The first few months of the Trump administration have been a nightmare for much of the philanthrosphere as organizations face cuts and threatened cuts to nonprofit funding and a tsunami of executive orders seeking to empower the federal government to dictate spending decisions, employment policies, and who gets served by nonprofits and funders. Given the particular hostility the administration, and the GOP more broadly, has shown to transgender Americans, we wanted to get an idea of how the country’s top LGBTQ funders are (or aren’t) taking action to respond to these unprecedented times.
To learn what’s going on in the field, I reached out to the top 10 U.S. funders (foundations and funding intermediaries) listed in Funders for LGBT Issues’ 2022 Resource Tracking Report, which was issued in 2024, and asked whether they planned any changes in their grantmaking in response to the anti-trans and anti-DEI executive orders that target programs and policies designed to create equal treatment for gay, lesbian and bisexual people.
Despite what one expert in the field described as funders being “still kind of paralyzed in this moment and trying to figure out what to do,” six of the 10 organizations responded to our questions. Their collective responses show a funding sector determined to continue its support for a community that is once again being targeted, perhaps reflecting how many of the major LGBTQ funders are also mission-specific organizations rather than generalists. This stands in contrast to the more cautious responses we received in our earlier reporting on funders’ plans for racial justice grantmaking in the wake of Trump’s anti-DEI executive order.
Notably, however, the three largest LGBTQ funders — all not LGBTQ mission-specific, and one affiliated with a pharmaceutical company — did not reply. Those three alone moved the majority of funds granted by the top 10 LGBTQ funders in 2022.
Two smaller foundations whose missions revolve in large part around supporting LGBTQ communities, the Gill Foundation and the Arcus Foundation, said they plan to stay the course.
Gill, which moved $9 million in 2022, “is fully committed and engaged in defending protections for all members of the LGBTQ community,” a spokesperson said in an email. A spokesperson for Arcus, which provided $6.2 million in 2022, likewise told IP: “We have made no changes to our mission or grantmaking and remain focused on ensuring the wellbeing of LGBTQ people, the world’s great apes and gibbons, and the human populations who live alongside them.”
Like Gill and Arcus, the Third Wave Fund was explicit about its plans to carry on with its mission. “Third Wave Fund remains ever-present in our commitment to resourcing BIPOC gender justice movement work. We have no plans to decrease our funding. In fact, we are increasing our grantmaking from last year, moving more general operating support to people and communities directly impacted by the increasing violence of federal and state legislation,” said Third Wave Director of Strategic Communications Monica Trinidad.
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The Third Wave Fund, which was founded in the late 1990s to support “youth-led, intersectional, gender justice activism to advance the community power, wellbeing and self-determination of young Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color,” moved $6 million to LGBTQ nonprofits in 2022.
Two funders that support LGBTQ communities as part of wider missions were also direct about plans to continue that support. “We are committed to (and will remain committed to) health equity and the efforts/organizations that improve LGBTQ health and wellbeing,” said a spokesperson for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which moved $9.2 million to the field in 2022. “In fact, over the past one to two years, we have deepened our investments in litigation-focused partners that work across several issues.”
The spokesperson said that many of the grantees RWJF supports are playing critical roles in pushing back against the administration’s attacks, including the ACLU, Legal Defense Fund, Democracy Forward and Southern Poverty Law Center. “We also have continued funding with the National LGBTQ Task Force and the Trans Law Center as part of our continued engagement with the Equity and Social Justice Relationships Cohort,” the RWJF spokesman added.
The Tides Foundation, which moved $9.7 million to the field in 2022, “remains committed to supporting the LGBTQ+ community and shifting power to communities historically denied it,” said Chief Partnership Officer Dan Shannon.
Shannon said that Tides, a funding intermediary, expects that its donors will continue supporting LGBTQ+ causes, “and we will continue to help them direct funds to the most impactful organizations in the LGBTQ+ space.” Tides gave $8.6 million to LGBTQ+ nonprofits in 2023. “We look forward to continuing this important work unimpeded,” Shannon said.
When I posed questions to racial justice funders about their plans in the face of the anti-DEI executive order, three of them gave diplomatic and fairly general answers. In contrast, only one of the LGBTQ funders that replied for this article took a similar communications approach.
The Chicago Community Trust, which invested $6.9 million in LGBTQ nonprofits in 2022, “was created to unite our community, help it face its most pressing challenges, and seize its greatest opportunities. That commitment extends to everyone in our region,” said Nina Alcacio, the trust’s director of public relations. “We have heard from many of our grant partners about their current challenges and worries and will continue engaging with them to determine how we can best support them, including through increased grantmaking.”
Even if every current LGBTQ funder starts speaking out now and continues the support they have provided in the past, though, the field has an even larger reason to worry: They are being vastly outspent.
In 2022, the top 10 funders supporting U.S.-based LGBTQ communities and issues awarded $149.2 million in grants. That total accounted for roughly 52% of all funding in this area that year. Meanwhile, just four of the country’s anti-LGBT organizations — the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Federalist Society — collectively reported $479 million in net assets in 2023, well over double the money that was moved to LGBTQ-serving nonprofits.
Not all of those assets were spent attacking LGBTQ rights, of course, but the fact remains that the war chest available to opponents of LGBTQ equality, and transgender Americans’ rights in particular, dwarfs the money being spent to specifically protect those communities. And now, opponents of LGBTQ equality have the support of a friendly president, Congress and Supreme Court.
To put it another way: Words are wonderful. Signatures on large checks would be better.
