About Pridelines
Forty-four years of belonging.
Who we are
South Florida’s oldest community center of its kind, serving youth, adults, and elders since 1982. Pridelines began as a circle of chairs and a promise: young people in Miami deserved a place to be fully themselves. Four decades later, that promise has grown into an integrated ecosystem of care serving every generation, from teenagers finding their voice to long-term HIV survivors aging with dignity.
Our home is on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach, and our programs reach across Miami-Dade County, from South Miami to North Miami to Opa-Locka, through partnerships with affirming congregations, health providers, and community organizations.
Everything we do is grounded in one conviction: our community deserves integrated, whole-person care delivered through a community center that is creative, bold, and unapologetically ours.
Our Mission
“To support, educate, and empower South Florida’s communities across every generation, creating safe, affirming, and pluralistic spaces that advance whole-person wellness, HIV prevention and care, and lasting social change.”
Our Vision
“Out of many, one community: a South Florida where every generation lives whole, every story is honored, and every person is home.”
OUR MODEL: Care for the whole person.
A person is one whole, and care should be too. That conviction has shaped Pridelines since 1982: the body carries the mind, the mind steadies in community, and community deepens when the soul has somewhere to breathe. Our model tends all four dimensions of a full life and weaves them through six interconnected program circles, grounded in the science of attachment, shame integration, and self-differentiation. Whichever doorway you enter, the whole of you is welcome.
Body: Health that meets you where you are, and sees all of you when you arrive.
Through Thrivelines Health & Wellness, we offer confidential HIV testing, STI screening, PrEP and PEP navigation, and nurse practitioner-led wellness care, at our Miami Beach center and on the road through mobile outreach across South Florida. Sexual health education is woven through every circle, so prevention lives where community already gathers. Through Nehushtan Wellness, screenings and health education travel into trusted partner congregations, bringing care to the rooms where people already feel at home. And a reactive result begins a warm, accompanied walk into treatment and support, with someone beside you for the first steps.
Mind: Healing that goes to the root.
Our Mental Health Hub offers depth-oriented psychotherapy for teens and adults on a sliding scale, so cost stays within reach. The work is trauma-informed and grounded in the science of attachment: how early bonds shape adult love, how shame learns to speak in our own voice, and how it can be unlearned. We call that work shame integration and self-differentiation, the slow, real practice of becoming yourself on purpose. Therapy here takes the long view, with room for the wounds that took years to form.
Community: Belonging is a health intervention.
Connection is where the healing holds. Our circles gather every generation: young people finding their voice in Hero Academy, brothers in Hermanos del Sol keeping culture and honest conversation alive in two languages, elders trading wisdom over Coffee & Conversations, and all of us together through the third weekend every month, from the New Eden Jubilee Market by day to the Lavender Lounge by night. We celebrate loudly, from the HALO Awards honoring heroes of HIV advocacy to fandom nights where joy wears a costume. Chosen family is real family, and it grows here.
Soul: A spirituality that belongs to you.
Some of us arrive carrying blessings, and some of us arrive carrying wounds given in sacred rooms. The Faith & Spirituality circle holds both. At our spiritual home, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Miami, there is space to explore humanist faith, to pursue justice, or simply to find community on a Sunday. Religious trauma healing offers a place to set down what harmed you and reclaim what is yours. And through New Eden’s monthly market, the oldest spiritual practice we know, feeding people with dignity, happens in the open air, with everyone welcome at the table.
OUR Journey: We started with a room. We became a home.
1982: Pridelines Youth Services is founded, creating one of the first safe spaces for LGBTQ+ young people in South Florida. Today: From our Miami Beach home, Pridelines serves every generation through the Six Circles of Care: an integrated, whole-person model spanning body, mind, community, and soul. Learn more below!
The story starts before we did. In 1977, Dade County passed an ordinance protecting residents from discrimination based on sexual orientation, and Miami instantly became the battleground of a national backlash. Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, launched right here, carried the repeal to victory at the ballot box that June, and this county became the symbol of an era that taught a city to fear its own neighbors. The campaign said it was about protecting children. What it actually did was leave a generation of young people in Miami with fewer safe places than almost anywhere in America.
Pridelines was founded in 1982, in the long shadow of that vote, by a handful of volunteers who took the campaign’s own claim seriously and did what it never intended: they actually made young people safe. The answer was almost defiantly simple. A borrowed room. A circle of folding chairs. Adults who stayed to listen. No model to follow and no funding to speak of, only the conviction that a young person with somewhere safe to land on a Tuesday night has a different life ahead of them than one without. It became one of the first spaces of its kind in the region, in the very county where the country’s loudest campaign had said no such space should exist.
The early work fit in that one room, and it was everything. We made the space safe and kept it that way. We listened before we advised. We let young people find each other, because peers heal what programs alone can’t reach. We told the truth about health at a moment when fear and silence were doing real damage, and we celebrated out loud, because joy was survival too. Volunteers cooked, drove, showed up, and set out the chairs again the next week. That was the whole model: welcome, honesty, community, and consistency.
Everything Pridelines does now is that room, grown up. The safe space became six of them: the Six Circles of Care, serving every generation from teenagers finding their voice to elders sharing their wisdom. The peer circle became Hero Academy, Hermanos del Sol, Los Guerreros, and Coffee & Conversations. Telling the truth about health became Thrivelines Health & Wellness: free, confidential HIV testing and prevention at our Miami Beach home, carried by mobile outreach across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe Counties. The potluck became the New Eden Jubilee Market, feeding neighbors with dignity every third Saturday beside thirteen partner organizations. The celebration became the Lavender Lounge and the HALO Awards, honoring the elders and long-term survivors whose courage carried us here.
History doesn’t move in only one direction. In 2022, Florida passed what the nation came to know as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and a wave followed it: laws and policies reaching into classrooms, libraries, and clinics, deciding which families may be named out loud, which books may stay on a shelf, which care may be given. And the wave is wider than any one community. Immigrants and their children, communities of color, religious minorities, people with disabilities: so many of our neighbors are standing in the same weather, pressed by the same systems of imbalance and oppression. We recognize this moment, because our founding was the answer to one exactly like it. Fear is being organized again. So is welcome.
That is why our doors have opened wider, not narrower. Pridelines’ mission today is to create safe, affirming space for all people, every generation, every story, every walk of life, because the lesson of forty-four years is that belonging multiplies when it’s shared. Our nation wrote its promise on the Great Seal in 1782, two hundred years before our first circle of chairs: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. We take that motto personally. Together, we are stronger, and when we sit down with people from every walk of life who are threatened by the same systems, we discover what we can become: a force for good that believes in what truly makes this nation great, that it is in our diversity that we find innovation, and in one another that we find home.
Forty-four years later, the mission has never needed rewriting, only more chairs. The door is still open. Out of many, one community. Everyone means everyone.
Join Us!
Get involved. Get support. Get connected.
Whether you want to attend a program, volunteer, or give, your journey with Pridelines starts here.
Accountability & transparency
Pridelines Youth Services, Inc., dba Pridelines, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, EIN 65-0670159. Contributions are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law. Your gift keeps every program free, affirming, and open: confidential testing, free groceries on third Saturdays, a seat at the Lounge with dinner served, and room for every generation to belong.
Our commitments
- Affirming, trauma-informed care in every program
- Bilingual programming and materials
- Sliding-scale and free services wherever possible
- Conservative, honest reporting to our funders and community
