From a Living Room to a National Foundation: Lambda Foundation’s 40-Year Story
In 1983, a seed was planted.
That’s how I opened my remarks at a reunion dinner last month, and it’s still the best way I know to describe what happened next.
What started informally around 1982 — a network of gay men in Ottawa looking for community and connection — became, by 1985, something official: a grassroots social and professional networking group for gay and lesbian entrepreneurs and professionals, organized under founder Gary Sealey and a handful of others who believed Ottawa needed a space like this. Early gatherings were dinners, guest speakers, and fundraisers, with members donating directly to local queer causes.
By 1992, that group had grown into something bigger: a registered charitable foundation, focused on education and research.
Three years later, in 1995, Lambda established its first scholarship endowment, at the University of Ottawa, for gay and lesbian studies — the beginning of everything we continue doing today. Along the way, the organization also launched Wilde About Sappho, a queer literary gala that ran as one of Canada’s major annual fundraisers until 2007. Its inaugural event, in November 1991 at the National Library of Canada auditorium, featured readings from Barb Freeman’s partner, Gabriella Goliger — from her book Song of Ascent — alongside John Barton, Sean Martin, and Candis Graham. Former Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar moderated. It was, by every account, electric — and it told the founders something important: this community was hungry for exactly this kind of gathering.
Forty years later, I had the privilege of sitting down to dinner with many of the people who made all of that happen — founders, past board members, Wilde About Sappho organizers and performers — to say thank you, and to share where Lambda Scholarship Foundation Canada stands today.
There was a lot to celebrate. Last year, we raised over $110,000 — more than five times what we’d raised the year before. We received three significant gifts toward new awards, which have become the Emerging 2SLGBTQIA+ Francophone Writer Award, the Vu-Gruber 2SLGBTQIA+ Refugee Tuition Bursary, and the QueerTech Lambda Foundation Award, to be announced this November. And Women and Gender Equality Canada extended our capacity-building funding by another twelve months, worth roughly $150,000.
None of the above happens without the people who built the foundation this all stands on.
The evening’s highlight came when Cameron Aitken, Lambda’s Past President, presented Tuan Vu — our treasurer for nearly ten years, and, together with his partner Gil Gruber, the driving force behind the Vu-Gruber Bursary — with Lambda paraphernalia and a certificate of volunteerism from his local Member of Parliament. It was a surprise, and it visibly moved him. As it should have. Almost thirty years of showing up for this organization, in ways both loud and quiet, deserves exactly that kind of moment.
Tuan Vu — Treasurer, Lambda Scholarship Foundation Canada
Lambda Foundation exists because, four decades ago, a small group of people decided Ottawa needed something that didn’t yet exist.
It still does, today as a Canada-wide charitable organization, because we recognize that what Lambda Foundation has been doing is still relevant — and needed — today, and long into the future.
— Darren Stehle, Director of Development, Lambda Scholarship Foundation Canada
Lambda Foundation has been built by people who decided to show up — for forty years. If you’d like to be part of what comes next, here’s how to start.
