South Florida's LGBTQ+ elders are the generation that built the community's institutions — the bars, the centers, the choruses, the response to the crisis — and they are now aging in a senior-services world that was not designed with them in mind. SunServe, the Fort Lauderdale-based nonprofit founded in 2002, exists to close that gap: per its published mission, it provides social services, senior care, and youth and family programs to the LGBTQ+ community across Broward County, with elder services among its signature work.
Why do LGBTQ+ elders need specific services?
Because the general system carries documented gaps. National research summarized by advocacy organizations — including the landmark “Still Out, Still Aging” studies and SAGE's work — has found LGBTQ+ elders less likely to have adult children caring for them, more likely to live alone, and widely concerned about discrimination in long-term care; many report re-closeting in care settings. For a generation whose lives included criminalization, job loss, and family estrangement, aging's vulnerabilities compound. Theelders who built community institutions often face them alone — which is exactly the gap a community-specific service organization fills.
What does SunServe actually provide?
Per its published programs: senior services including care management, in-home support coordination, and community programming for elders; mental-health services; youth and family programs; and community connection across Broward. Its senior work addresses the documented gaps directly — helping elders age in place, connecting them to benefits, and providing the social infrastructure that prevents isolation. South Florida's demographics make the work structural: the region draws retirees from across the country, including decades of LGBTQ+ migration, so Broward's elder community is one of the largest concentrations of LGBTQ+ seniors in the United States.
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How does the region's history shape its elder community?
Deeply. South Florida's LGBTQ+ elders include the generation that built South Beach, fought the 1977 ordinance battle, staffed the crisis-era response, and watched partners die in a pandemic the government ignored — and that history is living memory here in a way it is not in most American regions. Service providers work with a population that carries institutional distrust for documented reasons: healthcare discrimination, police history, government neglect. Community-specific organizations bridge that distrust, which is precisely why they exist rather than referring everyone to general agencies.
What does 'aging in place' mean for the community?
Staying home safely, with services arriving instead of relocation — the preference most elders report nationally, and the goal that care management serves. For LGBTQ+ elders, aging in place has an additional dimension: remaining in community, near the districts, congregations, and social networks that constitute their family structures. Per advocacy research, the alternative — institutional care without community connection — is where the documented fears concentrate: discrimination, isolation, re-closeting. Community-based care is the practical answer to a documented fear.
How can the community support its elders?
Concretely: volunteer and donate to the organizations doing the work — SunServe's published channels list both; include elders in community programming rather than building a separate senior track; and plan personally — advance directives, chosen-family documentation, and healthcare proxies matter doubly for a population whose legal next of kin may be estranged. The generation that built this community's infrastructure is still here, in the neighborhoods it made. Serving it well is the community's test of what its institutions were for.