Rainbow Cafe held its 24th anniversary gala on Oct. 5 at 6:00 p.m. at the Carbondale Civic Center. Members and community came together for a night of fun educational information and rekindling with old members and friends.
The night included a drag show from two queens, Ceduixion Carrington and Jayden Licious, and live music from Curt Wilson. Speakers of the night included the cafe’s Executive Director Carrie Vine, Rainbow Cafe staff Alex Waller, and keynote speaker of the night Planned Parenthood of Illinois CEO Jennifer Welch.
Advertisement
According to the brochure for the event, the Rainbow Cafe was fully established on Sept. 15, 2000 after organizing since the spring.
Former member Tim Rice had the idea to start the group as a safe space and collaborated with the Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship and the Church of Good Shepherd to get the organization off the ground.
“It’s a good way for us to talk about what goals we have achieved this year, what we’re looking forward to in the future,” said Rainbow Cafe employee Cy Chamberlain. “People mingle and get connected and, you know, just try to come together and work on the same mission.”
Advertisement*
This is Chamberlain’s third gala and second one as an employee. She works as a community health worker(CHW) at the cafe and is taking SIU School of Medicine’s certified recovery support specialist.
“So Rainbow Cafe also has something called RCHW, which is Rainbow Cafe Health and Wellness and we are very close to getting certified to be able to bill people’s Medicaid,” Chamberlain said.
As a CHW Chamberlain said they help people navigate resources, working with unhoused people to get government benefits like Link and health insurance.
“What our objective is is to help people get the resources they need, to help pull them from a lifestyle that may be really destructive and self-harming and show them that there’s a better way,” said Chamberlain.
Founding member Mary Campbell was in attendance and said the biggest challenge for establishing the organization was finding the locations and finding adults to get involved.
“We couldn’t have the teens there by themselves, they had to have supervision, you know, but it was just a matter of the word getting out and finding people to be able to do that supervision,” Campbell said. “Part of it because we really didn’t need a lot of money at first, because we were using spaces that were nonprofits.”
Campbell said one of the spaces they used to use was the Church of the Good Sheperd, but felt it was an awkward environment and fidning their own space was important.
“I don’t even remember where we where they finally ended up, because they went through so many different places to meet,” Campbell said. “I went to Minnesota for a while, and when I came back, they were meeting out on giant city road in the area.”
Campbell said one of the main things was to keep their faith up and it was slowly built to what it is today. She never expected it to get as big as it is today.
“Finally coming up with a permanent place, people believing in the Rainbow Cafe enough to financially support that,” Campbell said. “Our reputation has grown outside of Carbondale so that we get support from other people.”
One thing to know about the cafe is the outreach outside of Carbondale, Campbell said. The Rainbow Cafe is in contact with other southern Illinois towns working with mental health departments offering high school students sometimes coming to the cafe for support and services.
The Rainbow Cafe has grown into so much more than just a safe space. It’s become a community resource not just for health services, but various group bonding and community events.
“The best thing is we have this wonderful building right down on the strip, and it’s permanent,” Campbell said. “People can find us, and we have wonderful employees. I love our employees.”
Vine invited Welch, the Planned Parenthood of Illinois CEO, to be the keynote speaker for the event because of the current state of reproductive choice and gender affirming care, she said.
“Supporting bodily autonomy and making sure that that is something that we’re working towards as a community. I was just like, ‘Hey, Jennifer, could you speak?’” Vine said.
One of the cafe’s newest services is its Behavioral Health Center and the health center being able to write letters for patients who are seeking gender-affirming care, Vine said.
“A lot of insurance providers require that, and so we’ve been working with Planned Parenthood as far as, like, making sure that our letters are sufficient for them to receive care,” Vine said. “I’m also a big believer in reproductive justice as well. You know, reproductive justice is LGBTQ justice. It’s all the same.”
Welch said when Planned Parenthood of Illinois heard the cafe was building the health center she reached out to Vine to connect with people in Carbondale that focus on sexual and reproductive health.
“What we know right now is that the issues that are most important to us, bodily autonomy, access to care, gender identity and just the ability to be who you really are,” Welch said. “That has become so polarized in our country, and it’s important that people recognize that.”
It’s important to be in rooms speaking about the reality of the state of our world and how everything doesn’t need to be political and polarized, Welch said.
Welch said a typical day at the health center will see patients from seven different states looking for services not available in their states.
“80% of the abortion patients at that health center come from another state,” Welch said. “80% there are like health care refugees, who are forced to travel for the most simple care that they need and deserve, and their states have made it impossible to get.”
The main reason people travel to Illinois is abortion services with the second being gender-affirming care, Welch said.
“Which is what makes our partnership with Rainbow Cafe so important, because people are being forced to travel for their care,” Welch said. “We refer patients and clients to Rainbow Cafe, probably every day.”
During her speech Welch opened up by thanking all the supporters of Rainbow Cafe and supporters of their collaboration because nonprofits can’t thrive without their supporters, donors, volunteers and others who give their time.
“We’re serving patients all the way from Waukegan, which is right near the Wisconsin border, to places like Flossmoor and Champaign near the Indiana border,” Welch said. “Most importantly, here in Carbondale.”
The focus of Illinois’ borders and bordering states is because of the limited care that is still provided in Illinois, Welch said.
“We are surrounded by states that are hostile to bodily autonomy that do not believe, like we all do, that people have the right to make their choices about when and whether to have a family,” Welch said.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Welch said they have seen patients travel from 40 different states come to Illinois
“We are amazingly fortunate that when they get here, if they get here, we are able to provide comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care every day at all of our health centers and via telehealth,” Welch said “We provide a full spectrum of care.”
Welch said along with having gender-affirming care in Carbondale it’s provided in 16 other health centers around the state.
“We’re also really proud of our pre and post exposure, HIV work and all of our prevention education that we are offering lightly,” Welch said. “We received a five-year grant from the federal government to investigate HIV prevention amongst black women, who are the single largest group that is gaining most likely to have a new HIV diagnosis. So we are really focused on that community right now.”
Welch touched on the Peoria Health Center that reopened in the summer after being firebombed last year by Tyler Massengill, who’s serving 10 years in federal prison for his crimes. It took over a year and more than $1 million dollars to even get it back open, she said.
“For that year, people in the central Illinois community of Peoria didn’t have the STI testing and treatment that they were used to getting at Planned Parenthood,” Welch said. “They didn’t have the HIV prevention and the gender affirming care and access to family planning and well patient checks.”
The opposition claims to help patients, but the experience Planned Parenthood has seen is they’re actually harming people, Welch said.
“They’re scaring patients, they’re misinforming patients, and that’s just people trying to get the health care that they need and deserve,” Welch said. “They have to come through a bunch of protesters who are threatening them and challenging them about the health care choices that patients are making that day.”
Welch said now is the time more than ever for women to keep in mind the politicians in the U.S. that demonstrate their disdain for the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups.
“And if you care about a person’s right to decide when they start a family, if you care about the LGBTQ+ community, if you care about health equity, if you care about reproductive justice, if you care about bodily autonomy, that you care about this election,” Welch said. “I want you to vote about those concerns.”
Advertisement
