Last month, the Stonewall Community Foundation announced a new Reclaiming Our Power grants initiative: $825,000 in three-year grants to 15 organizations to support resilience and power-building work. Ten of the grantees were announced last month, with an additional five to be chosen next year.
Given the current climate of retrenchment on LGBTQ Americans’ rights, it’s hardly surprising that the Stonewall Community Foundation, named as it is for the uprising that jumpstarted the country’s LGBTQ rights movement, is focusing its new grant program on resilience and power-building. But at $55,000 each, the Reclaiming Our Power grants clock in at more than five times the amount that Stonewall usually moves with a single award.
The funding source for the new grant provides a powerful example of the potential of LGBTQ legacy giving — while also showcasing the important roles that queer community foundations can play at this inflection point in the country’s history.
Stonewall’s Reclaiming Our Power effort is fueled by the remainder of the Mark L. Brandt Legacy Fund, a $2 million bequest that the foundation received after Brandt died in early 2021. Stonewall Executive Director Elisa Crespo told IP that her organization was originally using the Mark L. Brandt Legacy Fund to provide one-time discretionary grants to mainly New York City-based nonprofits. But when Crespo took Stonewall’s helm in November after serving as the executive director of New York’s NEW Pride Agenda, she and her board decided to use the fund to create Reclaiming Our Power to provide multi-year grants and significantly increase grant amounts. Additionally, Stonewall plans to promote the new initiative as a way to strengthen partnerships with other institutional funders “and really tap into Stonewall Community Foundation’s status as an intermediary community foundation.”
Crespo isn’t alone in recognizing the potential legacy giving power of the country’s LGBTQ population. In 2023, Katie Hultquist, the director of leadership giving for Outright International, wrote a guest article for Inside Philanthropy detailing the $270 billion held in the estates of LGBTQ people that will be passed along over the next decade. That’s a small fraction of the overall $73 trillion set to pass to succeeding generations in the next 10 or so years, but it is also more than 10 times the amount philanthropic foundations moved to LGBTQ nonprofits in 2023.
Obviously, there’s no way to know how much of that $270 billion will make its way to queer, community-serving organizations. As well, not all queer people are politically progressive. But in the wake of Lambda Legal’s massively successful $285 million raise — primarily from LGBTQ people and their families — through its “Unstoppable Future” campaign, it’s safe to believe that today’s anti-gay and anti-trans attacks may both inspire LGBTQ folks to open their wallets while alive and change where their estates will be headed after they die.
At least some of both types of giving are bound to end up in the coffers of the community’s foundations. Evidence indicates that those dollars will be effectively spent. Both Stonewall and Horizons Foundation, the country’s oldest LGBTQ community foundation, punch well above their weight in terms of impact. As Inside Philanthropy reported in 2022, one of Horizons Foundation’s first $500 checks went to what was then the Lesbian Rights Project and is today the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, a $4.7 million advocacy and impact litigation powerhouse. Horizons also supported the first Gay Games and was an early supporter of the fight against AIDS. In the same vein, Crespo said that Stonewall made the first foundation grants to Destination Tomorrow, Translatina Network, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (The Center) in New York City. More broadly, philanthropic support made a big difference in the lead-up to the 2015 marriage equality decision.
Destination Tomorrow, a queer community center in the Bronx, grew from nine to 95 employees and from one to five locations (including expanding into Atlanta and Washington, D.C.) from 2021-2024, while the The Center provided more than 40,000 individual mental health, youth, substance abuse and other services to queer New Yorkers in 2024 alone.
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“In my experience having once led a statewide LGBTQ nonprofit or advocacy organization here in New York, it is local and state-based LGBTQ organizations that I think have been the most impactful and effective in pushing back and winning rights for our community,” Crespo said. “And I think oftentimes larger organizations suck up all the attention, media and funding and don’t always have the track record, particularly in this current climate and era that we’re living in.”
Supporting marginalized communities in today’s environment requires a grantmaking approach that’s both nimble and weighted toward state and local organizations. There’s not enough time to fund studies, conduct extensive site visits or undertake most of the usual process-heavy practices that large philanthropies frequently rely on. National nonprofits like Lambda Legal and the National Center for LGBTQ Rights are easy to find and have a valuable role to play, particularly in the realm of impact litigation, but a lot of the action is taking place on the state and local level. By their nature, community foundations are in the business of developing the kind of intimate knowledge of their program areas required to find and nurture the most promising grassroots groups — and LGBTQ community foundations are no different.
“For 35 years, we’ve been here as a for-us, by-us LGBTQ community foundation,” Crespo said. “We have experience with grassroots organizations. We have our ear close to the ground. We know who the emerging groups are, and we know how to move lots of small grants.”
Large mainstream foundations looking for the most impact for their pro-LGBTQ philanthropic investments may well want to consider taking advantage of that knowledge, whether via Stonewall or another community foundation serving queer Americans.
