Culture & Community | LGBTQ | Arts & Culture | New Haven Pride Center | Ninth Square
Soto at the Pride Center's former home in the basement of 84 Orange Street. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
From the moment he arrived at the New Haven Pride Center, Juancarlos Soto gave himself a directive: figure out the task at hand, because the community depended on it. Now, exactly five years in, he’s stepping back to let someone else take those reins.
Soto, along with NHPC board co-chairs Hope Chávez and Nick Bussett, made that announcement Thursday morning in a press release outlining Soto’s departure. On April 4, he will end his tenure as executive director, a position he has held officially since September 2023. It will mark the end of a period in which the Center has navigated intense financial turmoil, grown its presence in New Haven, and recommitted to its community roots.
During his time at the organization, Soto has also served as interim executive director, deputy director, and director of case management and support services. He cited family obligations as the most immediate and pressing need for his departure. He also plans to focus more deeply on making and selling his art, which has long centered immigrant rights, his own Puerto Rican and Taíno identity, and activist voices.
“This was a tough decision,” he said in a phone call Thursday morning. “I have deep love for the Center, the mission, and the folks that I work with. And it's a moment where my family needs me. It was difficult to balance the amount of care that the Center requires [with family needs], and I had to make a difficult choice.”
“I think when big things in our life happen, it sort of shakes us a little bit,” he continued. When a family member had a health emergency, “it made me think about what I wanted the rest of my life to look like. My intent with the Center was to get it back on its feet, and I've done that.”
Michael Zief and Ian "Scooby" Rossman at a community dinner at the New Haven Pride Center in November 2024. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
It marks the end of five years of remarkable service to the Center and New Haven’s LGBTQ+ community more broadly. In February 2020, Soto arrived at the Center as its inaugural director of case management and support services, a role he held alongside the late Maia Leonardo. At the time, he was coming from Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, where he had served as a community organizer.
“My approach is to make sure that we are providing the services that people need, but that we are also not just putting a band aid on issues,” he said in an interview that first month, as he worked in the Center’s then-basement offices on Orange Street.
What he didn’t expect, of course, was that the start of his work would intersect with a global pandemic. When Covid-19 hit New Haven in March 2020, Soto worked to ensure continuity of care across the distance, creating a warm line for people to call and helping grow the Center’s food pantry to a weekly food distribution program. Sometimes, he found, people called because they were in crisis. Often, they called just because they needed to hear another voice.
When it felt safe to bring people back into the Center, he kept a growing caseload somehow under control, navigating a community need that never seemed to get smaller. He helped mentor fellow New Haveners, including former director of support services Freddie Swindal-Endres and later, current Director of Support Services Bennie Saldana, who took over as he rose through the ranks.
When Soto became deputy director at the NHPC in late 2021, “it wasn't with an intention for me to lead the Center,” he recalled Thursday. Instead, he saw the role as assisting the Center’s leadership, helping grow robust community programming and supporting members of the staff, which by then had grown precipitously. And he did, from Black and Brown Queer Camp to PRIDE celebrations that lasted an entire week and took over the New Haven Green.
Community orgs tabling at "Pride In Balance," an NHPC health and wellness fair, last year.
That was true right up until November 2022, when the Center announced that it had lost its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. Overnight, Soto became acting executive director.
“In that moment, it was like, somebody has to figure this out, so I guess I'll do it,” he said Thursday. “I jumped in because the team needed someone to jump in.”
Those first months were a case study in uncertainty, he remembered. In January 2023, as Soto worked to reinstate nonprofit status, the Center’s board of directors made the call to furlough eight of nine employees. Less than a month later, the Center had reinstated its nonprofit status, using a federal pandemic relief grant to slowly bring back staff and draft a new, tighter operating budget.
“We were able to put systems in place that kept the Center transparent and it kept us moving forward,” Soto said. “And that's really a credit to the amazing, beautiful people that I work with every day.”
Soto and NHPC staff, in something of a trial by fire, steered the Center forward while also charting a new-old direction. In addition to existing partnerships, they began to build new community connections, from bagel shops to the Mitchell Branch Library to queer crafters of color. He cheered on staff as they urged New Haveners to fight, braved an anti-LGBTQ bomb threat and imagined new PRIDE celebrations in the heart of New Haven’s Ninth Square.
He framed it—and still frames it—as a return to the Center’s roots, with a strong and central focus on community. So it made sense when in November 2023, he announced that the Center would be moving down Orange Street to its first above-ground space. The move has since enabled everything from LGBTQ+ health and wellness fairs to expanded support services to community discussions and monthly dinners.
For the first time last year, Soto also secured a $30,000 line item for the Pride Center in New Haven’s city budget. That line item remains in the mayor’s proposed city budget for the next fiscal year.
Harmony The Valkyrie at a New Haven PRIDE block party in the Ninth Square in 2023. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
In a phone call Thursday morning, Soto was quick to say that he hasn’t done any of it alone. He praised fellow NHPC staff members for their unwavering commitment to the LGBTQ+ community, particularly in a moment when LGBTQ+ rights are under attack. He looked to the essential work of those like Communications Coordinator Laura Boccadoro and Director of Support Services Bennie Saldana, who have helped grow the Center’s footprint in ways that he couldn’t have imagined five years ago.
He also framed this moment of transition—particularly in a time of political upheaval and increasing attacks from the Trump Administration—as a moment of opportunity for the Center and for the city. In five years, he’s helped the Center survive a pandemic, regain its financial footing, and become a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ people well beyond New Haven, who sometimes travel over an hour for its services. Now, he said, it’s someone else’s turn to lead.
“Every person at the Center has been working very hard for the community,” he said. “We love our community. So please, keep supporting our work. More than ever, we cannot do this work alone.”
Reached by phone, Board Co-Director Nick Bussett praised Soto for his “remarkable” leadership, particularly during the last three years. When the board made the decision to furlough employees, Bussett said, he was awed by how much trust in Soto every staff member seemed to have. Now, after watching him “right the ship,” he understands why.
“He really was a true leader not just for the organization but for the people within the organization,” he said. “Outside of that, I think he really took the organization back to its roots, and back to the community. He focused on the things that really mattered to the community … he continued to think out of the box. That’s what true leadership in a human looks like.”
In the next month, he added, the board intends to appoint an interim executive director to keep operations running smoothly at the organization. They plan to launch a more formalized search process, most likely with the help of community stakeholders, in four to six months. Board members have not yet decided whether to engage a search firm or work directly with community members.
“Given the political climate, we want to make sure that we're being really intentional and smart about who we put in that leadership role,” he said.