Community activists have a history of mainstreaming the marginalized, sheltering the dispossessed, and empowering the powerless. Gloria Casarez has followed this path all the way to City Hall, where, as Mayor Michael Nutter’s director of LGBT affairs, she has one foot in the corridors of authority and one still in the activist tradition.

That’s because the LGBT community, which she came to embrace as she grew as an activist, contains a little bit of everything – the honored and the rejected, the mainstream and the marginal, the affluent and the poor, white, black, brown, yellow and red, male, female, transgendered and in between, power brokers and those who fight the power.

Her basic sympathies, as reflected in her career as a community activist, are with the marginalized, the poor, and the ones who fight to create communities out of hope and sweat. Her goal has been to help people empower themselves to fight for their interests, something she has been doing since her first foray into activism with Empty the Shelters in 1991.

“We were a group of students and young people lending our talents to communities that were addressing poverty issues,” she explained. Their approach was that “issues affecting poor people should be [dealt with by groups] led by poor people.” Thus Empty the Shelters worked with existing poor people’s movements in Philadelphia, including the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Union of the of the Homeless, to raise public awareness of and agitate for action on issues they identified, providing expertise in dealing with the media and establishing a formal service organization that could receive tax-deductible contributions from supporters.

The experience Casarez gained with Empty the Shelters, and the understanding of the larger societal forces at work behind the scenes, served her well when she turned her attention to organizing LGBT individuals to address their concerns, especially surrounding AIDS and living with HIV. As a founding board member of the House of Manolo Blahnik, she helped African-American youth both forge families to replace the ones that had disowned them and organize to arm their peers in the ballroom culture with knowledge about HIV and AIDS. And as executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (GALAEI), she helped improve the effectiveness of a group formed by Latinos to help Latinos, especially LGBT Latinos, secure the support and resources they needed to take charge of their health and their lives.

“Constituent-led efforts have been a consistent theme of my work,” she said in a recent conversation.

That continues to be the case inside City Hall. Although she says that she “never particularly planned to work in government,” she has found it satisfying in its own way. Although government is cumbersome – “You can work faster at the community level, while government is slower moving,” she said – she has been pleasantly surprised by some of what she has been able to accomplish since taking the newly created City Hall post in the summer of 2008.

One of those achievements was to get the gay community to stand up and be counted for the decennial Census last year. Working with PhillyGayCalendar director Steve McCann to organize the Complete Count Committee, her office succeeded in boosting LGBT participation in this year’s census, an effort that will pay off in increased Federal funding for a number of programs and services within the city of Philadelphia.

The most satisfying part of her job, she says, is interaction with the public. “Even though much of what I do is inward-looking, making sure the city’s policies and practices match what the community wants, there’s an external piece, which is I get to meet a ton of people. I’m out in the community every day.”

Casarez’s office is deeply involved in just about every effort to improve Philadelphia’s LGBT community, from promoting tourism to assisting small businesses, public health to public safety, education to elder care. And, she says, it’s all of a piece: “We’re still working towards long-term change.” There’s been a lot of it already, she says: Elected officials and city policies have become far more inclusive of LGBT people. But there’s still plenty of work to do.

Casarez’s Person of the Year honor is not her first: she has been repeatedly recognized for her contributions to the LGBT community, women and racial minorities, starting with being named one of the “100 Most Influential LGBT Leaders for the New Millennium” by Out magazine in 2000. In 2010 alone, she has won four community service, humanitarian and leadership awards from Dignity Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Chapter of the NAACP, the Women’s eNews and the House of Prestige. But the honors are not the point. Rather, they simply acknowledge a rare individual of great humor and compassion who learned how to take effective activism from the streets to the corridors of power.