A Grand Opening at The Rainbow Wellness Collective

The dilemma is simple: You live in a rural part of the country, and you are coming out as LGBTQ+. There is no support for miles. The largest city is hours away. Even with the Internet and video conferencing, it is not enough to find a physical space to be yourself – and to find community.

A Pride celebration may not be enough. It is just one or two days a year. At times when you need that connection outside of the confines of your room, they simply are too far to go.

In recent years, the effort towards creating a physical space for us in smaller communities has been gaining momentum. Not just in the number of Pride celebrations in Greater Minnesota, but the want to create more spaces in those same cities and towns.

A small group of people in Saint Cloud have taken a major step forward towards creating a year-round space for our community. Towards the end of 2023, the Rainbow Wellness Collective in the heart of downtown Saint Cloud opened their doors. It has become a beacon for our community that will shine across Central Minnesota and beyond.

The Collective’s location is perfect – a historic two-story corner building on West Saint Germain Street that is a part of a resurgence of the Saint Cloud Historic District. According to the National Register of Historic Places, the location was once known as the Lahr Building, owned by a blacksmith named Nicholas Lahr. Originally built in 1887, it was last used as retail space with upstairs offices.

Getting the building for the Rainbow Wellness Collective was quite the story unto itself. “We were originally going to buy a different building and that one fell through,” said Toni Rakke, the Co-Chair of Rainbow Wellness Collective and proprietor of EveryBody Wellness. “Eric said, ‘Why don’t you come take a look at this building?’ Knowing that we probably couldn’t afford it in the first place and we came in and looked and of course fell in love with it because the aesthetics and everything just fit so perfectly with what we had been looking for.”

After meeting the criteria for what they were looking for – including meeting the Americans with Disabilities Act standards – Rakke and the Rainbow Wellness Collective board purchased the N. Lahr Building. They achieved this through donations and financing – including an owner buy-back program.

The vision and the goals of this center for wellness and community were spelled out by the Rainbow Wellness Coalition’s Executive Director, Jennifer Potter-Vig. She said that her vision is to be “a safe place for community, for a population of people that often in Central Minnesota especially, don’t have just a place where they can just go and do the things that they want to do.”

“I envision it being a place where they know they can just show up as they are in whatever form they are and present themselves,” Potter-Vig continued. “And that is my goal here as their executive director, is whatever that is, make sure that they can do that in a safe space.”

So far, the Rainbow Wellness Collective have several tenants making space inside the building, providing services with an emphasis on individual LGBTQ+ wellness. The building’s tenants include Seal Dwyer Counseling, EveryBody Wellness, and Jamie Jones Physical Therapy. Also, Saint Cloud Pride, QUEERSPACE Collective and Outfront Minnesota also have offices inside the building.

Currently, the Great River Children’s Museum is taking temporary space in the building’s basement until their new location is complete in Saint Cloud.

“All these different organizations, mental health therapy and physical therapy, and all the queer organizations and all of these different folks are coming together and supporting each other rather than competing, because there’s plenty of queer folks for us to go around,” said Seal Dwyer, Rainbow Wellness Collective Tenant At-Large Board Member and proprietor of of Seal Dwyer Counseling

The Rainbow Wellness Collective also host several programs inside of their space. “There are various dance and movement classes, [and] yoga classes,” explained Potter-Vig. “Focusing on wellness in that aspect. Obviously, we do have partners in the building that offer support groups with Pride and QUEERSPACE Collective and OutFront [Minnesota].”

Dwyer added that, “We’ve got a dozen movement and dance teachers, we’ve got a local artist who’s an incredible artist, and she’s teaching art classes and how to draw and how to paint classes and things like that. We’ve got all these community organizations that are not actually housed here who are just like, ‘We want to support this, we need to support this.’”

The response from the community has been extremely positive. Accord to Rakke, the LGBTQ+ community were “so happy there is a place they can come and just be. No judgment. When we had our Queer Year’s Eve [at the Rainbow Wellness Collective]…it was wonderful. People could wear what they want, they could be who they are. It was lovely to see couples of all genders and presentations enjoying that kiss, that wonderful time at midnight. It was awesome. So yeah, we’ve heard nothing but good from the community.”

From this strong start, there are talks of bringing more programming to the Rainbow Wellness Collective. For example, Potter-Vig said that they are “working on an MOU with The Aliveness Project…to bring HIV testing, Tea Time, and even beyond HIV testing, preventative care at some point, someday down the road in a couple of years would be wonderful. We’re having those discussions and getting that rolling.”

“And, then just building other programs as far as third space and a Hangout for the 18 to 23-year-old range, just because there’s a lot of availability for hangouts for younger and older, but not so much that range group,” further explained Potter-Vig. “Then, we’re partnering Planned Parenthood for Reach One Teach One on various topics. And then also with the Whitney Senior Center is another group that we’re partnering with. I actually am giving a talk to grandparents and educating them on their grandkids.”

That is just scratching the surface. Rakke adds that the Rainbow Wellness Collective is also “planning on doing a binder library and education for how to wear those binders. We’re talking about doing some education on issues that affect trans people, both [masculine] and feminine.”

“There’s different things that go with them, and just trying to figure out what the community needs and meet those,” explained Rakke. “Some people just need to know how to do their finances. So, planning on some classes to talk about finances. Some people don’t even know how to do a checkbook or banking, unfortunately, because we know how families have not supported in some things. So things that we take for granted that we’ve learned from our families, we need to have that available for them.”

According to the website, the Rainbow Wellness Collective stated that there are 14,000 LGBTQ+ people living in the greater Saint Cloud area. Perhaps even more, if you expand that territorial footprint across Central Minnesota.

To reach these people, you have to start somewhere. As Dwyer explained, “not a lot of nonprofits start out with a building and then go from there. But that’s how we did this. It was kind of a, if you build it, they will come. And, we got this amazing building at an incredible price and we were able to bring this together and use our community resources and then be like, all right, everybody’s housed. Everybody’s doing this, everybody’s here and let’s go expand and expand into the space, expand into the community, expand our presence. Let’s expand our power, expand our voice.”

Rainbow Wellness Collective
601 West Saint Germain St, Saint Cloud
https://www.rainbowwellnesscollective.org