New Paltz native Richard Heyl de Ortiz has been a familiar face around town for a long time, especially at Elting Memorial Library events like the annual book fair. He wears many hats besides library board president, and those who know him better will be aware that he’s an adoptive father and a tireless advocate on behalf of children in New York’s foster care system, at both the county and state level. But now Heyl de Ortiz has taken on a new role that harks back to earlier stages of his career: He has been named the new executive director of the Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center, effective December 6.
Young Richard Heyl grew up on Huguenot Street, raised primarily by his grandparents, who had “no issue,” he says, when he came out as gay in his teens. He found a nurturing early mentor in renowned New Paltz High School art teacher and painter Fran Sutherland. He recalls discovering that “Art was a safe place.” So, when it came time for college, he was drawn to an innovative hybrid program at the Parsons School of Design that was meant to equip art students with business skills, leading to the degree of Bachelor of Business Administration, Strategic Design and Management.
“I came out of that with a certain way of thinking and skills,” says Heyl de Ortiz. “But the career paths they had in mind were in things like fashion or home products – whereas I saw an application to doing community service, working for not-for-profits.”
When he started attending Parsons in 1985, New York City was the epicenter of the AIDS crisis. No effective treatment was yet available for those infected with HIV, and gay men were dying by the thousands. So, in his spare time Heyl volunteered at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Manhattan, which shared a space with the activist organization ACT UP. He ended up developing a new program for the Center called NYC Orientation, designed to welcome newcomers to the City’s LGBTQ community, “help them understand the breadth of support and get connected” without depending on the gay bar scene, where AIDS was still rampant. “I loved doing that,” he says. “It was my introduction to what a community center can be.”
After graduation, Heyl worked for several not-for-profits, moving to Philadelphia in 1993 to become the director of development and finance for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, where he found “a sense of allyship and common cause.” (Nowadays we would probably call it “intersectionality.”) It was in Philadelphia that he met and moved in with his husband-to-be, Anthony Ortiz.
At that time, Philly’s only LGBTQ center was located in “a back alley in the center city,” disguised under the vague name of Penguin Place. Heyl left his ACLU job, but parlayed the contacts he’d made there to organize a coalition of community stakeholders to buy a vacant building in a more visible location in what was already known as the “gayborhood,” near the iconic Giovanni’s Place bookstore. There he founded the William Way LGBT Community Center, developed a strategic plan, created programs and oversaw renovation of the building. “It was a great experience creating that. It changed the dynamics of that community,” he says.
By 1999, the William Way Center was well-established and Heyl was thinking about what his next project might be, while Ortiz was looking to retrain to become a teacher. Heyl recommended SUNY New Paltz. They moved back to Heyl’s old hometown, and he began a five-year stint as executive director at the Youth Resource Development Corporation in Poughkeepsie. He describes YRDC at the time as being “like two agencies under one roof,” administering a large AmeriCorps program of mostly white interns alongside a federally funded program providing job training to youth, primarily of color, in marginalized neighborhoods. Heyl’s challenge was “bringing those two components together, creating avenues for the Black kids to transition into AmeriCorps.” The agency made significant progress on his watch, but foundered fiscally when the Pataki and Bush administrations slashed their budgets for such programs.
It was while Heyl de Ortiz was working for YRDC that he became familiar with the work of Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) and took on the role of a volunteer helping a child navigate the foster care system. It was to become a lifetime mission – what he calls “community service in one of its purest forms.” He and his husband eventually ended up adopting the first child to whose case he was assigned, a 7-year-old named John Paul. By the time things fell apart at YRDC in 2005, Heyl de Ortiz was taking the child advocacy role so seriously that he signed on to become co-executive director of CASA for Children of Ulster County.
While his adoption of John Paul was in process, he distanced himself slightly from CASA to become director of public programs, marketing and development at Historic Huguenot Street for nearly three years. He remembers it as a time when the roles of the indigenous Munsee inhabitants of New Paltz and the African slaves owned by the Huguenot settlers were first being given serious scrutiny by the historical society, along with the “changing role of women” under Dutch and English rule of Nieuw Netherland and New York.
In 2011 he returned to CASA of Ulster County in a professional capacity, this time as executive director. Exercising his coalition-building skills, Heyl de Ortiz soon took his work on behalf of foster families to the state level. He served on the steering committee of CHAMPS New York (Children Need Amazing Parents) and became its founding executive director under the new name of the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York, turning a fledgling organization with a staff of one into an effective statewide advocacy organization with 23 staff members and four regional offices. As a volunteer, he served on the Mandated Reporter Training Social Services Advisory Group for Prevent Child Abuse New York, Statewide Child Welfare Court Improvement Project for the NYS Unified Court System and the Family First Prevention Services Act Workgroup for the State Office of Children and Family Services.
In 2019 he became director of training and program support for CASA for Children of New York State, implementing a new system of statewide program support and volunteer training for 15 affiliate programs despite the challenges of isolation during COVID. In recent years he has also been serving on the Child Advocates Curriculum Development Committee for the National CASA Association and the board of directors of the Child Welfare League of America.
As if all this weren’t enough dedication to worthy causes, Heyl de Ortiz also stayed consistently active on the board of the Elting Library since his return to New Paltz, doing several shifts as president. He chaired the capital campaign that raised $2.8 million to fund the building’s most recent significant expansion.
And now, it’s back to his youthful roots as a community organizer serving the needs of the LGBTQ+ community, at a time of ferocious “culture wars” when the American electorate is divided and bigots of all stripes feel emboldened. “I see the challenges happening now in this country. There is a need for places like the Community Center to exist and to thrive,” he says. This time around he gets to incorporate the coalition-building skills that he developed over the decades, as well as greater experience in working with socioeconomically challenged families, particularly youth of color, and with issues of social equity.
When HV1 caught up with Heyl de Ortiz on his second day on the job last week, he identified the need for broader outreach as a top priority for the Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center in the years to come. That will mean forging connections with allies in cities and towns well outside Kingston, where the Center is physically located, in order to provide services to the hitherto-underserved.
“We have to be more intentional about how and where we offer services. We need to reach out more, to leverage relationships with other organizations in other locations,” he says. “In some cases that means using technology more. The pandemic made us more comfortable with that approach. We need to ask, ‘What can we offer that goes out into the region more?’ We know there are problems with public transportation; that comes up over and over again.”
School systems have a role to play, he notes, along with social service agencies of various kinds, all of which will have LGBTQ+ people among their constituencies. “We need to figure out how we can bring the community together, but not duplicate services.” That said, Heyl de Ortiz believes that the Center’s headquarters building at 300 Wall Street in Kingston’s Stockade District has “untapped resources,” and he’ll be using his fundraising expertise to seek ways to maximize its potential.
Less than a week into the job, Heyl de Ortiz says that he’s in a learning phase right now, “finding my pathway.” He praises the Center’s prep work – surveys, town hall meetings and so on – in sounding out the region’s LGBTQ+ community on its priorities for fresh leadership before offering him the position. “The process involves listening: stepping outside of oneself to understand another person’s perspective and experience. I’m open to hearing from anyone about what they think we should be doing. I don’t have all the answers.”
To contact the Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center’s new executive director, e-mail Richard Heyl de Ortiz at r.heyldeortiz@lgbtqcenter.org. Queries from organizations interested in collaborating to provide locally based programs and services are especially welcome.
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