How Philanthropy Can Support Young LGBTQ Leaders of Social Movements

For years, people in power and the mainstream media have divided struggles against gun violence into categories: worthy versus unworthy of our attention and those that involve “innocent” victims versus those involving people who would bring harm upon themselves.

But young people leading the #NeverAgain movement are changing the narrative, making obvious and unmistakable the connections between their experiences — gun violence in schools, gun violence on our streets, gun violence carried out by police, and more.

What’s often unrecognized is that it’s young, queer people who are a driving force behind making these connections — and their queer identity is instrumental, not incidental, to their leadership.

Emma González, one of the Parkland students and a leader in the #NeverAgain movement, credits her LGBTQ experience with giving her both the courage to fight for justice and the empathy to embrace others struggling with loss: She told Yahoo that what “we’ve been really focused on is inclusion and trying to really combine these communities spread around the United States. We’ve been trying to get everyone on the same page, to figure out what everybody’s asking for, and see if we can, as a giant movement, ask for that together.”

#NeverAgain is only the most recent example of a long, often unseen history of young, LGBTQ people leading the way on building inclusive movements.

For example, in the Movement for Black Lives, queer leaders have promoted policies that affect women and people with a broad range of sexual and gender identities because they know that those identities can make them increasingly vulnerable to violence and systems of oppression.

Multiple Identities

Grant makers have long talked about ways to focus their dollars on cross-cutting causes and missions, but now is a moment for all of us to consider how we can support young, queer people who recognize that most people aren’t just one thing — their race, class, sexual and gender identity, physical and mental health all might collide in ways that make it more likely they will suffer bias or violence in disproportionate numbers.

The Providence Youth Student Movement, in Rhode Island, a grantee of Borealis Philanthropy’s Transforming Movements Fund, offers one example of the victories that are possible when organizers refuse to focus on just one kind of change, such as helping immigrants or poor people.

The Providence group mobilizes queer Southeast Asian youths, families, and allies to build grass-roots power and organize collectively for social justice. In June 2017, the organization, along with a multiracial coalition of other local organizations helped win a strong police-accountability policy: the Providence Community Safety Act.

Through their organizing, youth leaders knew that many people in Providence were survivors of police misconduct because of their race, gender, immigration status, and more. Ultimately, their work led the city to adopt a policy that prohibited profiling by race or other characteristics, created a language-access hotline — which provides interpreters so individuals with limited English proficiency can interact with police in the language they speak — required that police body searches be performed by an officer of the same gender identity as the individual under scrutiny, and offered many additional protections. Pushing for changes that involved so many issues was harder than it would have been to focus on, say, race or gender alone, but youth leaders knew that their victory would be meaningful only if it helped protect everyone from police misconduct.

At Borealis Philanthropy, our Transforming Movements Fund offers a model for supporting young, LGBTQ leaders like those in Providence who want to work across issues and movements. The fund — supported by the Ford, Arcus, Overbrook, and Cricket Island foundations; the Foundation for a Just Society; and anonymous donors — grew out of the realization that young, visionary LGBTQ leaders are often a driving force behind movements for immigrant rights, police accountability, reproductive justice, and other social-justice issues.

That’s why we have been investing in the leaders who are the main force in building inclusive movements that embrace alliances and intersecting identities.

Flexible Support

In practice, our investments look like general operating rather than project-based support, and we provide flexible resources for leadership and organizational development. We believe the best way to help grantees become stronger is to let them decide what they need.

Grantees have used organizational-development funding to hire bookkeepers, undertake strategic planning, create databases to track membership, and more. Depending on their needs, grantees have similarly used leadership-development resources in a range of ways including retreats and training, trips to learn from other movement leaders, and services and practices to address trauma.

The fund currently offers general operating support to 12 grantees doing work locally, statewide, and nationally. One grantee, Khmer Girls in Action, led by young Southeast Asian women, focuses on building a progressive and sustainable community in Long Beach, Calif., that works for gender, racial, and economic justice. Its campaign goals include ending punitive school practices and increasing resources for programs that promote restorative justice, which involves bringing people who have been harmed together with those who have caused harm to discuss how to address the needs of everyone affected without going through the criminal-justice system.

We’re able to provide that support because the foundations that pool their money in the fund focus on a broad range of areas — LGBTQ issues, human rights, gender justice, criminalization, youth organizing, and more — but are united by a belief that to support cross-movement work, we must support young, queer leadership.

Our partners at the Third Wave Fund, an activist fund led by and for women of color and intersex, queer, and trans people under age 35, offer another example to follow. Third Wave has a long history of supporting feminist youth leadership. The organizations Third Wave supports have a strong and expansive focus on gender justice, viewing it as only possible when guided by the understanding that gender oppression is linked to bias based on class, race, age, and ability.

Rapid-Response and Other Support

Beyond providing general operating support and money to help organizations develop their leadership skills and strengthen their operations, the Third Wave Fund also offers both long-term and rapid-response funding opportunities. The Grow Power Fund, for example, provides up to six years of support for emerging feminist, trans, and queer organizations to collaborate, and the Mobilize Power Fund provides support for groups to respond to and heal from immediate threats and opportunities.

Borealis joined with Third Wave to provide a rapid-response grant to the Providence Student Youth Movement to support a network called Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance. Building from the Community Safety Act victory, the coalition worked to create a network to help people protect themselves from all forms of violence (including hate crimes and law-enforcement abuse) and get access to resources they need to be safe. The alliance provides a 24-hour multilingual support line that expands on immigration-raid hotlines by connecting people not only with legal support but also with comprehensive mental-health care, court accompaniment, community support, transportation, and interpretation.

Because the Providence group is led by young, queer people, it understands the need to provide holistic support for people of color and immigrants who may experience many forms of violence in part because of their legal status or color or sexuality or gender identity.

Another grantee of the Transforming Movement Fund and Third Wave Fund, BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100) demonstrates that a commitment to building the organizing power of black people, especially black women and queer and gender-nonconforming people, ultimately creates wider and more forward-thinking possibilities for victories and impact.

In January 2017, BYP100 joined Mijente, Organized Communities Against Deportations, and a number of other organizations to expand the definition of what it means to be a sanctuary city beyond a pledge to protect immigration. Instead, they said a real sanctuary would protect black people and Latinx people, who are often targeted by law-enforcement officials for minor offenses.

One of the demands of the coalition of organizations was to eliminate the city’s flawed gang database, which organizers said police and the federal immigration service use to find ways to imprison people of color.

In March, following the coalition’s campaign to expose the harmful effects of tagging individuals as gang members, the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General announced it would review the gang database. While this review is underway, organizers are calling on city officials to put a moratorium on adding names to the gang database and sharing information in the database with other agencies.

In a moment when already vulnerable communities face increasingly grave threats on all fronts, young, queer leaders are teaching us we can’t rely on strategies that try to solve problems in isolation from one another. We see these leaders asserting collective liberation for their communities. As grant makers, we can support their empathy, courage, and vision to take on the biggest, hardest fights and win victories that leave no one behind. It’s time for more people in philanthropy to make this support a priority.

Ana Conner is Borealis Philanthropy’s program associate for the Transforming Movements Fund and the Black Led Movement Fund. Alejandra Martinez is Borealis Philanthropy’s program officer for the Transforming Movements Fund.