P.O. Box 75265
Washington, D.C. 20013
For Release:
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Contact: Rick Rosendall
202-667-5139
GLAA Announces 2008 Distinguished Service Awards
The Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C., is pleased to announce its 2008 Distinguished Service Award recipients. GLAA presents awards to local individuals and organizations that have served the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community in the national capital area. The awards will be presented at GLAA’s 37th Anniversary Reception on Thursday, April 17, at the Washington Plaza Hotel.
GLAA’s 2008 Distinguished Service Award recipients are:
- Dignity/Washington
- Christopher Dyer
- D.C. Office of Police Complaints
- Sanja Partalo
- PreventionWorks!
- Brian Watson
Dignity/Washington has provided a healing outreach to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Catholics and other people in Washington, D.C. since 1972. The organization provides spiritual, social and educational support and leadership development, and seeks to be an instrument through which LGBT people may be heard by and to promote reform within the Catholic Church.
Christopher Dyer is Director of the D.C. Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Affairs. Dyer founded the Youth Pride Alliance in 1997, and has worked for a variety of non-profit organizations over the past decade and a half, including serving on ten Capital pride planning committees and serving as marketing and communications committee chair for the Crystal Meth Working Group. He also serves as an ANC Commissioner representing Logan Circle, and as a city Human Rights Commissioner.
D.C. Office of Police Complaints and its governing body, the Police Complaints Board (PCB), are independent of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and the D.C. Housing Authority Police Department (DCHAPD). OPC's mission is to investigate and resolve police misconduct complaints filed by the public against MPD and DCHAPD officers. OPC was created after extensive advocacy by a coalition including the ACLU, NAACP, National Black Police Association, and GLAA. OPC seeks to employ the best practices of citizen oversight of law enforcement, with the goal of promoting greater public confidence in the police. In 2007, OPC completed the most investigations, and adjudicated and mediated the most complaints since opening in 2001. OPC has issued detailed policy recommendations, including a report on its monitoring of MPD’s handling of several protests in Washington last spring, and conducted a variety of community outreach activities.
Sanja Partalo is a former staffer for Councilmember Phil Mendelson, himself a past honoree, and in that capacity worked extensively on the Domestic Partnership Equality Act of 2005, which provided the single greatest expansion in legal protections for registered domestic partners in the District. Partalo showed a nuanced understanding of the bill and the goals behind it, and rewrote much of it after the legislative hearing. Her work contributed significantly to the bill’s success. She was also quite helpful in addressing GLAA concerns on the Omnibus Crime bill, and in dealing with Smokefree Workplace enforcement issues at the Department of Health.
PreventionWorks! was established in October 1998 to provide needle exchange and other harm reduction services in the District of Columbia. Its mission is to curb the spread of HIV and other blood-borne diseases among injecting and other drug users, their sexual partners, and newborn children. PreventionWorks! incorporated after the U.S. Congress passed legislation forbidding both the District of Columbia from using its local funds to support needle exchange services and private organizations receiving any federal funds from operating a syringe exchange program, even if funded with private donations. The law was subsequently changed to allow publicly funded organizations to use private funds to contribute to needle exchange. Prior to the recent lifting of the local funding ban by Congress, PreventionWorks! operated a life-saving program for more than nine years solely on private donations.
Brian Watson is an activist in the areas of social justice, youth, LGBT issues, and HIV/AIDS. He is President of the D.C. Coalition of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Men and Women, where he has worked on its revitalization and organized numerous community events. He is Director of Programs for Transgender Health Empowerment, and works part time at Charlie’s Place, a homeless breakfast program in Dupont Circle. He has served on the Regional Health Services HIV/AIDS Planning Council, LGBT Executive Advisory Board, and the Mayor’s HIV/AIDS Advisory Board, and is a former board member of Youth Pride Alliance.
A list of previous award winners can be found on the GLAA website at www.glaa.org/resources/awardshistory.shtml.
Founded in 1971, the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington (GLAA) is an all-volunteer, non-partisan, non-profit political organization that defends the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgenders in the Nation’s Capital. GLAA lobbies the DC Council, monitors government agencies, educates and rates local candidates, and works in coalitions to defend the safety, health, and equal rights of gay families. GLAA remains the nation's oldest continuously active gay and lesbian civil rights organization.