Creating a Safer, Healthier, Inclusive Community

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from believing the most essential thing about you must be explained before it can be understood.

For some young people, that loneliness begins at home. For others, at school. For an older adult, it can arrive more quietly, after friends are gone and the community that once felt close begins to thin. For 51 years, Pacific Pride Foundation (PPF) has been there when people needed somewhere to turn.

“We know being LGBTQ+ is already isolating,” Executive Director Julio Roman says. “A lot of it comes from the isolation that young people find in their communities and the lack of affirming support that they find within their community.”

The organization began in 1976 as a volunteer effort serving gay men and lesbians struggling with drugs and alcohol. During the AIDS crisis, its work changed with the emergency in front of it. What has remained, Roman says, is the refusal to disappear. Through funding shortages and public-health crises, Pacific Pride has provided uninterrupted services for 51 years.

One of PPF’s most critical and underappreciated roles is in their harm reduction program. The organization operates the only syringe exchange program in Santa Barbara County. Today, however, much of their most vital work happens in a counseling room.

Pacific Pride serves more than 6,500 people annually in Santa Barbara and Santa Maria through programs that span the full lifecycle of the LGBTQ+ community, from teens to the elderly. Last year, the organization recorded 349 hours of counseling. Its clinicians are trauma-informed, and care is offered on a self-reported sliding scale. 

Before anything else, every person seeking services receives a comprehensive assessment. If someone is in crisis or at risk of harming themselves, Pacific Pride connects them to emergency care. If counseling is appropriate, they can begin six to eight sessions with the same dedicated therapist. The need is especially acute at the edges of age: young people between 14 and 21, and elders in their sixties and seventies. 

Extending Crucial Outreach

In Santa Maria, language creates yet another barrier. Roman describes LGBTQ+ residents there as often “totally disconnected from any type of services,” a gap compounded by both language and stigma.

While Pacific Pride has the only bilingual LGBTQ+ affirming therapy program on the Central Coast, the organization is looking to hire a full-time bilingual clinician so clients with deeper needs can stay in therapy longer. Now that more than $300,000 in federal funding tied to counseling and bilingual services has been cut, this need is more crucial than ever.

And there is always a waiting list. There are simply not enough clinicians to see those in need of help. By the time someone reaches out for counseling, they have often already done the hardest part: admitted they need help, found the courage to ask for it, and trusted that someone on the other end will be there. Pacific Pride is trying to make sure that trust is met with someone always answering the call.