Virginia (Ginny) Apuzzo
Founding President and Life Time Board Member
After serving five years as the President of the Board of Directors, Ginny was named Founding President of the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center, an office which ensures her a permanent seat, with vote, on the Board.
Ginny’s tenure as President of the Center was marked by a remarkable series of accomplishments. The Center achieved non-profit status in 2006, bought and opened our headquarters building in Uptown Kingston in 2007, and hired our first staff in 2008. Today the Center’s membership numbers nearly 1,500, and we have both full- and part-time staff members working on a variety of programs aimed at raising awareness among social service providers of the unique needs of the LGBTQ population, as well as serving specific populations within the LGBTQ community, including youth and seniors.
Ginny is a native New Yorker whose professional political experience, both in New York and in Washington, DC, as well as her decades of activism for LGBT causes, made her the ideal founding leader for the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center.
Her experience includes executive service in the New York City, New York State and federal government, as well as the White House. In NYS she became the first openly gay person to be confirmed by the Senate as a Commissioner. In the federal government she was appointed Assistant to the President, and became the highest-ranking gay person ever to serve at the White House.
With over 35 years of activism in the LGBTQ community, she has served as Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and founding member of numerous gay and lesbian national and local organizations including the NYC Gay and Lesbian Community Center.
Ginny is a graduate of the College of New Paltz, State University of New York (B.S. in Urban Education); and has advanced education toward her doctorate in Urban Education at Fordham University in New York. She has also been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Law from Queens College of the City University of New York.