These Two Philanthropic Initiatives Seek to Save Trans Lives Now and Build Support for the Future

Last spring, in the wake of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to target families pursuing medically approved healthcare for their transgender children, a group of trans- and LGBTQ-led funding intermediaries launched the Trans Futures Funding Campaign. Its goal: to raise an initial $10 million in front-line, emergency support for state and local groups fighting the wave of anti-trans legislation in their own communities.

Today, having met that initial goal, the campaign’s organizers are taking some time to build the effort’s infrastructure and decide their next moves. Whatever specific strategies the initiative pursues in the weeks and months to come, though, one thing is already clear — funders that want to do something to help stem the tide of anti-transgender legislation and hatred should strongly consider looking into this campaign.

A tale of two strategies: short and long term

At a glance, it might be easy to confuse the Trans Futures Funding Campaign with a similar effort, Grantmakers United for Trans Communities, aka the GUTC pledge. Both are initiatives housed within and administered by Funders for LGBTQ Issues and both, after all, seek to move money from funders to trans-led nonprofits in need. But there are some notable differences between the two that would definitely seem to justify the need for these separate efforts.

The most marked difference is in the thrust of the strategies behind each. Beyond a commitment to move money to trans-led, trans-serving organizations, funders that have signed on to the GUTC pledge also commit to being publicly vocal in their support and to ongoing self-education and to changes in their internal practices, including improving their recruitment and retention of trans and gender-nonconforming people at both the staff and board levels.

The Trans Futures Funding Campaign, on the other hand, can be thought of as more of an entry-level access point for funders that currently lack the knowledge or mechanisms to give effectively to state or local trans-led groups. While GUTC has attracted a few heavy-hitters like Ford and Hewlett, most pledging funders to date are relatively smaller organizations. Meanwhile, Trans Futures has attracted money from Ford and also from other larger funders that aren’t usually associated with trans issues, such as the Surdna and Robert Wood Johnson foundations.

Alexander Lee, Funders for LGBTQ Issues deputy director, explained that the Trans Futures Funding campaign leverages the expertise of its member funding intermediaries to move money immediately to states and trans groups that are fighting the impacts of legalized discrimination and violence. Concurrently, the GUTC pledge initiative provides an opportunity to invite funders into a deeper, longer-term relationship with GUTC and trans-led nonprofits alike.

“It's one thing to ask them for money, but it's another to say, where are your values? Where can we find some shared alignment with (those values), to help maintain and drive the momentum in the sector for this type of campaign for trans communities?” he said. “It's like it's two strategies, hitting them short term and long term."

The short-term strategy represented by Trans Futures Funding may well be helping funders save lives right now. By brokering a connection between the Ford Foundation and the Campaign for Southern Equality — one of the funding intermediaries that make up the greater initiative — the Trans Futures Fund inspired Ford to move $100,000 to the CSE, Lee said. That money is being used to support the campaign’s Southern TransYouth Emergency Project, which provides medical referrals and travel support to families impacted by bans on gender-affirming healthcare. Thanks to the Ford grant, CSE reports that it has been able to expand the project to 12 states. Given the link between hormone-replacement therapy and a decrease in suicide attempts among trans teens, the TransYouth Emergency Project is potentially saving lives among the 80% of trans youth in the South that CSE says are now trapped in states that have banned access to medically approved treatments.

Stopping right-wing momentum

The overlapping Venn diagrams between the anti-abortion and anti-trans movements are well documented. So are the links between the anti-abortion movement and its funders and efforts to restrict voting rights, and even to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Given those links, funders that support abortion access, voting rights, and even American democracy should consider funding efforts like the Trans Futures Funding Campaign as part of an overall strategy to combat right-wing political extremism.

Trans Futures certainly seems to be building the infrastructure to handle increased support. In January, Funders for LGBTQ Issues hired Ashe Helm-Hernández, an organizer with extensive experience in the Southern U.S. states where trans peoples’ lives and rights are most at risk, to coordinate the campaign. Helm-Hernández said that, in addition to building infrastructure, the campaign is currently also re-evaluating its initial goals and working on plans to both make the initiative more visible and create methods to help funders see where funding gaps exist and how best to fill those gaps and support trans-led nonprofits.

For his part, Lee said that by allowing the right to take the momentum in mounting so many successful attacks against transgender and gender-nonconforming people and their families, philanthropy and the larger social justice movement has allowed conservatives also to build energy and momentum — which in turn could lead to the election of an extremist Republican president in 2024. While moving more money to trans-led local and state organizations may not stop the discriminatory bills that are currently in state legislatures’ pipelines, providing that ammunition would at least force conservatives to spend more money on what are, currently, comparatively easy wins for them — and thus, potentially make them move at least some of their resources away from their more uphill battles on elections and issues like abortion, gerrymandering and other methods of voter suppression.

Supporting the emergency needs of trans-led nonprofits now is also a way to build a brighter future, both for trans communities and the other groups and rights currently under attack by conservative forces.

As Helm-Hernández said, “We work as though our hands are tied, and that's not always the case, because (trans-led nonprofits) will do the things we've always done. Foundations need to actually do things that they've never done; they need to experiment, they need to know that they are sowing seeds for a future, not for an immediate response. So if putting in a million now is like, ‘I want to see something next year, I want to see something in five,’ you need to know that you are sowing seeds for four generations.”

Featured