The Story Behind a Donor’s Million-Dollar-Plus Gift to Back the Fight for LGBTQ+ Civil Rights

As a conservative campaign against LGBTQ rights continues, including a flurry of anti-rights legislation at the state level, philanthropy has a key role to play in ensuring that organizations serving LGBTQ people — and defending their rights in court — have enough resources to keep up the fight.

However, despite all the grantmakers out there who are stepping up, LGBTQ advocacy continues to wrestle with a funding gap. Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ latest tracking report, which was based on funding data from 2021, put U.S. grantmakers’ total support for LGBTQ issues and nonprofits at $251.9 million, a sizable jump from the previous year. That might sound like a lot, but it amounts to just $0.28 to LGBTQ nonprofits for every $100 U.S. philanthropy spent overall. Meanwhile, nonprofits serving trans people received only four cents for every $100.

Amid potentially dire national prospects for LGBTQ civil rights, we continue to highlight the funders out there, who derive their wealth from a variety of sources and are motivated by equally varied reasons. Often, the motivation is personal. I recently wrote about real estate mogul Robert Ansin’s foundation, which backs psychedelics research to improve treatment outcomes for LGBTQ people. Ansin’s child is a nonbinary adult and dealt with discrimination along the way.

Now comes news that LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal received a $1.25 million gift from Chicago’s Steans family to support its Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project. I recently caught up with Heather Steans, a former Democratic member of the Illinois Senate and chair of the Steans Family Foundation. In our conversation, I found out more about what motivated the gift, the personal motivations behind it, and what philanthropy can do to be a better ally to LGBTQ organizations in the coming months.

“It’s one of those things where you need things working together”

Heather Steans spent nearly a decade and a half as a state senator in the northern part of Chicago from 2008 to 2021. She calls herself a “budgeteer” during her tenure, but also someone who focused on marriage equality alongside state Rep. Greg Harris. This is when Steans first encountered Lambda Legal, the long-running LGBTQ civil rights organization started by lawyer Bill Thom in the 1970s. She credits the organization for helping her craft bills to support LGBTQ people. “They were the ones I would always have [in] the room when everyone wanted to negotiate,” Steans said.

With an office in Chicago, Lambda Legal was always close by for the state senator, and she says she also benefitted from Lambda’s advocacy work, talking to legislators about the need for these bills. In 2009, Steans introduced a gay marriage bill (SB 2468) that aimed to grant same-sex couples full marriage rights in Illinois. Fittingly, on Valentine's Day 2013, the Illinois Senate passed that bill 34-21-2, and Gov. Pat Quinn signed it into law, making Illinois the 16th state to legalize same-sex marriage.

As Steans pursued wins in state politics, family philanthropy was also on the agenda via the Steans Family Foundation, started in the late 1980s by her father, Harrison Irwin Steans. As chair of US AmeriBank, Harrison Steans grew the institution from a single $40 million bank to a six-bank holding company with assets exceeding $1.8 billion. In 1987, the bank holding company was sold to NBD Corporation, now part of JPMorgan Chase. Harrison Steans passed away in 2019.

The foundation is a family affair, headed up by Steans and her two sisters, and each of their husbands. When the foundation first started, Steans said her father convened the whole family and they collectively picked the first project they would work on together. It was around at-risk youth. Fittingly, all these years later, this latest gift to Lambda Legal was given alongside her sisters Jennifer and Robin.

The Steans Family Foundation gave away about $14 million in 2021, mainly focused on community development in a Black neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, and one in North Chicago, a predominantly Latinx immigrant community. In 2022, the foundation’s grantmaking totaled roughly $16.5 million.

Working across multiple sectors to make an impact has always been important for Steans. “It’s one of those things where you need things working together…. You really need to try to get alignment to make the biggest impact. There are certain things that each do well — philanthropy, government, and then that policy and advocacy piece, too,” she said.

Stepping up for LGBTQ litigation

Steans said she’s been supporting Lambda since she first started working with the organization. She particularly became close with Camilla Taylor, deputy legal director for litigation at Lambda in Chicago. “I’m a huge fan of hers. I feel like she had really been doing a lot of work on which states should take which approach,” Steans said. “Sort of building the cases toward the Supreme Court.” The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide with the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015. That followed concerted, strategic efforts by philanthropic funders to expand public support for LGBTQ rights.

Steans happened to be an Illinois state senator at a time when she and two other Illinois state senators all had kids who were starting to identify with a different gender — or had already started to transition. Steans’ own trans daughter started to transition in her early 20s. “It was nice having other parents who were going through it at the same time who were actually in the legislature,” she said. “We all know how tough the environment is for trans kids doing it. And just some of the hateful stuff even personally we would get from our colleagues around it.”

When Steans left the legislature in 2021, she really wanted to step up her support. Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings reached out to her about joining the board. She called it a “no brainer,” praising Lambda Legal as the most “pivotal" organization in protecting the rights of trans kids and adults.

This latest $1.25 million gift from the Steans family will specifically support Lambda Legal’s Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project, which is rooted in the idea that nonbinary and transgender people should be able to live openly and authentically. Lambda works to ensure nonbinary and trans individuals have access to identity documents, healthcare and inclusive school policies. The gift will fund the hiring of more attorneys in response to the raft of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ laws that are currently being passed around the country.

The Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project is headed up by Sasha Buchert, who previously worked at the Transgender Law Center. After the 2016 election, the lawyer joined Lambda and was counsel in Karnoski v. Trump, a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s ban on military service by transgender people. Buchert is also counsel in Gore v. Lee, a federal lawsuit filed in Tennessee challenging that state’s refusal to amend birth certificates for transgender people.

Buchert said that the Steans gift “couldn’t come at a more important moment.” She noted that since since 2022, federal and state legislators across the United States have introduced more than 1,300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, a large number of which target transgender people. “It’s not just care-to-treat gender dysphoria. It also involves access to identity documents, competing in athletics, access to facilities… just a whole swath of really horrific target legislation,” she said. “We view ourselves as one of the last lines of defense against these kinds of attacks.”

She also mentioned critical victories Lambda has won in recent months. The organization is celebrating an April 29 win in the U.S. Court of Appeals affirming two lower court rulings ordering North Carolina and West Virginia to end their discriminatory exclusions for coverage of gender-affirming medical care for transgender people, impacting more than 175,000 transgender people over the age of 13. Looking forward, she echoed Steans’ hopes that the organization can continue expanding its ranks to handle cases like these.

Part of a larger fight

Steans thinks that there’s a lot more philanthropy can do in this space, including by making sure philanthropy’s own leadership comprises a diverse group of people — including LGBTQ leaders. She also believes that Illinois is particularly behind in LGBTQ giving, though many other states aren’t doing so well, either. She hopes that her gift will inspire others.

In addition, while Steans sees her work with Lambda Legal as clearly within the LGBTQ space, she also sees it as part of a larger fight to defend democracy. The Steans family is not alone in that regard — progressive grantmakers, including some of the most prominent LGBTQ funders, have been stepping up with crucial democracy funding this year.

That includes the Gill Foundation, an LGBTQ philanthropy powerhouse, which recently dove into the pro-democracy space ahead of the election. And in a recent IP opinion, two leaders at LGBTQ+ organizations, Dani Martínez of top LGBTQ funder Arcus Foundation and Fran Hutchins of Equality Federation, called on equality-minded funders to open their pocketbooks for voter engagement this year.

Looking ahead to November, Steans sees her work within this space as all the more important. “I feel like the right uses these wedge issues to undermine democracy and they try to pick the most vulnerable populations,” Steans said.

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