Please note:
Having brought our major projects to a happy conclusion, we dissolved Purple as of August 31, 2023. This site functions only as a repository of information about the Lesbian Legacies Endowment we created, and as a record of Purple’s herstory.
Our Origins
The roots of Purple are deep in the Lansing womyn’s community, but we can trace the beginnings of this specific organization to 2005. That year, several of the womyn who are presently involved with Purple, along with others, decided to mount a fundraising campaign called the Kay Gardner Memorial Festival Fund to purchase tickets to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival for womyn who would not otherwise be able to attend. Our premier event, February Festie Fever, was a mini-Festival with movies, burritos, performances, and a 
portajane (for show) in the backyard. After that, a concert by Nedra Johnson, and various other festivities, we ended up sending eleven womyn off to the Festival that year, along with an Adirondack chair we decorated to honor Kay Gardner that graced workshop Area 15 through the last Festival in 2015. You can find our legacy website, with more pictures, here.
Replete with success, we rested on our laurels for a few years.
Michfest Fever
In 2012, Festie fever struck again as we realized how many womyn were missing the Michfest experience. A crew of eleven, including some of 
the same fanatics and their friends, pledging “no womon left behind!”, formed up to “send a grrl to camp” in 2013. We reprised February Festie Fever as an even more elaborate, funny, and engaging winter mini-Fest, and added an outdoor version in June called Festival Foreplay and a successful letter appeal. This round, we fielded a Michfest Fever website (legacy site here), a blog, and a Facebook page, which are no longer in operation. Several fine times were had by all, and we sent five more womyn off to the 2013 Festival.
The Dawning of Purple
In the meantime, it had dawned on us that we ought
to form up a non-profit corporation and go for 501(c)(3) status. And, clearly, if we were going to go to that trouble, we should structure the organization to be able to foster other lesbian and womyn’s community initiatives like Michfest Fever that might appear in the future. We set about fashioning a Purple non-profit umbrella. We incorporated in Michigan in April 2013 and received our determination of federal tax-exempt status on January 9, 2015. Michfest Fever morphed into the first project of Purple.
Under our Purple umbrella, we produced a February Festie Fever in 2014, with the same mini-Fest vibe, and mounted another mail campaign. We were able to send four happy womyn off to the 2014 Festival.
In 2015, even before we all heard that it was to be the last Michfest, we geared up early with renewed enthusiasm. We had some new co-conspirators and a new, more open, and more accessible venue. We also had the generous participation of one of Michfest’s 
favorite comedians, Karen Williams. This February Festie Fever involved food (of course); drumming and movies; a huge auction, with Karen serving as auctioneer while keeping us laughing ourselves silly; and a DJ’ed dance to top it off. With that event and our other efforts, we raised enough to buy tickets to bring eleven womyn and girls to the last Festival who otherwise couldn’t have joined us there.
We once again spent some time resting and assimilating and slowly preparing to announce that we were open to proposals from other womyn’s and/or lesbian groups who needed a home, some consultation, and a boost in executing a short-term project or launching a new organization.
Fiscal Sponsorship of the We Want the Land Coalition
Then, in the fall of 2016, we were very excited to have the opportunity to become the Fiscal Sponsor of the We Want the Land Coalition (WWTLC), a fiercely ambitious initiative to purchase the beloved site of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and to hold and manage the Land for the benefit of women and girls. A fiscal sponsor is a non-profit organization that provides administrative services and oversight to, and assumes legal and financial responsibility for, a group that is engaged in work that furthers the fiscal sponsor’s own mission. A fiscal sponsor that is a 501(c)(3) non-profit can
accept tax-deductible donations on behalf of the sponsored project until the sponsored group achieves its own 501(c)(3) determination from the IRS. WWTLC’s mission could not be more fully aligned with our own, and Purple was honored and delighted to sponsor the We Want the Land Coalition. Taking on this sponsorship temporarily precluded our actively soliciting proposals from local groups.
WWTLC was able to purchase the Land on April 17, 2017. During the summers of 2017 and 2018, a small crew of volunteers assembled on the now WWTLC Land to familiarize themselves with opening utilities for the season, making plans for using the Land in accordance with the Conservation Easement it carries, and accommodating an Event and Gathering Planners Week designed to work out the terms for Land rental and to inspire planners to fill the Summer 2019 calendar. Meanwhile, WWTLC achieved its own IRS 501(c)(3) determination in September of 2017, and Purple’s fiscal sponsorship of WWTLC ended on Dec. 31, 2017. The women of WWTLC continue to revise the infrastructure of The Land and prepare for events such as those held in the summer of 2019, the first during this new era, and resumed in 2021 and 2022 after a hiatus caused by the pandemic.
Find detailed information about WWTLC’s structure, proposal, and plans as well as recent developments at www.wwtlc.org or on Facebook at WWTLC Community
Establishment of the Lesbian Legacies Endowment
In the fall of 2019, encouraged in our dedication to Purple’s mission by our success working with the We Want the Land Coalition, and having learned an enormous amount during the process, we took on a new goal: we created the Lesbian Legacies: Amazon Cultural/Political Activism in Second Wave Feminism Endowment Fund in cooperation with the Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections.
The Special Collections include a wonderful array of lesbian and feminist materials, recently graced with donations of the records of Goldenrod Records and of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, both dear to our mid-Michigan hearts. We are excited about the potential use of these materials to increase the recognition and the impact of the work of lesbian feminists in the last half-century. We especially hope that young womyn will be able to find and build on our heritage. To those ends, we decided to create an endowment to support, build and make accessible these materials, primarily by creating opportunities for members of our community as well as more formal scholars to come and use the collections for research, activism, and artistic activities.
As of June 2022, the Lesbian Legacies Endowment has been actualized; that is, it has received gifts amounting to a little over the $50,000 minimum required for it to become operative, an occasion for great rejoicing. However, since the endowment can use only the earnings from that investment to make grants, we hope to see it become considerably larger. We will be engaged in ongoing fundraising, as well as in efforts to make potential visiting scholars aware of the possibility of receiving a grant. We hope that in Fiscal Year 2023, starting in July 2023, information specific to our endowment will be included in the description and instructions for the Visiting Scholars Program, by which the grants will be administered.
See our Lesbian Legacies Endowment page for more information and for ways to support this project specifically.
Fostering Other Lesbian & Womyn’s Community Initiatives
In keeping with our original vision, Purple sought proposals from local Lansing womyn and womyn from nearby regions within Michigan who were imagining or already working on other nonprofit initiatives to further the well-being of lesbians, womyn, and our community itself. The relationship between Purple and a candidate project would be determined by the nature of the project and the needs of both Purple and the participants. It could range from Purple’s adopting an initiative as its own, staffed by the womyn who proposed it, to a formal fiscal sponsorship. We were and are open to addressing a wide range of concerns: education, culture, health, civil rights, and more fit under our umbrella.
As we continued our outreach to members of the Lansing area lesbian/womyn’s community whose projects might benefit from sheltering under Purple’s umbrella, we especially invited initiatives by and for members who are under-represented and under-resourced: womyn of color, young womyn, differently-abled womyn, low-income womyn, and others.
Although we have had what seemed to us to be very useful consultations with several womyn whose imagined projects turned out to be well beyond our capacity, we have received no proposals from any who wanted help with initiatives comparable to our own, or even who were ready for fiscal sponsorship. Given this lack of demand for what we could offer, we have suspended our solicitation of proposals. We remain available to share experience and dispense advice in consultation with any feminist/lesbian enterprise that wants it.
Building And Sustaining Lesbian & Womyn’s Community
Now, late winter of 2023, we will be focused on spreading the word about the Lesbian Legacies Endowment, promoting the use of the plethora of resources in the Michigan State Libraries Special Collections, and raising funds to increase the endowment so that more money will be available for travel grants from it. We may also sponsor the occasional social or cultural event to provide the opportunity for womyn to gather, thereby enacting and celebrating community and (we hope!) fostering foment.
