The Victory Fund Summer Reception
Hey, Charlie. Hey, Logan. How are you? Good. How are you? Doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. Excellent. Thank you so much for doing this. I know that our cleaners and our clients will really appreciate your time with us. Wonderful. I’m happy to be there. So what do you do for Victory Fund? So I’m a development officer with Victory Fund specifically the Western Region Development Officer.
And what that entails is I look to engage with stakeholders and really folks who resonate with our mission to, to hopefully garnish their support either individually or around our regionally based events in order to provide support or for Victory Fund as well as the Victory Institute.
Awesome. And then what does the Victory Fund do? So the Victory Fund is the only nationally based 527 political action committee that is solely designated to increasing the number of out LGBTQ plus individuals in public office. And we’re the only nationally based organization that also focuses on down ballot candidates.
So everybody from city council, your school board members and everything else in between, as well as all the way up to Pete Buttigieg when he ran for president and all of our congressional candidates as well. Excellent. Do LGBTQIA have proportional representation in government in the United States?
No, we do not. And we are quite a long ways from reaching that. To paint a slight picture, we’re at about 1, 100 out LGBTQ elected officials across the board. And in order to achieve a 7 to 10 percent representation which is what the United States is fluctuating between right now we need about 35, 000 folks in office.
Yikes. Okay. And why do you think that representation in public office is important? It’s incredibly important because only folks from our community can really have the conversations and provide the impact in the places where the decisions are being made that truly affect our community.
That’s not to diminish the having allies as well in these spaces. But there comes a threshold in which, what our allies are able to really understand as it pertains to living as a member of the LGBTQ community every day of our lives. So it’s really important that folks who are living these experiences and want to create change are participating actively in the conversations that end up determining what happens at a larger scale.
Okay, yeah. And I want to ask a question about a little bit more about representation. Does Victory have anything that we’re doing to push forward or elevate the voices and campaigns of people of color and trans people? We do, we have a number of programs, both on the Victory Fund and Victory Institute side on the Victory Fund side, we have the Black Leaders Caucus, which is a fund strictly designated to increasing the number of out for Black lgbtq plus leaders nationwide on the interest on the institute side.
We have the victory empowerment fellowship, which is designed for leaders of color and or transgender leaders who where they’re provided with a year long mentorship from a member of Congress as well as. Really just having their all around educational components to running and uplifting a viable political campaign taught to them and, ensured that they’re prepared and ready to be running for public office.
We also endorse a number of what we call spotlight candidates, and this is a designation that’s more so dedicated to our more vulnerable candidates, people who are running in highly marginalized areas. That have little to no representation areas that might be the targets of, or higher volume targets of a lot of negative legislation as it pertains to our community and we look to connect our nationwide network of donors and elevate these campaigns in front of these, this network so that we can have a lot more carbon neutrality network.
Likelihood of increasing the amount of money that’s going to these campaigns. Awesome. Yeah, the Spotlight program is really great. Is Victory Fund successful at getting LGBTQ plus candidates elected to office? I would like to say that we are to paint a little picture. In 2022, Victory Fund endorsed a record breaking 504 candidates for the first time ever.
Prior to that, our record was 390. And of the 504 candidates that we endorsed, we saw a 70% win rate. There were 700 members of the LGBTQ community that applied for endorsement, and while we can’t endorse everybody the folks that we did not endorse saw about a 2% win rate this was not meant to discourage them however, in certain circumstances, folks really need to prove that they’re viable as a candidate and we look and encourage them to come and participate in our trainings explore.
A different race. Sometimes folks for the first time will go into politics really looking to, make a big splash. And a lot of the times you really need to start at the local level and move your way up. That’s what the opposing party does. And, we believe in our candidates and we want these down ballot candidates to start their career because for the most part, it’s not the end of where their political career will take them.
Yeah, absolutely. Okay in the United States of America, like it or not, you need to have money to win political races, and Lord knows that conservatives are good at that. That means that we need to be raising money as well. And that brings me to the event in July that we want to invite the Dazzle clients to.
Can you just tell us a little bit about that event? Absolutely. So the victory in Pacific Northwest reception is a bit of a longstanding event of ours. It’s been taking place for at least 7 years now, probably longer. I’m relatively newer to victory, but it’s really, a fantastic place that showcases the very, very strong representation that Washington state has.
We have members from the state legislature. From the state Senate, as well as the state House of representatives all the way down from school board members, city council, people. County commissioners will be planning to join us. And really, it’s an opportunity to come and engage with local community leaders who, who believe and understand the importance of representation as well as meeting with the folks who are representing us and being able to have those conversations with them about what motivates them what struggles they’re facing, what successes they’re having and they’re really are truly special evenings.
Yeah. And the event is going to be taking place at the home of Matthew Phillips and Devin Howard, who are two of our very long standing supporters, and yeah, that’s pretty much the event in a nutshell. Alright, awesome, so it’s July 13th, and tickets are 150. And we’ll include a link with however you’re seeing this, there’ll be a link nearby.
Awesome. That’s on that. Alright, awesome. Charlie, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Awesome. I really appreciate your time today, Logan. Thank you so much.
