A local openly gay employee of a federal agency recently was honored for his commitment to encouraging diversity within the workplace.
Mike Frankel, communications coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic branch of the Environmental Protection Agency, was one of 15 individuals presented with the EPA’s Suzanne E. Olive Award for Exemplary Leadership in National Equal Employment Opportunity in a June ceremony.
Frankel heads the GLBT Diversity Program for the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region, headquartered in Philadelphia. The award was given to the managers of each of the GLBT Diversity Programs throughout the country.
Frankel, a 13-year employee of the EPA, was one of the founding members of the local program, which formed in 2000.
“There really was a need for some information, education and outreach to our staff and management,” Frankel said about the group’s creation.
The local GLBT Diversity Program brings together LGBT and ally employees to raise awareness about the importance of a tolerant and accepting work environment.
Approximately 20 percent of Frankel’s position is concentrated on developing the program, in addition to his other duties authoring press releases and staging media events and guiding internal EPA communications.
The other members of the program work on an ad-hoc, volunteer basis and organize events during Gay Pride Month in June, for National Coming Out Day in October and for World AIDS Day in November, as well as other activities throughout the year.
Frankel noted the EPA also has other “special-emphasis” groups that represent Hispanic, African American, Native American, Asian and female employees, and who all work together with the GLBT Diversity Program to take advantage of other educational opportunities.
“Diversity isn’t something that happens one month at a time,” Frankel said. “All of our constituencies criss-cross, so I try to reach out to as many of the other programs as I can so we can all cooperate on as many efforts as possible.”
Frankel said that since the program’s formation, he’s seen an influx in the number of employees from the other special-interest groups that have become involved in the LGBT events.
“One of the nicest things is that over the years, the number of allies has grown dramatically,” he said. “When it first started, most of the allies who joined were mainly women and now we also see a lot of men volunteering, as well as people from the Hispanic program or the African American, Asian American or Native American ones. It’s great to see how each year the barriers drop a little more. More people want to get involved and become allies from across the spectrum of diversity.”
Frankel has also served as the secretary of the EPA’s GLBT Advisory Council — which grew out of the flourishing regional GLBT Diversity Programs — for the past six years. The council provides guidance to the EPA on policy issues that could impact the LGBT community and serves as a resource for the regional GLBT Diversity Programs.
The nominations for the Suzanne E. Olive Award came from the directors of the regional offices in San Francisco and Atlanta, which Frankel said was an “important statement that the recognition came from different corners and from such high-level individuals in the infrastructure of the agency who recognized the importance of the work that the groups are doing.”
Frankel noted the EPA has long been an organization that values its LGBT employees and, to that end, instituted a nondiscrimination policy inclusive of sexual orientation in the early ’90s.
“The EPA has really been in the forefront of federal agencies in working to create GLBT-friendly workplaces,” he said. “The agency has been forward-thinking and continues to try and move forward even further.”
Frankel said the local office will do its part within the next year to advocate for its entire LGBT employee population, with special emphasis on the Bs and Ts.
“We’ve spent a lot of time building an understanding about gay men and lesbian women, but the issues for people who are bisexual or transgender in the workplace are something we’d like to look more closely at,” he said. “We’ve laid the groundwork for that over the past couple years, so we’re now looking to continue to expand.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].