Life-changing, even life-saving. That’s how Denise Spivak describes the work of LGBTQ community centers, which benefited from increased giving in the 2012-21 decade but now are finding their funding stretched thin in the face of extensive legislative attacks.
“Our centers are incredibly resilient,” says Spivak, CEO of CenterLink, a network of LGBTQ centers. But “if you don’t have the funding to keep the lights on — if you don’t have the funding to pay people or can’t get volunteers to do it — then there are certain programs that don’t get put out there” at a time when LGBTQ people might need them most, she says. “That becomes a real tragedy.”
From 2012 to 2021, funding for LGBTQ groups more than doubled, rising from $387 million in 2012 to $823 million in 2021, according to a comprehensive report released last month by Indiana University’s Equitable Giving Lab. Yet even that doubling of funds over the past decade may not have been enough to keep pace with the mounting challenges that LGBTQ charities face, including an onslaught of legislative attacks. Now, as donations dip across the charitable sector, advocates say it couldn’t be coming at a worse time for LGBTQ nonprofits fighting to preserve their hard-won gains — and bulwark civil rights in the process.
“We’re not able to fight the battles the way we should be fighting them to win,” says Alex Lee, deputy director of Funders for LGBTQ Issues, who connected attacks on LGBTQ rights to a broader effort to roll back reproductive rights and bodily autonomy in ways that ultimately amount to “an attack on democracy.”
The United States saw a record 510 anti-LGBTQ bills last year censoring school curricula, targeting trans athletes, banning drag artists, or otherwise weakening protections for LGBTQ people, according to the ACLU. In that time, says Lee, funding for LGBTQ groups actually stagnated despite progress over the previous decade, reflecting a downward trend in giving felt across the nonprofit world, but felt particularly acutely by LGBTQ groups in the face of growing attacks.
Adjusting for high levels of inflation, U.S. foundations actually gave less to LGBTQ causes in 2022 than they did 2021, according to a report released Tuesday by Funders for LGBTQ Issues. In 2021, grant makers gave $270.9 million in inflation-adjusted dollars to LGBTQ issues, compared with $258.1 million in 2022.
“We don’t have enough people on the ground who can go to those state houses and make arguments or mount a counter media campaign to correct a lot of misinformation and lies about trans people,” says Lee. “We just don’t have the resources.”
A Decade of Rising Momentum
The stagnation comes after years of rising momentum — both philanthropically and legislatively. In 2012, only a handful of states allowed same-sex couples to marry, and most LGBTQ Americans still lacked protection from discrimination in health care, housing, or the workplace.
Sustained pressure from advocates helped turn the tide of public opinion in the decade that followed. Both before and after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, many of those advocates received significant backing from philanthropy, which helped usher in — and ride the wave — of the contemporary LGBTQ rights movement.
Indeed, as momentum for LGBTQ rights grew, so too did charitable giving to LGBTQ groups. Then, in 2020 and 2021, amid the Covid-19 pandemic and widespread racial reckoning, that support increased even more significantly, with overall philanthropy for LGBTQ growing by a full 35 percent from 2019 to 2021.
As the LGBTQ+ rights movement accumulated victories, many of those gains in philanthropy went toward advocacy groups like the National LGBTQ Task Force or the Transgender Law Center. Underfunded issues — like international and trans groups — also received substantially more support by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, other issues, such as HIV/AIDS — which used to receive among the highest levels of donations — received a much smaller percentage of support over the decade.
As rosy as that overall picture might seem, however, the $823 million that LGBTQ groups received in 2021 is still a tiny percentage of overall philanthropy, says Jacqueline Ackerman, one of the researchers behind the 2024 LGBTQ+ Index.
“Even after a decade of growth, less than $1 out of every $500 given to charity goes to an LGBTQ organization, underscoring the need for continued advocacy and funding support,” says Ackerman, who noted that the money that has gone to LGBTQ charities has not been distributed equitably.
Amid Cultural Backlash, Donations Drop
Moreover, most philanthropic growth has been concentrated in the very largest organizations — groups like the Trevor Project or GLAAD — while “your local neighborhood LGBTQ+ youth homeless shelter” may not have seen much growth at all, says Ackerman.
In recent years, a barrage of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced across levels of government, spearheaded by a multimillion-dollar campaign to roll back LGBTQ rights.
While some donors have stepped up in the face of these challenges, others may be pulling back out of fear of dipping their toes into culture war waters, says Elise Colomer-Cheadle, development director at Outright International, which supports LGBTQ groups worldwide.
“We have experienced some pausing by certain funders,” says Colomer-Cheadle, who attributes declining support not only to downward giving trends overall but also to “increased polarization” and “risk aversion” among some mainstream grant makers and corporate philanthropists.
As the LGBTQ rights movement stands at a crossroads, facing mounting challenges, sustaining the momentum of the past decade will require “doing things differently, reframing and creating new approaches and collaborations to be able to respond to what’s happening to LGBTQ people in the U.S. and globally,” says Colomer-Cheadle.
When it comes to the country’s hundreds of LGBTQ community centers, which connect over 50,000 people a week with vital health services, hot meals, and a safe space to socialize, even a near tripling of philanthropic support — from $37.8 million in 2012 to 110.2 million in 2021 — has not been felt everywhere, says Spivak of CenterLink.
“We’re really not talking about the smaller ones,” she says, many of which are located in the small towns or rural states that are both especially vulnerable to anti-LGBTQ attacks and particularly underfunded. Rural LGBTQ centers are accustomed to doing more with less, she says, often acting as a lifeline to LGBTQ people across an entire state — or even multiple states — even with fewer funding opportunities than their peers in coastal cities.
Even so, “they will find ways that always amaze me to still provide services to the community” with or without funding, she says. “They will not leave the community behind.”
