Gay Community Marketing - Luncheon Club

TOPICS: GLBT community news. Gay community marketing. Lesbian and gay community sponsorship. Luncheon Club, Sydney, Australia. Aussie Home Loans. Sponsoring the right gay community organization is not just smart business - it's a good thing to do. Sydney's Luncheon Club gets a visit from the NSW Governor, Marie Bashir.

Ian Johnson
August 14, 2007

I love a good news story.

You don't get to read it as much as you might like but this week I was delighted to see that after some troubled times one of the most worthwhile Sydney gay community support groups - The Luncheon Club - is back in business, or more correctly its Luncheon Club Larder is.

The Luncheon Club is a grassroots gay and HIV community group, founded by Carole-Ann King in response to an AIDS pandemic that ruined a lot of lives in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Luncheon Club, Carole-Ann, and her able body of wonderful volunteers has, for many years, been a lifeline to people living with HIV/AIDS who can no longer work. For people that have lost social contact due to isolation, problems such as loneliness and depression can feed the impact of HIV on the body's self-defence mechanisms.

The Luncheon Club is an antidote to that. Having been there several times to help with Monday lunches, I can report that it is a place brimming with joy and great fun.

Many popular celebrities have graced the stage at the regular Luncheon Club Monday lunches over the years.

Last week it was the turn of the NSW State Governor, Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir (pictured above with one of the regular lunch guests) to visit The Luncheon Club, to lend a hand.

To people feeling isolated by HIV illness, The Luncheon Club provides food, entertainment and, most of all, invaluable social contact once each week.

A few years back, one of our clients in Australia, Aussie Home Loans, now called just Aussie, asked us for some advice on gay marketing. We told them that an important way to market to the gay community and ask for customer support, is to support the gay community by way of financial help to gay and lesbian community organizations that could do with a hand.

Aussie, led by successful businessman John Symond, had no hesitation in stepping up to help out. We put together a range of gay community marketing sponsorships for Aussie, but one of the first was for The Luncheon Club. John even came down to the Luncheon Club to help serve lunch - and present a cheque as well to contribute tangible financial help.

Was it good business for Aussie? You bet. But when I spoke to John Symond of Aussie one day at one of these events about how it made a lot of people respect his brand for doing it, he replied - "Yes Ian, but the main thing is - it's the right thing to do."

It may be good gay community marketing, but at the end of the day, it's not just about business. It's about people and the major difference that well thought out corporate sponsorships can bring to the gay community.

John Symond was right - it is most definitely the right thing to do.


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