Advocacy & Justice Driven

It didn’t start with a mission statement. It started with a conversation between neighbors who had just watched one person stand up—and couldn’t walk away from what that felt like. Nobody asked Keegan to show up. There was no organization behind it, and no plan. Just a young person in New Castle, Indiana who decided that silence was no longer an option—and took to the streets the day after George Floyd was murdered.

June 6, 2020. One day after Keegan’s protest. A small group made a decision that wasn’t formal, wasn’t planned, and didn’t come with a roadmap. Just a shared belief that Henry County needed something it didn’t have—and that the people who felt that absence most were the ones to build it.

Thirteen days after Lightkeepers was founded, they organized Henry County’s first Juneteenth celebration. Not because it was on a to-do list—because it had never been done here before, and that absence meant something.

Juneteenth isn’t just a holiday. It’s a reckoning. And in a county where that history had largely gone unmarked, showing up in public to name it—with music, with food, with community—was its own kind of statement.

Kids climbed on the LOVE sculpture at Art’s Park. Neighbors who had never met stood in the same space and shared the same story. For a lot of people in Henry County, it was the first time they had ever celebrated it at all.

Three years of showing up without a safety net. Three years of doing the work without the infrastructure that makes the work sustainable. That changed on October 31, 2023, when Lightkeepers became an official nonprofit—and received the first significant funding in the organization’s history.

What that funding made possible wasn’t just programs. It was permanence. The ability to plan further than the next event, to bring people on, to say with confidence: we’re not going anywhere.

Every movement needs a home. Not a borrowed room, not a rented hour—a place that belongs to the community and says so out loud.

Westminster became that place for Lightkeepers. A permanent headquarters and education space in the heart of New Castle—where the work could happen on its own terms, on its own time, with the door open to anyone who needed to walk through it.

Having a building changes what an organization can be. It changes what the community believes about you. And it changes what you’re able to believe about yourself.

Henry County Pride didn’t disappear—it found a larger home.

When HC Pride joined Lightkeepers, it wasn’t an ending. It was a recognition that the work of belonging, visibility, and joy is stronger when it’s connected. That LGBTQIA+ people in Henry County deserve an organization with roots, resources, and staying power—and that Lightkeepers was built to be exactly that.

This isn’t just a new chapter. It’s a promise. That there is a place in this county where you can show up exactly as you are, and be celebrated for it.