September 2019 Cover Story: Marketing Equality
With ONE Community, Angela Hughey started a movement
By Karen Werner
About 20 years ago, Angela Hughey and her wife Sheri Owens were renovating their house. Wanting to support the LGBTQ community, they decided to use only LGBTQ vendors. Some of the bids were good, but an air-conditioning bid seemed high. They faxed it to Hughey’s father, a general contractor, and asked him to take a look. He called his daughter back and told her the bid was three times what it should have been.
This prompted Hughey and Owens to have a frank conversation. Here they were, young women in a home that needed renovations. Did they really care about the sexual orientation of the person who installed the AC? Their primary concern was safety, and they wanted to hire a contractor who would treat them respectfully while doing a great job at a fair price.
This was the inspiration for the couple to start ONE Community, a member-based coalition of socially responsible businesses, organizations and individuals who support diversity, inclusion and equality for all Arizonans.
ONE Community launched in December 2008 as a for-profit media company for gay, lesbian and allied individuals and businesses. Hughey and Owens put their life savings into it and built up the business from a straightforward but comprehensive idea. “We’re selling equality. That’s been our philosophy from day one,” Hughey said.
A natural leader, Hughey — a self-described “corn-fed Midwestern farm girl who was president of her high school class” — today lobbies for inclusivity in a no-nonsense, plainspoken way. “I’m a big believer in consensus building,” she said.
She and Owens took an inclusive approach, reaching out to the community in a business-friendly way. They filed paperwork to start a foundation in 2011, but it took 22 months to get their nonprofit status.
During this time, they learned that Arizona Community Foundation had received a national grant and were in the beginning stages of starting an LGBTQ philanthropy wing. “They actually gave us the opportunity to start the ONE Community Foundation fund at ACF in 2013,” Hughey said.
Around the same time, Hughey and the ONE Community team launched the UNITY Pledge, an effort by Arizona businesses and individuals to advance workplace equality and equal treatment in housing and public accommodations. “We created the pledge because we realized most Arizonans mistakenly believed that Arizona was LGBTQ-inclusive from a statewide, nondiscrimination standpoint. Unfortunately, it’s not,” Hughey said.
In its first year, 800 businesses and organizations took the pledge. Organizations ranging from PetSmart to Local First Arizona to mom-and-pop restaurants came on board to declare that discrimination is bad for business and bad for Arizona.
It was the setup for the tsunami that would come.
In February 2014, the ONE Community team was doing a day of service at the Arizona Animal Welfare League when a member of the Multicultural Advisory Board took Hughey aside and told her about a proposed piece of legislation making its way to the governor’s desk: Senate Bill 1062, the controversial bill that would have allowed businesses the right to deny service to gay and lesbian customers. “We weren’t involved in advocacy work, but we knew we had to get involved,” Hughey said.
Scott Koehler, who owns FASTSIGNS on Central, contacted ONE Community as well. A UNITY Pledge signer and ONE Community business member, he told Hughey, “I’m conservative. I’m Christian. I’m a Republican. We need to stop this,” Hughey said.
What Koehler and the ONE Community team had in common was that they were all Arizonans. “We love this state, and we want to improve it together. So we got on the phone and 30 seconds later we had come up with Open for Business,” Hughey said.
After being printed around the clock by FASTSIGNS that weekend, the “Open for Business to Everyone” signs became a sensation. During the peak of SB 1062, ONE Community distributed more than 3,500 signs in less than 72 hours. The sign was shared more than 100,000 times on the Internet, and individuals and businesses throughout Arizona posted it in their homes, offices and stores.
“I like to say that we’re an overnight sensation five years in the making,” Hughey said. “We had been doing this for five years and the next thing you know we’re on the national news and anchors are quoting from our website.”
ONE Community’s time had arrived. In July 2014, nonprofit paperwork in hand, they received the first educational grant for ONE Community Foundation, which works in tandem with ONE Community. “The foundation is really important, because you have to have gas in the car. The foundation lays the educational foundation for ONE Community to do the actionable work that we do,” Hughey said.
Today, the foundation takes an all-inclusive approach to educating the general public, business leaders, faith leaders and elected officials about why it’s important to update the state’s policies for both LGBTQ people and our state’s economic future.
Though she grew up on an Arabian horse farm in Ohio, Hughey has been all-in for Arizona since she arrived in 1984. “If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and put in a hard day’s work, the sky’s the limit here,” she said. “I don’t know that we could have started ONE Community in a different city but Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the nation that still acts like a really big small town.”
Hughey’s zeal for the state allows her to reach out to all Arizonans, finding ways to educate and form alliances. “So many times people say, ‘It’s this or it’s this’ and nine times out of 10 the answer is ‘yes’ and the answer is ‘and,’” she said. “We are one community. We’re Arizonans before we’re LGBTQ or allies.”
The education work ONE Community Foundation does starts with the UNITY Pledge, which is today the largest equality pledge in the nation. To date, more than 3,200 businesses and organizations and over 20,000 everyday Arizonans have signed it.
Still, Hughey and her team continually educate on the core value of equality. “We’ve always believed that when you start with what you have in common, the opportunity to say, ‘Yes, we really should be a state that treats all people, including people who are gay and transgender, fairly’ is pretty easy,” she said.
Part of the work involves dispelling myths about the LGBTQ community. “The myth is that we are all swinging from a chandelier. All we have is sex, and we have more money than God,” Hughey laughed. “But we are just as boring as everyone else.”
The a-ha moment for ONE Community Foundation came when they discovered research that shows when a person knows someone who is LGBTQ their propensity to vote against the group goes down, no matter the person’s political affiliation or religious beliefs. “If we can get rid of stereotypes and barriers that are fear-based, we can change things,” Hughey said.
ONE Community Foundation’s pitch is based on numbers. (“My wife says I should have been a mathematician, because it’s all math,” Hughey said.) In 60 percent of the state, it’s not illegal to discriminate in employment, housing or public accommodations based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.
“We’re losing 30 percent of our college graduates. If you look at Millennials, 20 percent identify as LGBTQ, and 63 percent are allies. If you look at Gen Z, 48 percent do not identify as wholly heterosexual. So we have a responsibility from a sustainability standpoint in the state of Arizona to make sure we welcome all people,” Hughey said.
Not doing so puts Arizonans at risk, because we’re at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to business expansion, tourism, workforce development and business attraction, and the retention of top talent. Plus, as Hughey points out, the LGBTQ community is the most culturally diverse community in the world. “We’re every culture, every belief, every socioeconomic background,” she said.
Beyond the macro level, there is a micro level, of course, and real-world consequences to treating people in an inequitable way. In communities that don’t have equal protections, there are higher rates of depression and mental health issues. This is compounded for transgender individuals, the most vulnerable members of not just Arizona, but national communities as well.
Arizona’s business sector has been receptive to ONE Community Foundation’s message. “Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. But it’s also really good for the bottom line,” Hughey said. “When you are diverse and inclusive, people stay longer. They’re better advocates. They bring better ideas, because they’re not afraid to be different. The bottom line flourishes.”
Armed with PowerPoint presentations and open arms, ONE Community Foundation explains that these protections don’t currently exist and educates on why it’s important to update our policies for both LGBTQ people and our state’s economic future.
Hughey likens the process to a sort of coming out. “We’re not here to judge you and we’re not here to predetermine where you should be on your path as an individual, business or organization,” she said. “We’re inviting everyone to this awesome conversation about our common humanity.”
One organization asked Hughey to speak, but requested that she take “LGBTQ” out of the title slide over concern that people wouldn’t come. After she gave the presentation, Hughey had to stay an extra hour to take questions. “The thing that came up at the end was, ‘Thank you for not yelling at us.’ That’s the perceived hurdle of getting people to this conversation.”
Salt River Project, for instance, recently signed the UNITY Pledge, after a very thoughtful process. The company now has a diversity and inclusion unit and has created a pamphlet on transgender employee guidelines. “We’re incredibly thankful that organizations take the internal steps they feel they need to take,” Hughey said. “Our job is to make sure they’ve got all the time they need so that when they get there it’s meaningful and celebratory.”
It’s this intentional, across-the-aisle bridge-building that’s given ONE Community the reputation of being the most innovative regional organization in the nation advocating for LGBTQ inclusion and rights.
“We have to bring people together,” Hughey said, citing as an example “the most moving educational thing we’ve ever done.”
Last year, ONE Community held its first interfaith summits in Phoenix and Tucson. An interactive opportunity to understand what’s at risk for people who are gay or transgender, the event paired 25 faith leaders with 25 transgender Arizonans. “We put them through spokesperson training and they had to get to know one another. Some went out for coffee; some had dinner.”
Then they went to the state Capitol.
“We had over 30 meetings with elected officials on both sides of the aisle. So if your concern is faith, you have faith representatives saying, ‘My God loves all people, and they love people that are gay or transgender.’ And you get to hear and meet people who happen to be transgender, in some cases for the first time.”
Following the meetings came more than 20 minutes of constituent storytelling from representatives introducing their transgender constituents and telling their stories. “There was not a dry eye,” Hughey said.
Such is the reaction people often have after receiving education from ONE Community. “It moves folks,” Hughey said “It’s not just about LGBTQ Arizonans. This conversation is truly about all of us.”
Hughey and Owens have come a long way since they got a bad air-conditioning bid. In fact, a few years later, the pipes in their house broke. But this time, rather than quibble about the plumber being gay, they followed a simple process. “We just looked at our ONE Community directory and knew any plumber we called was going to give us a good price, guarantee their work and treat us as a couple with dignity and respect,” Hughey said.
It’s the straightforward logic of a friendly Ohioan who sees problems best solved by candid conversations over a cup of coffee. “The time to get to know your neighbors is not when your house is on fire. When we can let our guard down and give people the opportunity to find out what we have in common, the sky’s the limit,” she said.
To learn more, go to onecommunityfoundation.org.
