so we were able to hire a couple of full-time people and then sort of do the same thing we've been able to do in Vermont, continue attracting people to us who both want to participate and support financially very often. For us, those are the same people, which we love and that's how we've really been able to grow that work there, which is wonderful. It's flexible support that allows us to be guided by the trust and relationships we have within our community to do what we need. Cool, so hearing you talk, I can understand why you were selected by the committee. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about as being a Hogan Award recipient made any difference for you or for your organization? Yeah, absolutely. I actually just, one of my nominators I ran into at the state house this afternoon and was really just, yeah, a lovely reminder of the community of people that supported me to be a Hogan nominee and a Hogan Award winner. Even just, I think the validation from people outside our community of how important this work is, we know it's really important and to be able to highlight our community and the work of our organization on a broader stage than we usually have has absolutely been really useful. Even connections with folks on the committee, we had an opportunity come our way this year where I needed to get in touch with Will at Vermont Community Loan Fund and say, hey, can we explore some things? Are you able to support us and having that relationship from someone who was on the committee made that a lot easier. I think I might have been more nervous to approach them and because we knew each other from this experience, that was really easy. Other folks on the committee, yeah, have been becoming more involved and out in the open and that's been really lovely and wonderful as well. So definitely in those kinds of ways. And then I think for myself, I had been aware of this award when it started and really in the back of my mind is it's been like, that's really amazing. There's not a lot of awards that provide for an individual person who's been working in community, this kind of financial support. Usually it's, okay, here's a little something for you and here's, you know, and that was really useful for me as a working class person who had been working in my position part-time for a long time to have also that kind of support. Amazing for myself. Yeah, it's been lovely. It's been interesting to me how differently people use it. Some people use it to travel, some use it to pay off medical bills, some use it to hire executive coaches. It's been the gamut. I think when we first started it, we thought people would get working cars. That was the fantasy. Absolutely. So people in the non-profit world need a better car. And because the, so the applications are going to be due by June 27th of this year. And we think they'll probably be a big Shabang celebration because it's the last year. Do you have any advice for people about submitting nominations? I mean, tell your story about who you are is that's, I think that's what I did in my, or didn't do, that's what I had other people do for me. But yeah, gather those people who know you and your story really well and can just tell people about what it is that you do and how you do it. And I think that's the thing. I think it's been wonderful to connect with other awardees as well and be able to see those, yeah, just like threads of integrity and hard work and interest in our community. And I think those things come through in a nomination, the nominating, the committee is really wonderful as well and feel like I've loved just the process of connecting with those folks from having lunch at Jamet's house and meeting everybody and just, yeah, deep interest in people and then who folks are as an individual person in addition to the community work. So that's the advice that I would give for people be yourself and have folks who can tell your story. So if you're watching and you wanna nominate somebody, it will be on the Vermont Community Foundation website under grants, available grants. And if you need any help, just call them up. They'll tell you how to do it. If you're having any technical glitches, they'll tell you how to do it. And I also wanted to thank you for setting us up with ORCA. I've never been here and the same thing. If any of you have public service announcements or information you wanna get out to the public, please contact your local community access station. They are incredible. We're grateful to the people here. Absolutely, love Public Media in Vermont, all kinds of it. Absolutely. Yes, yes, we're very lucky. And thank you, HB, for taking the time to come all the way up from Brattleboro today to talk with me. Absolutely, yes, thank you so much. Appreciate it, very much. Hope the rest of your year is great. Thank you.