John Joanette, Western Michigan '84, and his company, Lambda Consulting, were the leaders in lobbying the Indiana State House of Representatives about the “Marriage Amendment” that recently was defeated in committee for 2007. Read below about his role in making this happen.
DSF: Can you tell us about yourself?
JJ: I was born in Dearborn, MI and spent a large part of my childhood there. My family eventually moved south of Ann Arbor, MI to an area known as the Irish Hills, where I went to high school. I then went on to attend Western Michigan University.
DSF: What initially made you go to Western Michigan, and what was your major while there?
JJ: I specifically attended WMU to be a music major, and decided about a year and a half or two years into it that I did not want to do that. I was getting involved with the Fraternity, getting Beta Tau back engaged at Western, and that was what was driving me more than anything else.
So, I ended up changing my major to Communications with a minor in music, and put a lot of time into the Fraternity. Why I do what I do today had absolutely nothing to do with what I learned in class. It was all about how you build something from ground zero, and that was from the Fraternity stuff where I learned that.
DSF: So your musical talent. Did you go to Western for music performance or music composition?
JJ: I was and am a jazz music keyboard player, so I did a lot of arranging and performing, and was in a vocal jazz group there that was world-renowned called Gold Company.
DSF: What made you decide to join the Beta Tau chapter of Delta Sigma Phi?
JJ: The notices were going around, and Headquarters happened to target my particular dorm, so a group of us who were really close on my floor decided to join and get started. That core group of 12 guys made it happen.
DSF: You served as chapter president for Beta Tau, but what other positions did you hold in the chapter?
JJ: I was in charge of the pledge program for a period of time. President and Pledge Educator were the two positions that I held. There is a story from when I was chapter president that relates to some of the work I have been doing recently. Times were different in the 1980s when I was in college, and obviously we started with a core group of brothers and expanded it out from there. Around early January 1984, one of the brothers had an issue with my personal life and my sexual orientation. I thought that had absolutely nothing to do with the success we were having in bringing the fraternity back. The way it was portrayed was that it was an intervention that essentially said that I was out as president. They made it sound like it was the Headquarters that made it happen, although that wasn’t the case. The thing is that many of the brothers were still my friends, and I said that if it was going to be a big deal and cause problems, for the betterment of everyone, I would resign.
That situation kind of led me on a path to our current point, where I am fighting this kind of discrimination on the front lines. It’s interesting because it has come around, and the Fraternity has made changes along the way with the evolution of its anti-discrimination policy. That has been great to see.
DSF: Talk about your career path prior to what you ’re doing now.
JJ: I worked in television right after school in the sales and marketing department of the CBS affiliate in Detroit, and then worked for a publishing group in Detroit which had a great deal of trade publications, so I dealt with the Big 3, their truck manufacturers and that type of thing.
While I was working in the media, I created an organization called Geared for Life, essentially a group of my friends in the marketing and advertising community that got together to get serious about raising money for the HIV/AIDS community. That started in 1993. Over a period of time, I grew it into an organization that raised millions of dollars to give to HIV/AIDS organizations to help their clients with their health issues, housing issues, and all sorts of emergency needs. From that, I found that it was in the non-profit field that really intrigued me – all of the skills I learned while a part of Delta Sigma Phi.
Being a grantor of money through Geared for Life, I got to know a dynamic HIV/AIDS organization, Friends Alliance. This was one of the groups in existence right around the time that Ryan White, was lobbying Congress for money to start helping those living with HIV/AIDS caught in the pandemic. Education, prevention and outreach actitivies began to be funded at a federal level because of this brave boy’s testimony before Congress. As a result dollars started flowing into Detroit, because it was one of the epicenters of the HIV scourge population-wise. Friends Alliance became one of the first recipients and soon approached me to become their first Executive Director. That was an exciting time, because I was seeing the results of a lot of grassroots work. We were trying to fund the work through private donations, and all of a sudden, the president actually uttered the word AIDS, Congress responded, and our country started moving down a path to taking care of its people.
At that point the disease was changing from being exclusively a white gay men’s disease to really hammering the African-American and people of color communities. And that’s still where the trend is going more and more. My agency was right in the Wayne State University area of Detroit, and half of our clients were the original gay population, and the other half of our clients were people of color, living onthe street, injection drug users, prostitutes, etc. That really had an impact on me.
From that, I was asked by the Michigan AIDS Fund to work on a project which gave me the opportunity to still do non-profit work, but yet start my own business, Lambda Consulting in Michigan. I did work with Michigan AIDS Fund, producing the 12 AIDS Walks across the state which were all linked together to raise money for HIV and AIDS. As you can seemy path has been organizational development, advocacy and fundraising. I also got involved with the Human Rights campaign which got me involved in the political realm, which is a big part of my business now.
DSF: How did you end up in Indianapolis then?
JJ: I had done organizational development stuff, and I knew how to fundraise, and I thought to myself what are the politics involved in this arena? I had worked with the Michigan Legislature to get AIDS funding in place, and then I got an opportunity to move to Indianapolis to be the Development Director for AIDServe Indiana, and their Executive Director, Mark St. John, and myself decided that we wanted to be in business together. He had a huge lobbying background, and I had more of the fundraising and organizational background. We just put our talents together, and cross trained each other. I am now doing a lot more lobbying work, and we are now known as the social justice lobbyists at the State House. We do the lobbying for those that don’t have a voice.
DSF: What is the business philosophy of Lambda Consulting?
JJ: We said that we would probably never work for for-profit entities. We made a slight exception to that based on a company’s direct philosophy. There is a company called BioScrip, which is a pharmaceutical chain that specializes in HIV/AIDS meds, and because of how they work with the community, it’s almost like a service that’s beyond a for-profit, so we said that we would work with them. It fits in well because we do some HIV/AIDS lobbying at the State House. Other issues we lobby for include working toward the availability of affordable housing for everyone, the homeless, family/children/seniors needs, general poverty needs, etc. These are all social causes that we personally believe in.
DSF: Talk about what you have done with the recent debate in Indiana about a Constitutional Amendment to ban same sex marriage.
JJ: This has been our proudest achievement so far. We started the organization, called Indiana Equality from the ground up. We were contacted by a woman by the name of Kathy Sarris. There was an organization called Justice Incorporated that worked in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, but it was meant to be a statewide coalition, but was pretty Indianapolis-centric, and in some cases it never represented the needs of the entire state. Well, Kathy was in the last incarnation of that group, and came to the table with some dollars, and said that she would like to hire Lambda Consulting to do lobbying work on behalf of the LGBT community.
It was great to know that Kathy had started the process, by supporting formation of a statewide faith organization that supported rights for LGBT Hoosiers and was made up of several hundred congregations. Another group was forming that was made up of people who are supportive, can understand and can educate on all of the “trans” issues (which was another huge learning experience for me. It’s challenging to wrap yourself around it). And then, there is a
statewide Rainbow Chamber of Commerce for the business community. We could see there were a lot of things in place. What they needed us to do was knit them all together into a cohesive group.
So what Indiana Equality is, is a coalition made up of 8 statewide organizations, and 12 regions of the state which are represented by a person on the board of directors. The board members are representative of other organizations. There are still areas of the state where it is hard to get organized because it is hard for people to come out and talk about these LGBT issues in rural Indiana. We are making headways in those areas everyday.
My business partner, Mark St. John and I have been at the forefront everyday – the rest have been volunteers that give an incredible amount of their time. As much as we can, we try to put those really good and committed volunteers out front, but as you can see (from a recent Indianapolis Star article), somedays I get to be the media spokesperson.
It’s been quite a ride. In 2004, the Speaker of the House, B. Patrick Bauer (D-South Bend) was able to stop the Marriage discrimination outright. He said that the legislation was unnecessary since we already had a state law defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Then, one year later, the Democrats they lost the majority in the House. So, it was two years of one side of the aisle being able to push not only the marriage discrminationamendment through, but also lot of other things that were bad for the LGBT community, without any checks or balances.
The LGBT community did not take this lying down. Two years later, we helped organize the Progressives for the 2006 election cycle. Through Indiana Equality’s Political Action Committee, we worked closely with Human Rights Campaign, labor unions and the other progressive groups, to help win a Democratic majority again in House of Representatives With this, we had the former Speaker of the House back into his position, and it allowed us to work again with fair-minded legislators to kill the marriage discrimination amendment this year!
The LGBT community raised a lot of money. We had people out walking the neighborhoods, and did the electoral work that was expected of us. That set the stage for success. In the final accounting, as much work as it was, when the former state Democratic party chair came to me on the day of the marriage amendment vote and said, “When the progressives that you guys organized don’t think they made a difference today and they aren’t the reason that this happened today, they are absolutely the reason this happened today,” it made it worth it.
It was interesting how in 2005, they were going through the motions of this debate, the main argument was that homosexuality is against God and the Bible and all of these things. But what we did with our messaging was utilize the playbook from Arizona who defeated their marriage amendment in 2006. We were able to turn it away from those religious arguments to a set of arguments that really resonated: this is bad for economic development; bad for business; creates a state that is looked at as being backwards and not a place to want to live and work and prosper. Not to mention the problems the amendment woudol cause for victims of domestic violence. We were able to learn from all of the states who have gone through this before, and all of them gave advice and counsel that helped us with the win this year.
The amendment is dead for this session, and the Speaker of the House used a lot of political capital to do what he did. What it came down to is disagreement about what the ramifications are for this to happen. The same amendment will be back next session, and we’ll do this all over again. By then, we’ll have more Indiana businesses speaking out about it. What it comes down to is that the public and their perception of things, and their ability to adapt their thinking, whether its sexual orientation or race issues, we evolve, and things are better than they were a decade ago in many instances.
DSF: Where do you see yourself in five years?
JJ: I see myself doing the same type of work in the social justice/human service realm. I look forward to the day that there won’t be the need to do as much LGBT civil rights work! Things are changing very rapidly with this set of issues. I certainly can‘t imagine working in big business!
DSF: What are your hobbies?
JJ: Music. I created an LGBT/Allies musical organization two years ago that has a concert band, and a jazz band which I direct. The whole idea came from someone wanting a band for the Pride parade here in Indiana, and we got a bunch of musicians together from Indianapolis and across the country. Music is what keeps me grounded to do the work that I do.
DSF: What can you trace back to your Delta Sig undergraduate days that helps you in your work?
JJ: The original Beta Tau colony pledge class was charged with starting the organization from ground zero. A huge challenge. It made us work hard and smart and be creative along the way. That’s pretty much what I had to do with Indiana Equality.
DSF: What is leadership to you?
JJ: I think the people that I have chosen to follow have been the people who were
unwavering in their ability to move things forward, even when those paths were not popular with the masses. True leaders know how to move boldly ahead, building consensus along the way to accomplish their goals.
DSF: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
JJ: It’s that you have to do in life what you’re passionate about. You will not be as successful, nor have a high level of self-satisfaction if you are not passionate about what you do.
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