A college professor with a wealth of background in nonprofit management has assumed the helm of a local LGBT of color agency.
Ralph Godbolt was appointed executive director of The Colours Organization Inc., this spring.
Colours’ former executive director, Robert Burns, passed away suddenly in December.
Godbolt, a straight ally, is on the faculty at Cheyney University, a historically black college, where he teaches in a master’s of public administration program. He has also taught at Chestnut Hill College and Neumann University.
The 38-year-old Pittsburgh native attained his undergraduate degree from Clarion University.
Among his nonprofit accomplishments, he is the founder and former executive director of the Campbell Street Youth and Family Center, a north-central Pennsylvania multipurpose community center.
Locally, Godbolt has served as executive director of Special Olympics Philadelphia, where he spearheaded a fundraising campaign and worked to bring the agency’s work to underserved communities, and as executive director of the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children. In that capacity, he created a dropout prevention program for at-risk youth and developed a library-service program for a number of local elementary schools.
Godbolt said he has long been interested in Colours’ work and pursued the director position in remembrance of a young gay man he mentored who passed away.
“He was essentially a little brother of mine. He was openly gay, and that took him a long time to get to that point. He was ostracized from his family, from the African-American church, from his neighborhood,” Godbolt said. “It took him a long time to find himself and by the time he did, he died just a few months later at age 24. I wish he knew of an organization like Colours that has the support and does so much for the community.”
While the organization has a powerful influence on the community, Godbolt acknowledged that it has had “unstable executive leadership” in recent years. Several years ago, the agency’s director was arrested for embezzling money from the agency, and the organization saw two more directors before Burns took over.
Godbolt said he will work to solidify the agency’s reputation and its finances.
“My focus has been to start the process of stabilizing the organization,” he said. “The bulk of our challenges have centered around funding, so we’re working now to diversify our funding.”
Programmatic expansion is also a top goal, he said.
“I want to look at our programs and ask ourselves if we’re doing as much as we can be doing and if we’re as successful as we can be with our programs,” Godbolt said. “For example, we offer a one-day-per-week youth drop-in center, but the question is if we can do more with that. The school district is dealing with a drop-out crisis and with unsafe schools, and both of those impact LGBT African-American youth very much, so we need to look at if we can be more proactive on issues like this.”
Godbolt said he envisions Colours in a much stronger position on all fronts by next year.
“I would like to see a much more stable organization. I want to see us stabilized financially, and increase the number of people we’re serving and testing,” he said. “We will be an organization that is cognizant of its past but not living in the past — an organization that is forging a strong reputation based on the realities facing LGBT people in Philadelphia.”
Colours will host an open house for community members to meet Godbolt at 6 p.m. July 18 at 112 N. Broad St.