ERIN DRINKWATER
Executive Director, Brooklyn Community Pride Center
“In five years, I want to see New York State have long since passed the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act and DOMA have been repealed. I want to see enough shelter beds in the city for our runaway and homeless youth population, which too often is left out in the cold,” Erin Drinkwater says of her hopes for our community. Before heading the BCPC, this longtime activist was a policy consultant serving as co-president of the Lambda Independent Democrats of Brooklyn and the Downstate Director of Pride in Action at the Empire State Pride Agenda. In her decade of work in government and nonprofits, Drinkwater also served as Congressman Jerrold L. Nadler’s Manhattan Community Representative and former Clinton advisor Sean Patrick Maloney’s Policy Director. Now, she helps facilitate the BCPC’s mission of providing support and services to Brooklyn’s LGBTQ community, including peer support groups, financial planning services, community education panels and legal clinics, to name a few. What’s her own five-year plan? “In that amount of time, the Brooklyn Community Pride Center will celebrate its 10 year anniversary; we will have grown out of our space on Atlantic Avenue and be providing expanded programming,” she says. Both our staff and our center will have grown, but our commitment to serving Brooklyn’s LGBTQ community will remain just as strong.”
