In the 1950s, lesbians, gay men, and bisexual, transgender, and queer‐identified (LGBTQ+) people were triply stigmatized: same‐gender sexual activity and cross‐dressing were widely criminalized; medical professionals considered homosexuality a mental disease; and religious leaders condemned homosexual acts as unforgiveable sins. Given this nearly universal excoriation, most LGBTQ+ people hid their sexual orientations or nonconforming gender identities.

Yet, beginning in the 1950s, organizations emerged in the United States for lesbians and gay men: the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), started by four lesbian couples in San Francisco; the Mattachine Society, initiated by progressive gay men in Los Angeles; and ONE Magazine, a publication founded by lesbians and gay men in Southern California. They all educated the general public about homosexuality, advocated that studies be done of lesbians and gay men to counter inaccurate stereotypes, and provided much‐needed social and emotional support. Chapters of DOB and the Mattachine Society formed across the United States, and people throughout the country subscribed to ONE Magazine.

Like the Mattachine Society, DOB's initial efforts were driven completely by volunteers, who contributed food, beverages, and space at their homes for meetings and social gatherings. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, both organizations shared offices in New York and San Francisco. In 1956, when DOB began publishing a newsletter, The Ladder (which evolved into a magazine), a DOB member who worked at Macy's San Francisco print shop initially used the department store's equipment to produce the publication, until the group found a printer willing to work with DOB.

DOB generated funding from membership dues; subscriptions to The Ladder, which was by the mid‐1960s also sold in newsstands; and donations from its leaders and most committed members, who held a variety of white‐collar and blue‐collar jobs. Supporters included lesbians with wealth. A closeted anonymous woman, for example, cumulatively contributed approximately $100,000 to support publication of The Ladder during the mid‐ to late‐1960s.

The 1969 rebellion against police harassment, led by transgender women of color at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, sparked an ongoing movement to secure equal rights and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people. Scores of gay liberation organizations and advocacy groups sprang up around the United States. Many were short‐lived efforts that relied on volunteers, and donated supplies and meeting spaces, but they helped to create what became the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement.

As more and more gay people “came out” and moved to cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, nonprofits focused specifically on the needs of LGBTQ+ people took root. The American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973, and states began to decriminalize homosexuality in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, LGBTQ+ people still faced overwhelming societal disapproval.

In the early 1980s, unusual health maladies began afflicting gay men in cities throughout the world. Scientists eventually identified the human‐immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that attacked people's immune systems as the cause of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). Gay men, already stigmatized, were the targets of increased societal hostility and fear. The federal government's response to the AIDS public health emergency was glacial. Ronald Reagan, who was president when the crisis arose, did not speak publicly of AIDS until four years into the pandemic. Foundations, already wary of gay people, took years to respond. Most corporations, thinking of their bottom line, would not consider supporting nonprofits in the gay community.

As the AIDS crisis deepened, gay people demanded government and private‐sector resources and responses to deal with the widening pandemic. The most prominent group to do so was ACT UP, or AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, founded in New York City in 1987 to engage in direct political actions. The group's first action was a march on Wall Street to protest the astronomical cost and scarcity of HIV treatments. ACT UP chapters formed in cities throughout the United States and carried out, for a time, almost daily nonviolent protest. As autonomous, informal, volunteer‐driven groups that did not incorporate as 501(c)(3) organizations, ACT UP chapters had maximum freedom to make political statements and to engage in actions appropriate for their cities. Chapters funded their activities through in‐kind and monetary donations, and sales of T‐shirts and other products.

With institutional funding largely inaccessible in the 1970s and early 1980s, organizations in the LGBTQ+ community looked inwardly to generate necessary resources. The history of fundraising for LGBTQ+ equality and justice reveals a host of organizations that, initially by necessity and later by design, built bases of individual donors, most often LGBTQ+ people, to provide needed services, community organizing, and advocacy. Following are examples of how grassroots organizations, some of which have grown significantly, generated funding from the 1980s through the 2020s.

HORIZONS FOUNDATION

In the 1970s, lesbians and gay men from throughout the United States migrated to San Francisco, drawn to a seeming Shangri‐La of acceptance that contrasted with the repressive small towns, isolated rural areas, and conservative cities in which they grew up. Gay and lesbian entrepreneurs opened small businesses and formed a chamber of commerce, the Golden Gate Business Association (GGBA). In the late 1970s, GGBA had amassed a small budget surplus, and its board chose to donate money to two nonprofits helping lesbians and gay men. GGBA then decided to organize a casino‐themed event, “22 on the Red,” to raise money and generate interest in members' businesses.

The event, which spotlighted GGBA's support of lesbian and gay nonprofits, was a success, attracting donated goods and services, sponsorships, and hundreds of enthusiastic partygoers. So, GGBA produced another casino night and formed a charitable foundation through which the association would make small grants to community groups providing services and advocacy for gay men and lesbians. LGBTQ+ people moving to San Francisco needed help meeting basic needs like housing and food while they looked for jobs. Employers frequently discriminated against LGBTQ+ job seekers, and landlords often refused to rent to LGBTQ+ people.

Demand for the Foundation's grants far outstripped the money available. At the time, only a handful of progressive or women's foundations across the country would fund a lesbian or gay organization. Even if foundations had been open to supporting lesbian and gay groups, those seeking Horizons' support were often too small, controversial, or unknown. Some GGBA Foundation board members recognized that relying on a single fundraising event limited the organization's effectiveness to raise more money and award more grants.

The GGBA Foundation board consequently decided to seek donations directly from individuals, in addition to producing its “22 on the Red” event. Two board members immediately resigned because they did not want to ask people for money. But remaining board members reached out to their friends, family, and associates for contributions. As businesspeople, they were accustomed to networking and building contacts. Weaving fundraising for the foundation into their professional and personal relationships was natural for many of them.

Generating resources from individuals was also a practical necessity: Even in liberal‐leaning San Francisco, few foundations or corporations in the early 1980s would fund openly gay organizations. Government grants and contracts were also limited given the lack of LGBTQ+ political representation in City Hall. “When other avenues are closed, you have to go to paths you have access to,” explained Doug Braley, the Foundation's first Executive Director.

The Foundation underwent an identity shift. Rather than functioning solely as the philanthropic arm of a professional association, it evolved into a community foundation, generating funding from LGBTQ+ people to address LGBTQ+ community needs. The organization changed its name to the Horizons Foundation and adopted the motto “Taking care of our own.”

Horizons board members and staff diligently built the Foundation's mailing list, not only through board members' contacts but also by collecting names and addresses of people who attended the casino night events and stopped by the Foundation's booth at gay Pride festivals. In an era before databases, board leader Cheri Bryant meticulously recorded donors' and potential donors' information on index cards so that Horizons could send them direct mail appeals, and so that board members could meet personally with people who had the financial means to make large gifts. Horizons' board and staff also worked to raise the Foundation's community visibility, through contingents in the annual gay Pride parade and articles in the local gay press.

Individual donor efforts proved successful, with contributions from individuals outstripping the revenue generated by “22 on the Red.” After a few years, Horizons stopped producing the event, in part because of the intense labor and resources required, and in part because board members didn't want to compete with potential grantees, especially AIDS organizations, that were using events as their main or sole fundraising strategy. By that point, Horizons' fundraising program was grounded in asking individuals directly for contributions. That was a fitting strategy for an organization seeking to build philanthropy among LGBTQ+ people for LGBTQ+ community groups.

As a community foundation, Horizons wanted its board to represent the diversity of the LGBTQ+ community. Ahead of their time, Horizons' early leaders intentionally sought equal representation of men and women, a rarity in the early 1980s. (Consciousness of transgender identities was not yet prevalent.) Over time, many board members had little or no fundraising experience. So, Horizons trained them on individual donor fundraising and provided systems to ask people for financial support.

Braley observed that making a financial gift to Horizons was for many donors a way of participating in the movement to dismantle discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. During a time of intense homophobia and transphobia, when thousands were dying of AIDS, donating to Horizons was also an act of hope for a better future. Contributing, however, was not without material consequences. In the 1980s and 1990s, donors could be fired or evicted if it became public that they supported LGBTQ+ organizations. In that context, writing a check to an organization with the words “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or “transgender” in its name was not only a personal act; it was also a political act.

As LGBTQ+ people fought for their rights and made their lives more visible, Horizons secured modest foundation and corporate support. At the same time, it grew its individual donor base, planned giving commitments, and deep involvement in the community, which helped secure its long‐term viability, eventually becoming a recognized leader in nationwide LGBTQ+ philanthropy.

NATIONAL CENTER FOR LESBIAN RIGHTS

Spurred by the feminist and gay liberation movements, many women “came out” as lesbians in the 1970s. Some were in heterosexual relationships and had children. Many lost custody of their kids because of the assumption that a lesbian could not be a good mother. In response, a group of young lesbian lawyers in 1977 started the Lesbian Rights Project to fight for lesbian mothers and to combat discrimination that gay people faced in other aspects of their lives. They found a home at the San Francisco–based feminist legal nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates.

Like much of the women's movement, which promoted self‐sufficiency and mutual support, Lesbian Rights Project leaders looked largely to lesbians to fund their initial efforts. There was also a practical necessity for the Project to seek community members' financial help: Only a handful of progressive foundations (including the newly formed GGBA Foundation mentioned earlier) would provide grants to openly lesbian and gay groups.

By the mid‐1990s, the Lesbian Rights Project had become an independent organization, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), whose main financial support came from individual donors. Grassroots fundraising was part of the organization's DNA. In the mid‐1990s, NCLR made a concerted effort to deepen and grow its base of donors, as well as diversify its revenue streams.

Ruth Herring, who was Development Director at the time, engaged many of NCLR's founders and major donors (those contributing $1,000 or more annually) to help generate resources and new donors. She created an infrastructure for them to become successful volunteer fundraisers. Every fall, about 12 volunteers and the executive director served as a major gifts team, with each team member meeting with major donors to update them on NCLR's work and to solicit contributions of $1,000 or more.

Two dozen volunteers, some of whom were also major gifts solicitors, secured sponsors and sold tables for the organization's Spring gala event, first held in 1997. “They loved it,” recalled Herring of the volunteers and their activities. “These were engagement opportunities that were deep and visible, especially through the gala. The gala committee volunteers were eager and delighted to work together to identify prospects and ask for contributions. They just needed a structure.”

NCLR's annual gala was not just a signature event but a social phenomenon for the larger lesbian community. NCLR's first dinner/dance/silent auction attracted 1,000 attendees. Quickly, the event grew to more than 2,500 people. By the time of NCLR's first big event, other LGBTQ+ groups in San Francisco had successfully secured corporate funding, as companies were acknowledging the gay market. With the large audience for NCLR's events, it wasn't hard to generate sponsorships from law firms and other corporations. Herring encouraged friendly competition between the table sales and sponsorship teams, which motivated volunteers to meet, and often exceed, their financial goals.

Herring experimented with direct mail solicitations to build the base of donors contributing less than $1,000. She tested mailing lists for organizations, like the ACLU, whose donors she thought might support NCLR's work. Through regular acquisition, membership renewal, and special appeal mailings, NCLR steadily built its donor base. NCLR also recognized the power of sustaining donors and encouraged its existing supporters to become monthly contributors.

Although NCLR had, since its inception, worked on behalf of the entire LGBTQ+ community, not just lesbians, its name led some to believe it was concerned only with lesbian issues. So, NCLR made special efforts to educate gay men about the breadth of the organization's work, and enlisted gay male supporters who asked their peers to contribute to NCLR.

Through steady efforts, NCLR's donor base grew to about 5,000 donors, who provided the bulk of the organization's budget, which increased from around $500,000 in 1995 to $3.3 million about 10 years later.

FUNDRAISING FOR ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN COMMUNITY RESPONSES TO HIV/AIDS

The 1980s and early 1990s were frightening years for LGBTQ+ people, as well as an era of organizing and new nonprofits rooted in LGBTQ+ communities. AIDS was devastating gay communities. Hysteria arose that HIV could be transmitted through casual contact. Mass efforts were necessary to educate gay people and the general population about how to prevent the spread of HIV. At the same time, people with HIV/AIDS needed services, including help navigating complex health systems. For many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), receiving care and accurate information about HIV/AIDS were complicated by cultural and language barriers. Some were immigrants with limited English proficiency. Others were closeted and had parents who believed that homosexuality didn't exist in Asian cultures. An AIDS diagnosis meant not only explaining to family, friends, and neighbors that they had a frightening disease, but also meant coming out as gay.

The Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA), a grassroots San Francisco–based support and advocacy group, created the GAPA Community HIV Project (GCHP) in 1989 to address the cultural and linguistic needs of AAPI men with HIV/AIDS, and gay AAPI men who were at risk of becoming infected with HIV. An all‐volunteer effort, GCHP initially created baskets of donated food and supplies for AAPI men with AIDS. GCHP quickly developed emotional and practical support programs staffed by trained AAPI volunteers to assist AAPI people with HIV/AIDS.

Eventually, GCHP needed a staff person to coordinate volunteers and to initiate HIV‐prevention programs. GAPA provided some funding, and GCHP organized events to raise the rest of the money. However, generating the ongoing support required to meet the growing crisis would be challenging without government help. Only the public sector had the resources needed to address the AIDS pandemic.

GCHP leaders recognized that the San Francisco Health Department and larger AIDS service organizations, which had succeeded in obtaining some foundation funding, were not equitably addressing the needs of people of color with AIDS. But GCHP didn't have relationships with local public health officials to access funding. So, in coalition with other gay men of color, they organized gay AAPI people and allies to advocate that local government officials fund community‐based organizations helping people of color with HIV/AIDS.

GCHP was not just a service provider but a catalyst to channel gay AAPI men's political power to bring about changes that would reduce stigma in AAPI communities around AIDS and being gay. Steve Lew, one of GCHP's founders and later its Executive Director, explained how he considered fundraising as part of community organizing: “The same people that we were trying to build awareness and commitment around to be volunteers or to show up at meetings were the same people we were working with to raise money and to donate.” Lew understood that a power base is also a donor base; it didn't matter how much each person contributed. The goal was to get lots of people to participate politically and to donate.

What started as organizing among gay men grew to involve many more people in San Francisco's AAPI communities as volunteers, advocates, and donors. Over several years, GCHP's grassroots giving grew from $15,000 in 1989 to $130,000 in 1995, the year it changed its name to the Living Well Project (LWP) to reflect its growing focus on individual and community wellness.

GCHP's organizing paid off: The group ultimately received government funding and built a base of individual donors who were motivated by their firsthand experiences of knowing AAPI people with AIDS, seeing GCHP's effectiveness, and feeling connected to GCHP's work combating HIV/AIDS and sexual stigma in AAPI communities.

Unlike GCHP, Asian AIDS Project (AAP), which began in 1987 as a program of San Francisco's Asian American Recovery Services (AARS), initially secured government grants because of AARS’s strong reputation with funders, existing relationships with public agencies, and the innovation of its programs with overlooked communities.

In 1991, AAP spun off from AARS, and Vince Sales, an AAP program director, became the executive director of the newly independent organization. At that time, AAP received restricted government grants but needed unrestricted funding for programs focused on underserved populations (youth in detention, transgender individuals, and women working in massage parlors), as well as a reserve to provide cash flow when the government was slow in paying contractors. So, Sales strategically decided to increase AAP's funding from individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Fortunately, some members of AAP's board had fundraising experience as nonprofit development staff or volunteers. They mentored Sales on the fundamentals of generating resources from nongovernmental sources, and they introduced people in their networks to AAP, creating lists of their contacts (including non‐AAPI allies who had the financial capacity to make large gifts) for direct mail solicitations, event invitations, and major gift asks. AAP developed materials (such as newsletters featuring stories about the organization's clients, volunteers, and donors) to keep supporters informed about the impact of their contributions.

Just as AAP worked to change AAPI community norms around HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ+ people, so too did the organization try to change norms around giving, engaging bar patrons as donors and strengthening AAP's name recognition and reputation so that community members would be motivated to contribute when asked directly. AAP developed an ethos of all staff helping with fundraising. Staff members understood that financial resources were essential for impactful programs. As such, all staff served as ambassadors for AAP, looking for opportunities to ask individuals and businesses to support the organization through cash and in‐kind donations.

Because AAP programs were well known and authentic, staffed largely by bilingual and bicultural people who represented the diversity of AAPI ethnicities, community members (AAPI gay men and transgender people in particular) knew and trusted the organization. AAP's reputation paved the way for grassroots support, including donations through formal fundraising dinners and outreach events in bars and other venues where affected AAPI people congregated.

In 1996, AAP and LWP merged to form Asian and Pacific Islander (A&PI) Wellness Center. With a $2 million budget and 40 staff members who spoke 20 different languages, A&PI Wellness Center was the largest nonprofit in North America focusing on HIV in AAPI communities. John Manzon‐Santos, who was founding Executive Director of Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA) in New York City, became the new organization's first executive director.

Even as A&PI Wellness Center secured government funding, foundation grants, and corporate sponsors, Manzon‐Santos and his team leveraged the grassroots organizing approaches to visibility and fundraising of AAP and LWP. Passing the hat at a Thai temple after an HIV 101 workshop or at a keg party hosted by a local bar continued to be important.

At the same time, A&PI Wellness Center had more capacity to cultivate individual donors to contribute major gifts through branded, targeted campaigns. For example, the Founders Campaign at the time of the merger met a $100,000 goal. Gay and bisexual men, along with women of all sexual orientations, continued to form the core of major giving.

Unrestricted dollars were vital to addressing critical service gaps that institutional funders didn't prioritize: programs for sexually active AAPI youth involved in or at risk for involvement in the criminal justice system, and eventually multilingual case management for AAPIs living with HIV.

The group got creative, pairing government‐funded education programs with visibility, community advocacy, and fundraising. To fight HIV‐related stigma on a national scale, for example, A&PI Wellness Center successfully advocated that the federal government designate May 19, 2005, as the first National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. A&PI Wellness Center hosted a flagship event—a panel discussion featuring AAPI celebrities from entertainment, sports, and activism—with dozens of media outlets in attendance. By design, this event was colocated with and immediately followed by the organization's annual awards ceremony and fundraiser, where the same celebrities could participate and help generate unrestricted funding.

In 2015, the government designated API Wellness a federally qualified health center, thereby guaranteeing the organization favorable government reimbursement rates for health care services that the center provides to its low‐income clients.

NATIONAL COALITION OF BLACK LESBIANS AND GAYS

Black lesbian and gay advocacy groups began proliferating around the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Building on a tradition of social groups in Black communities, these queer groups relied largely on volunteers and in‐kind donations to realize their advocacy, cultural production, and social support goals.

Like all Black people, African American gay men and lesbians faced systemic racism in the criminal justice system, education, and employment, as well as daily acts of personal discrimination and disrespect. But they also had to deal with the added layer of racism within lesbian and gay communities. And they couldn't assume to find a supportive home in Black communities either because of homophobia, even as Black communities and families offered safe harbor in the overall struggle against race‐based discrimination. So, Black lesbians and gay men formed groups of their own in which they could be their full selves and approach liberation from an intersectional standpoint. As AIDS‐related illnesses and death spread, Black people, particularly Black gay men, were disproportionately hit, increasing the need for organizing and advocacy.

In 1978, several activists formed the National Coalition of Black Gays as a means for queer Black people to voice their perspectives, which were unacknowledged or ignored in white‐dominated gay organizations, and to advocate for the equality of gay people within Black communities. The Coalition grew as a federation of local chapters in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and other cities. The organization, which eventually added “lesbian” to its name, focused on advancing the social, cultural, and economic well‐being of Black lesbians and gay men. Its statement of purpose included “transpersons” as part of its constituency.

The Coalition advocated for the rights of Black lesbian and gay parents at a time when they were overlooked. It was one of the first organizations to engage in HIV prevention efforts in Black communities, producing materials specifically for Black men who had sex with men but did not identify as gay. The Coalition also engaged in cultural and organizing efforts, publishing Black/Out, a quarterly magazine, and producing “National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conferences,” in addition to its own national conferences.

Gil Gerald, the Coalition's first paid Executive Director, had been a founding board member of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a LGBTQ+ advocacy group, and through HRC had been trained on individual donor fundraising, including how to throw fundraising house parties and how to secure donations from major donors. He applied what he learned to his work with the Coalition, developing and deepening relationships with a handful of allies who were not Black lesbians or gay men but who understood the need for the Coalition. These allies contributed between $5,000 and $10,000 each.

At the same time, Gerald built a constituency among Black gay men and lesbians who could financially support the Coalition's work, mainly through dues as individual members or through collective dues as chapters of the Coalition. Gerald found that members and chapter leaders were very responsive to paying dues.

He also expanded the Coalition's supporters to include institutional funders. He researched the handful of progressive foundations that had donated to LGBTQ+ organizations, and he secured a few grants. Gerald learned through colleagues that even within the socially regressive Reagan administration there were avenues to access federal dollars for groups like the Coalition. The national office of the Coalition had developed a relationship with a federal official at the Department of Health and Human Services who had authority to issue a grant of $20,000 for the Coalition to produce the first national conference on AIDS in the Black community.

Looking back on the nearly 12 years of the Coalition's existence, Gerald noted that few of the group's leaders had training in community organizing or fundraising and had to learn on the spot while dealing with multiple crises, including the devastating impact of AIDS on Black people. He recalled that in the era before cultural competency became a common expectation for service provision, foundation representatives questioned why a specific organization focused on AIDS in the Black community was necessary. These factors highlighted the need for funder education and for capacity‐building assistance for small organizations addressing the needs of Black people.

TRANSGENDER LAW CENTER

Black and brown transgender women led the Stonewall rebellion, which inspired generations of LGBTQ+ people to organize and advocate for equal rights. Yet, transgender people have been misunderstood, overlooked, and marginalized within the broader queer‐rights movement. In the larger US society, transgender people have been the targets of political attacks, cultural ridicule, and deadly violence. In the face of this oppression, transgender people have fought back.

In the early 2000s, two law students formed Transgender Law Center (TLC). Initially a project of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and supported by a fellowship from Echoing Green, a funder that supports social change entrepreneurs, TLC became a separate organization in 2004. Until 2012, the vast majority of TLC's revenue came from progressive foundations. That's when TLC hired C. Nathan Harris as Development Director.

For flexibility, stability, and long‐term growth, TLC needed to diversify its revenue streams and generate unrestricted funding. Knowing that historically about 70% of private‐sector contributions come from individuals, and having been Director of Individual Giving at Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE), which had a robust individual donor program, Harris set the strategic goal of increasing TLC's funding from individuals, as well as corporations.

A key donor acquisition strategy was “Give Out Day” (a national day of philanthropy similar to Giving Tuesday, but focused on LGBTQ+ organizations). In 2013, TLC recruited a team of 10 “Give Out Day” volunteers to ask their peers for donations. The effort was successful: TLC won a “Give Out Day” cash prize as one of the top three organizations in the nation that had generated the largest number of total donors. In subsequent years, TLC's “Give Out Day” team of peer‐to‐peer solicitors tripled in size. More solicitors translated into hundreds more donors. As TLC grew, leaders decided not to participate in “Give Out Day” so as not to compete with smaller organizations.

TLC also successfully asked many of its existing major donors to increase their gifts. Studies conducted in the 2000s indicated that the largest donations from individuals to transgender organizations had by 2011 plateaued at $15,000, a relatively low amount compared to major gifts for lesbian and gay organizations. This knowledge provided Masen Davis, TLC's Executive Director at the time, opportunities to ask TLC's major donors to increase their donations beyond the $15,000 ceiling. When donors understood the underfunding of transgender groups, many stepped up and gave more to TLC. The largest individual donor contribution to TLC quickly rose from $15,000 to six figures.

In 2012, TLC had a donor base of several hundred individuals who contributed about $100,000. Three years later, TLC had tripled its number of donors and increased by six times the amount generated from individuals.

As a legal organization, TLC partners with law firms that provide pro bono legal work. To build its corporate support, TLC encouraged law firms to donate to TLC the amount in legal fees that the firms would have received after successful litigation. These asks generated two six‐figure donations.

After Kris Hayashi became TLC's Executive Director in 2015, the organization purposefully applied a racial justice lens to all of its work, including fundraising. Although TLC's donor base had grown significantly, it didn't reflect the communities the organization served. So, Ace Xavier Portis, who succeeded Harris as Development Director, intentionally set out to increase transgender BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) representation among TLC's donors. Portis participated in TLC gatherings to get to know individuals involved in its programs and to ask them to claim ownership of TLC by making financial contributions. He ensured affordable tickets for all TLC fundraising events and didn't make assumptions about the financial capacity of BIPOC transgender people to make donations. BIPOC transgender people appeared more frequently in TLC's communications.

Portis was, at the same time, strengthening TLC's internal fundraising infrastructure by updating the organization's database, hiring additional development staff, training all staff on how to talk about TLC, and raising TLC's visibility.

Those efforts paid off after the 2016 election of Donald Trump ushered in an era of increased and relentless attacks on the transgender community. Donors concerned about the siege against transgender people were looking for ways to show their support. Contributions to TLC exploded, including from institutional supporters, some of which had earlier stopped funding TLC, and a big wave of new individual donors.

In 2021, TLC's revenue streams were far different than 10 years earlier: 53% from foundations, 27% from individuals, with the remaining funding coming from government sources, events, corporate support, and investment income, for a total of nearly $6.1 million.

Although vilification of LGBTQ+ people has decreased significantly since the 1950s, the struggle for LGBTQ+ equality and justice continues. Although LGBTQ+ nonprofits have greater access to funding from the public sector, foundations, and corporations, they are still subject to political shifts and the vagaries of foundation and corporate agendas. During the Trump administration, for instance, LGBTQ+ people were once again in the federal government's political crosshairs.

The nonprofits profiled in this chapter, as well as numerous others, demonstrate that organizing people subjected to discrimination to advocate for their rights and dignity and to contribute resources to the work necessary for positive changes can result in revolutionary advancements. In the early 1980s, for example, when AIDS was ravaging beleaguered gay communities throughout the United States, lesbians and gay men rallied to care for people who were dying. Over time, they founded and funded organizations providing services and advocacy for people with HIV/AIDS. And they exercised political power to compel local, state, and federal officials to fund AIDS programs, an idea that was virtually inconceivable when the AIDS pandemic began and lesbians and gay men were roundly vilified.

Similarly, many LGBTQ+ organizations led by white people frequently ignored the existence of queer people of color. Confronting homophobia within their ethnic/racial communities and racism within lesbian and gay communities, LGBTQ+ people of color created and supported organizations meeting their unique needs. Over time, people of color, as members and donors to non‐racial‐specific LGBTQ+ groups, have demanded that those organizations evolve to address the varied needs and perspectives of increasingly diverse LGBTQ+ communities.

As the organizations in this chapter show, the movement to change societal attitudes about LGBTQ+ people and to secure their equal rights has required clear visions for progress, organized advocacy by affected communities, and financial contributions from LGBTQ+ individuals and their allies. These organizations have lived out the motto that the Horizons Foundation adopted in the early 1980s: “Taking care of our own.” In doing so, they have changed US society in ways that the founders of lesbian and gay groups in the 1950s envisioned.