Steve Baker’s work with the Palm Springs Gay Men’s Chorus gives back in many ways – Desert Sun
A good volunteer should possess at least two things: passion and skill. While finding an organization about which one is passionate isn’t all that difficult, finding an organization that needs one’s specific talents can sometimes be. Luckily for Steve Baker, a nine-year performer and volunteer for the Palm Springs Gay Men’s Chorus, an ideally suited opportunity just happened to find him.
“I had never sung in a chorus before,” Baker says, “but one of my good friends in town encouraged me to join, so I decided to give it a try. And after singing in that first concert, I was asked to join the board of directors. So, I went quickly from being a singer to being a singer and a board member.”
Prior to moving to the desert, Baker called the Bay Area home. He attended Stanford University and after graduation walked across the street to Hewlett-Packard, where he worked for 29 years. During this time, he was also involved as a volunteer and board member for two local arts organizations: Opera San Jose and a small chamber orchestra, the San Jose Chamber Orchestra.
“I got involved in volunteering early on when I was in San Jose,” Baker says. “My husband (Doug Nagel, a professor of music and former professional opera singer and opera director) encouraged me. What I found is that boards need good people who are willing to apply their specific skillset to help an organization grow.”
Baker believes that “every nonprofit wants to grow, thrive and complete their mission. And you are only able to do that in a couple of ways. One, you’ve got to have a good strong board that knows how to run a company or an organization, to keep the wheels turning. And you’ve got to have — and we’re so lucky here in the Coachella Valley — people who support that mission.”
The Palm Springs Gay Men’s Chorus has a board comprising 15 members, seven singing and eight non-singing members from the community. “We really felt that that balance of singing and non-singing gives a good perspective on not only what we do as an organization — which, primarily, is to sing and perform — but also gives us a good extended background that’s connected better to the community,” Baker says.
The chorus puts on two major concerts per year, a holiday concert and a spring concert. And in between, the group focuses on outreach to local communities. “We’ve performed at the AIDS Walk, we’ve performed at Pride and marched in the parade and we’ve marched in the Festival of Lights Parade. These are things we feel enrich the community.”
During the pandemic, the chorus held both a food drive and a toy drive for Martha’s Village, participated in a mask-making project (“with chorus members burning their fingers on glue guns,” Baker says) and held a supplies drive for Well in the Desert.
In addition, Baker says, “an important part of our mission is our anti-bullying efforts. We have a very active program we fund each year that supports gay-straight alliances in all the junior high and high schools in the Coachella Valley. We give them grants so they can do their activities and not have to worry as much about fundraising. Some of the kids have anti-bullying days at their school, others have coming out days. The goal is to support a better environment for the LGBTQ community. We’ve been doing this now for six years, and we’ve given close to $5,000 per year in grants over that period.”
Baker believes that anyone — and he places himself in this category — who supports an organization, whether by volunteering, donating money or participating in the organization’s activities, does so because they have some kind of personal connection to that organization and its mission.
“That happened to me with the Palm Springs Gay Men’s Chorus,” he says. “I sang in a concert of Cole Porter music. And I knew nothing about Cole Porter. So personally, I learned about his music and what he went through in life. The audience loved it. That gave back to me, because here I’m doing something I’d never done before and now I’m getting this great positive applause and feedback from the audience.”
At that time, the chorus was facing some financial challenges. And Baker felt certain his business background with Hewlett-Packard could help the organization move forward.
“And we were able to do that,” he says. “It was a lot of work, but it was rewarding to be able to apply skills I’d learned, coming from a high-tech company, to see what worked and what didn’t. There’s a lot more passion and emotion in the nonprofit world than there is in the high-tech world.
Ultimately, Baker says his satisfaction comes from working with a group of people that have become part of his family: “To help them be successful and put a foundation in place to support future success — that’s what fuels my passion.”
To learn more about the Palm Springs Gay Men’s Chorus, visit psgmc.com.
As the philanthropy and special sections editor at The Desert Sun, Winston Gieseke writes about nonprofits, fundraising and people who give back in the Coachella Valley. Reach him at winston.gieseke@desertsun.com.