Earlier this year, I reached out to the top 10 foundations funding LGBTQ+ nonprofits, according to Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ Resource Tracking Report for 2022, with a single question: Did they plan to stay the course on their support for sexual minorities in light of hostile executive orders from the new Trump administration?
The majority of the foundations said “yes.” Still, the top three foundations in the field — funders that collectively awarded the majority of the entire top 10 funders’ grants in 2022 — declined to respond, suggesting reticence about either the topic or being transparent about their giving in the early weeks of Trump’s second term.
Now, Funders for LGBTQ Issues has released its Resource Tracking Report for 2023, which shows that foundation giving to LGBTQ+ nonprofits plunged in the year before Trump’s re-election. Published in June, the report reveals that total dollars awarded were down by 19%, or $48.7 million, from the $258.1 million given in 2022. Adjusted for inflation, 2023 foundation giving to LGBTQ+ groups fell by a jaw-dropping 22%.
At the same time, Lambda Legal was in the midst of its highly successful Unstoppable Futures campaign, which netted $258 million over the three-year period between 2022 and 2025 — a massive haul, and primarily from individual donors. Only four of the campaign’s 17 principal gifts came from mainstream foundations.
And on July 1, Global Philanthropy Project, which works to increase philanthropic support for LGBTI people in the Global South and East, announced that its Fund Our Futures Campaign, launched in November 2024, had blown right through initial fundraising goals of $100 and $150 million. The effort ultimately landed at $182 million in new commitments for LGBTQ-serving organizations around the world. Private foundations, including some U.S.-based funders, made 44% of those commitments, 16% came from public foundations, and other donors included government agencies in the U.K., Sweden, and Norway.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Collectively, these three developments suggest that U.S. foundations began decreasing their support of LGBTQ-serving nonprofits during the Biden administration, despite the fact that state legislatures significantly ramped up their attacks on LGBTQ+ residents during those same years. And despite the fact that Global Philanthropy Project attracted some U.S. funders, it’s too soon to say whether or not Trump’s election was a wake-up call for American foundations to start opening their checkbooks again — particularly since only a single large, mainstream U.S. foundation, the Ford Foundation, chipped in to that campaign.
What is known is that major U.S. foundations’ support of the country’s LGBTQ+ communities has never been particularly robust when considered in the context of their overall giving. For example, they allocated only $.25 out of every $100 of their grantmaking to queer-supporting nonprofits in 2022. In 2023, that proportion fell to $.20 out of every $100. At the same time, LGBTQ+ nonprofits rely on private foundations for a significant amount of their funding: In 2022, 49% of LGBTQ+ funding came from private foundation grants.
In talking with experts in the field about the shifting support provided by foundations (and queer individuals and their families) to LGBTQ-serving nonprofits, one theory raised was that donors believed that queer Americans had largely won the fight for equality under the law. The Matthew Shepard Act, which addressed anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009. Marriage equality has been the law for over 10 years. And while the federal Equality Act banning anti-LGBTQI discrimination in housing and employment hasn’t passed, queer couples living in 32 states are protected against discrimination (or rather, permitted to sue over it) if they do marry.
These days, though, no one who takes even a passing interest in the news could conclude that these victories are final.
The myth of universal queer affluence could also be a factor shaping foundation giving to queer organizations. While it’s true that male same-sex couples have higher incomes on average than heterosexual couples, lesbian couples earn significantly less, and over a third of transgender people live in poverty. The bottom line is that, yes, there is a good deal of wealth in LGBTQ+ communities overall, particularly among gay male couples with no children. But while Lambda Legal’s success suggests that LGBTQ+ folks and their families may be starting to dig deep to counter the onslaught of legal attacks, queer nonprofits almost certainly won’t be able to preserve legal and cultural gains without ample support from foundations and wealthy, heterosexual donors as well.
For its part, the Fund Our Futures campaign won support from a number of mostly smaller, private progressive funders, including the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, the Black Feminist Fund, Democracy Fund, Emergent Fund, the Horizons Foundation and Third Wave Fund. The U.S.-based Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is also participating, and so is the Omidyar-backed Luminate.
As mentioned, only one commitment came from a large mainstream U.S. foundation: the Ford Foundation, which in 2022 was the second-largest grantmaker by dollar amount to LGBTQ+ nonprofits. (Ford was among the top three givers that didn’t reply to my question back in March.)
It’s possible that foundations will step up in the wake of the simultaneous conservative attacks on queer communities and funders’ ability to give as they wish. There’s also a chance that this is already happening behind the scenes; after all, this year’s Funders for LGBTQ Issues tracking report data is already two years old, and Ford’s support for Fund Our Futures may not be the only money moving without an accompanying press release.
Much as I’d prefer more openness from funders about their plans — I am, after all, a journalist — the important thing in these fraught times is to get and keep the money moving.
Note (7/9/25): This article has been updated to include more detail about Global Philanthropy Project’s work and a fuller list of the types of donors that made commitments to GPP’s Fund Our Futures campaign.
