Life Changing Empowerment 4 U is conceived and designed to meet the needs and exceed the expectations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning community in the Mid-South. As a comprehensive response to the challenges and opportunities articulated across this unique city of Memphis, the LCE Center will be the result of the committed collaboration with the City of Memphis. This combination of community design, organizational experience, and political vision has become the living platform from which the Life Changing Empowerment 4 U will emerge to serve a community that for too long has ranked among Memphis most underserved populations.
To begin to identify and understand the unmet health-and-wellness needs of this specific population, LCE visionaries elicited input from the LGBTQ community. This early initiative reached out to the impacted Memphis constituencies and began the ongoing process of determining how LCE4U can invite, support, organize, advocate for, and serve the current real-life needs of the Mid-South LGBTQ community. LCE identified the following Core Values as foundational to the development of the Center: “being inspirational and innovative, welcoming everyone, fostering accomplishment, accepting without judgment, exemplifying diversity, ensuring equality, and promoting self-improvement.
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Since 2019 Life Changing Empowerment 4 U, has struggled with the issues of Poverty In the LGBT Community: An Assessment of the Needs of Low-Income LGBT People” depicts an unexpectedly severe—even “heartbreaking”—constellation of discrimination-based disparities that is unique to this population and that immeasurably escalates the challenges posed by poverty, despite Memphis being home to far more LGBT people than anyplace else in Tennessee.
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In Memphis, LGBT invisibility, especially for low-income individuals, extends even to the absence of basic social and recreational amenities that have made other Mid-South locals more welcoming. More than 7,000 same-sex couples, or about 85% of Memphis total, live in the Shelby County, according to the state analysis of 2015 census data. Yet most Memphis residents would be hard-pressed to name a single explicitly gay- or lesbian-friendly community gathering spot in the mid-south. Inspired by a vision of the LCE4U “an LGBTQ safe space--a symbol of inclusion in the commercial, cultural, and geographic center of Memphis. For the past 3 years the organization has been outreaching across the Mid-South to identify and engage at-risk, underserved, and hard-to-reach populations, including low-income LGBTQ people, with services for risk prevention, harm reduction, and other vital supports.
