Mazzoni Center’s new leader has come home to Philadelphia to listen and help heal

You’ve just been made the new leader of Philadelphia’s largest LGBTQ health and wellness agency. It’s a big job: heading a $14 million organization that provides care to more than 7,000 people throughout the region. Yet it is also an agency that has been roiled the last several years by internal turmoil, instability, and shaken community trust.

Do you move quickly to make your mark? Stir things up? Make bold promises?

Well, if you are Sultan Shakir, the new president and executive officer of the Mazzoni Center, what you do first is listen.

“Everyone always asks the leader, ‘What are your plans? What are you going to do?’ That’s not up to me by myself,” said Shakir, 41. “The Mazzoni Center’s future has to be based on understanding the community’s needs, and understanding why certain communities are better served or underserved, based on the general context of the world but also the Mazzoni Center’s history, even its current operations. And then put together a plan that puts all of that into context.”

Since Shakir took his post Jan. 10, he’s met with community groups, local leaders, and past and present staff members — and he’s far from done.

He comes to Mazzoni after a successful run as executive director of SMYAL, a housing and service nonprofit for LGBTQ youth in Washington, D.C. Under his leadership, that agency substantially expanded its services, budget, and staff.

A classically and jazz trained musician (bass and cello) and graduate of Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute, Shakir is a Philadelphia native who attended its public schools — high-achieving Greenfield and Masterman — and found his life’s passion and purpose in community organizing and social justice work.

For people who know him professionally and personally, his thoughtful approach with Mazzoni is no surprise.

“He’s a consummate unifier,” said Jorge Membreño, SMYAL deputy executive director.

Marty Rouse, senior director of political programs for the LGBTQ Victory Fund, was Shakir’s supervisor at the national Human Rights Campaign. Shakir worked on such issues as marriage equality and making historically Black universities more inclusive for LGBTQ people.

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Rouse also said Shakir was skilled at getting diverse groups to work together, but it was always about more than just the end result.

“Sultan was a really good person to [say] to leadership that we have to make sure we fight for everybody,” Rouse said. “That was something that I think was important to him as a person.”

Carol Dann, longtime education activist and curriculum manager with Camden’s Hopeworks, knows Shakir well. He is married to her son, Mark Dann, also an activist.

“Sultan is very perceptive,” Carol Dann said. “I think because underneath it all, he’s a musician, he can see how things fit together, as you would if you were playing in an orchestra. He can read a situation.”

Skills like those could prove quite useful leading an agency that is still dealing with the residual damage of years of internal and external discord.

In 2017, former medical director Robert Winn resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct with patients. He was followed by longtime Mazzoni leader Nurit Shein, accused by staff of not heeding the allegations soon enough. Also under Shein, employees of color claimed they were singled out for disciplinary action, and they filed complaints with the city.

Mazzoni’s last permanent leader was Lydia Gonzalez Sciarrino. She left several months after her 2018 hiring, following a number of controversies, including the firing of a diversity director and ongoing dissatisfaction that Sciarrino was not a member of the LGBTQ community.

During those years, Mazzoni’s employees, who formed a union, accused agency leadership of anti-labor tactics. In addition, Mazzoni had a history of troubled relations with the transgender and Black and brown communities.

Jacen Bowman, vice president of Philadelphia Black Pride and King Mother of the Haus of Supreme Moncler, a house in the city ballroom community, said Mazzoni has historically looked to grassroots groups such as his to help obtain revenue-generating data about people with HIV, but then offered the groups limited support in return.

“It was like, ‘You guys are the biggest health and wellness center in the city. Y’all do so many great things that the community needs. But when it comes to Black and brown, you always shortchange us,’” Bowman said. “They wanted the numbers so they could get more funding, but the funding wasn’t being poured back into the community.”

For the last few years, Mazzoni has been run by an interim leadership committee that many people say has restored some order and risen to the challenges of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, a selection committee that included Mazzoni staff, leadership, and community members, aided by executive search firm Kevin Chase, looked for most of the last year for the right person to move the agency forward. Search committee chair Marianne Price said Shakir stood out in key ways, beyond his proven management track record. That he is from Philly was one more plus.

“The bonus was that he had roots in Philadelphia that obviously are going to make him a really good connector to the Philadelphia community,” she said.

While many people say Shakir has a gift for bringing people together, he also is someone who has experienced the pain of feeling apart. Like many of the people he later served, he witnessed early on how the powerful often regard people whose lives check the same demographic boxes as his.

Growing up in Philadelphia, Shakir was an arts and music kid who went to city schools with reputations for academic rigor. He was also raised to be a devout Muslim.

“We would go to mosque, fast during Ramadan, pray five times a day,” he said.

In high school, he started to realize he was gay. Freshman year of college, he knew.

“I remember sitting behind the cafeteria at school and struggling with reconciling being gay with everything I was taught about being Muslim,” Shakir said. “I will never forget. I was behind the cafeteria, crying and thinking, ‘If it’s bad enough to be gay, it’s worse to lie about it. So that’s one thing I can do — not lie about it.’”

Acceptance did not come easy for his parents, either. “For me and my parents, it was a reconciliation of the truth.”

If early college brought that key realization of who he was, not long afterward Shakir learned something that would prove life-changing for him about the world. While he was still in college, he got work as a community organizer, working with low-income people in Baltimore.

As an activist, his job was to help bring the needs of the people he was organizing to the attention of people in power. More often than not, those needs were ignored. It didn’t take long to hit him: “There are probably more people in power working against me and people like me than working for me.”

It was eye-opening — uncomfortably so.

“I could emotionally tell blinders had been taken off,” he said.

He still loved music, but he knew then it would not be his life’s work.

“I made a conscious decision young,” he said. “It’s great to entertain people, but I need to work to change the world.”

And so that’s what he set out to try to do. With the Human Rights Campaign, he worked on issues important to LGBTQ people around the country. At SMYAL, he and his staff expanded programs aimed at helping LGBTQ youth achieve stable futures, including many young people who had been homeless.

With Mazzoni, he saw an agency doing important work with the potential to do even more.

“It’s providing care that no one else is providing in the region. It’s providing that care for people I call my family: queer and trans people, the Black and brown people in Philadelphia,” he said. “Even before COVID, there was a huge need for medical support for the queer and trans community. The Mazzoni Center has been at the forefront of that for decades, and there’s the ability to expand upon its mission going forward.”

Mazzoni is a significant health resource for LGBTQ people, offering care and culturally sensitive services not widely available elsewhere in the region. Its health center has about 16,000 visits a year. Mazzoni’s clients hail from more than 780 zip codes, including but not limited to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Delaware.

Its new leader plans to hold meetings with Mazzoni’s various constituencies — including trans people, LGBTQ seniors, queer youth, center staff, and more — to assess needs and help chart new directions.

Addressing the unresolved past hurts is also one of his top priorities.

“There is the healing that needs to be done around sexual assault and how the organization responded. There are feelings of anti-Blackness, anti-transness,” Shakir said. “People are carrying baggage around. You have to deal with it. You have to take accountability.”

So far, he’s been getting positive reviews from community leaders.

“It’s exciting to see him engaging with and listening to the staff, community, and clients about what is really needed to support the health and well-being of the LGBTQ community in the region,” said Celena Morrison, director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBT Affairs and a former Mazzoni community engagement specialist.

“I really get the sense he’s going to be an excellent bridge builder,” said Chris Bartlett, executive director of the William Way Community Center.

Zachary Wilcha, director of the Independence Business Alliance, Philadelphia’s LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce, said Shakir seems committed to listening to all community voices to help restore trust in the agency.

“By appointing a new leader, I think that’s a huge part of the healing process,” Wilcha said. “I know myself and many other community leaders are really rooting for them.”