NYC’s Ali Forney Center Gets $300K from Golden Girl

The estate of the late “Golden Girls” actress, Bea Arthur donated $300,000 to The Ali Forney Center (AFC), the nation’s largest homeless LGBT youth service organization based in New York City.

"We work with hundreds of young people who are rejected by their families because of who they are," said AFC Executive Director Carl Siciliano.

"We are overwhelmed with gratitude that Bea saw that LGBT youth deserve as much love and support as any other young person, and that she placed so much value in the work we do to protect them, and to help them rebuild their lives."

The announcement comes just a month after the AFC held a memorial service for Arthur and released plans to establish a house named in her honor to accommodate 12 homeless youths.

The AFC was established in 2002 as a safe place for LGBT youth to have the opportunity to get off the streets by providing housing, medical care and educational services to close to 1,000 young people a year.   

Half of the Center’s clients are Black, 30% are Latino and 20% are White, Native Indian or Pacific Islander.

Ali Forney was a homeless black gay youth who was killed on the streets of Harlem in December of 1997.  Forney was dedicated to the safety of other homeless queer youth; he was a committed HIV prevention worker and aggressively advocated that the NYPD investigate a series of murders of the homeless queer youth he had befriended.  His murderer was never identified.

More than 42 percent of the country's homeless youth identify as LGBT, and approximately 90 percent of that group are people of color, according to a 2006 study released by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and the National Coalition for the Homeless.