As Attacks Proliferate, Philanthropy Sends More Money to Groups That Serve Transgender People

Arkansas drew national attention last year when it became the first state in the country to pass a ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender youths. Intransitive, a small nonprofit helping trans people in Arkansas, joined medical professionals and others to protest the legislation.

Soon after Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson chose to veto the bill, the state legislature overrode his veto. As more of the nation turned attention to what was happening in Arkansas, Intransitive began to get more funding from foundations and individuals. That flood of donations in 2021 left the nonprofit with a budget of $258,000 — mostly from individuals — after beginning the year with a $20,000 budget. The nonprofit used about $200,000 of that new money to purchase a building in Little Rock and renovate it as a community center for trans people last year. Its 2022 budget is $280,000, according to the group’s executive director, Rumba Yambú.

Other nonprofits serving transgender people, such as Transgender Advocates Knowledgeable Empowering, a Black-led Alabama group known as TAKE, and Trans Lifeline, based in California, also have seen increases in philanthropic support in recent years, especially the past two years.

For instance, TAKE saw its annual budget more than double from 2021 to 2022. Trans Lifeline’s giving rose 40 percent in 2020 compared with 2019.

Some of the spike in funding came as Alabama, Arizona, and Texas followed Arkansas in enacting restrictions to gender-affirming health care and as state legislators introduced a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills this year, with about half specifically targeting transgender people. Other increased support was due to more attention to Black-led groups that grew out of the work of Black Lives Matter.

While greater awareness of the challenges trans people face has resulted in a major uptick in donations from individuals, many groups that serve transgender people still largely operate with smaller budgets and less foundation support than other nonprofits. For every $100 that foundations distributed in 2019 and 2020, fewer than 5 cents supported nonprofits that serve trans people.

Lack of support poses challenges for many organizations dedicated to trans causes.

For instance, when Intransitive in Arkansas got the influx of money in 2021, it wasn’t ready to fully take advantage of it. Yambú, who founded the group in 2017, has a lingering frustration with the lack of philanthropic support over the years. They said that left the nonprofit unprepared to push back more forcefully against anti-trans legislative developments in the state.

“We didn’t have any of the infrastructure we needed to,” they said. “We didn’t have ways to pay ourselves. If you all had invested in us, if you all had realized that there are trans folks worth fighting for in Arkansas, what impact could we actually have had last year?”

In response to the spate of state legislation on trans issues and persistent concerns about trans-led nonprofits’ sustainability, a group of grant makers launched the Trans Futures Funding Campaign in May. The campaign, spearheaded by Funders for LGBTQ Issues and the Third Wave Fund, is urging foundations and individuals to provide $10 million this year for general operating support for trans-led organizations. The focus is on building their staffing, operations, and long-term sustainability.

New Commitments

Over the past several years, foundations have increasingly taken an interest in allocating funding and support to groups that help trans people. In 2017, Funders for LGBTQ Issues launched Grantmakers United for Trans Communities, an effort encouraging foundations to support organizations serving trans people and to provide guidance on how to fund those organizations and developing leadership among trans people in philanthropy. Philanthropic funding for trans people in the United States rose by 25 percent from 2018 to 2019, reaching a total of $36.1 million. That number dipped slightly in 2020, to about $31 million, according to a report from Funders for LGBTQ Issues.

This year, the new Trans Futures Funding Campaign has drawn support from foundations including Ford, which committed at least $10 million to help trans people over the next five years. The California Endowment pledged in July to spend $1 million to help trans-led groups build their management capabilities.

Intransitive

Alexander Lee, deputy director at Funders for LGBTQ Issues, says the key to making a difference for the long haul is for grant makers to provide more funding directly to trans-led groups and to organizations that have experience connecting grant makers to nonprofits they wish to support.

Expanding the capacity of organizations that can identify small groups with potential to grow is especially critical, he says. “Right now, they are really stretched thin, and they’re pretty much at capacity.”

The Trans Justice Funding Project is among the organizations that aids smaller trans-led organizations, supporting groups with budgets of $250,000 or less.

Yambú’s organization, Intransitive, received its first grant of $5,000 from the Trans Justice Funding Project in 2018. That opened opportunities to get subsequent funding from Borealis Philanthropy, which runs the Fund for Trans Generations. It received a grant of about $10,000 in 2020.

Intransitive has come a long way since Yambú founded it five years ago. Yambú said they worked four or five jobs to support the work of the nonprofit. Now with more philanthropic support, the nonprofit purchased land next to its community center with plans to build a basketball court.

At TAKE, the Alabama nonprofit, Daroneshia Duncan-Boyd, executive director, says the organization’s annual budget has increased from $20,000 in 2013, the year it was launched, to $407,720 in 2021.

This year’s annual budget has grown to $946,353 as the organization received support from foundations such as Borealis Philanthropy, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and the Foundation for a Just Society. That growth has allowed TAKE to secure a larger office and community space and hire additional staff for its work to get trans people registered to vote and get them involved in influencing policy.

For Taegen Meyer, interim executive director of Trans Lifeline, the shift in giving seemed especially notable in 2020. In 2019, the nonprofit, which operates a mental-health hotline for trans people, had a budget of about $2 million, according to its tax forms, mostly because of contributions from individuals.

“We hadn’t felt solid in our finances at that point,” she said.

The next year, Meyer said, more foundations were willing to fund social justice amid the pandemic and racial reckoning. Since then, Trans Lifeline has received six-figure grants from foundations such as the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.

The nonprofit’s annual budget increased to $3.2 million in 2020. In 2021, giving from foundations and corporations accounted for 60 percent of its budget, while individual giving made up 40 percent of its funding.

While the organization has received large gifts from individuals and family foundations, many of its contributions come from small donors.

For example, it works with gaming livestreamers to raise money, with many events held in connection with Transgender Week of Visibility and Transgender Day of Remembrance.

With increased funding from foundations and continued support from individuals, the nonprofit has been able to improve its technology and hire more staff to handle finance and human resources, according to Meyer.

More Work Ahead

Even with the increased support, financial barriers remain for many trans-led groups. Some are still too small to get money from foundations that like to finance large nonprofits. Trans leaders also often lack relationships with larger philanthropists and foundations that might give them access to bigger pools of money.

“They’re navigating the nonprofit industrial complex and also navigating funders for the first time,” said Aldita Gallardo, program officer at the Fund for Trans Generations at Borealis Philanthropy.

Gallardo and other staff at the fund work with their grantees — which largely have budgets of $300,000 or less — to ensure they have access to coaches and leadership-development programs to help them navigate the philanthropic world and secure funding more effectively.

Duncan-Boyd of TAKE said she often encounters grant makers that simply do not provide donations to groups in Alabama, either because they don’t provide funding in the South or because they focus on other states in the region. That is a particular problem because the Bible Belt is where so many anti-trans policies have proliferated and where violence against trans people of color has been persistent.

“I want people to know that we’re living in a crisis every day,” she said. “These crises didn’t just start happening when Breonna Taylor was killed or George Floyd.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. See more about the grant and our gift-acceptance policy.