(Image: Gay City)

The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture has announced Gay City and Africatown are part of the mix in the award of $1.1 million in “neighborhood recovery” funding “to support arts and cultural organizations impacted by the pandemic and increase citywide recovery efforts.”

The two core Capitol Hill and Central District-focused nonprofits have made the list, the city says, to “sub-contract with neighborhood-based organizations and small businesses to carry out inclusive and creative activation projects and events that further the neighborhoods’ and city’s pandemic recovery process.”

The city says these fourteen organizations are now in their Request for Proposal (RFP) processes to select neighborhood-based groups to be part of this “one-time funding” from the JumpStart “Payroll Expense Tax approved by the Mayor and Seattle City Council” in 2020 to help the city stabilize and recover from the pandemic.

• Africatown Community Land Trust
• Beacon Arts
• Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association
• Downtown Seattle Association
• Friends of Waterfront Seattle
• Gay City Health Project
• Historic South Downtown
• Lake City Collective
• Museum of History & Industry
• Na’ah Illahee Fund
• South End Seattle Art Center (ReVision Arts)
• UDistrict Partnership
• Watershed Community Development (formerly Georgetown CDA)
• West Seattle Junction.

LGBTQ health and community center Gay City moved into its new Capitol Hill home last summer on E Pine and took on a new mission as “Seattle’s LGBTQ+ Center.”

Africatown, meanwhile, is nearing a major milestone in its efforts to strengthen the black community and celebrate its history in the Central District with the construction of its Africatown Plaza development at 23rd and Spring that will create affordable housing and new office space for the organization. The organization also recently suffered the loss of community coordinator Elijah Lewis in a road rage killing on Capitol Hill.

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