4 Ways Funders Can Build Authentic Partnerships With Trans and Nonbinary Communities

(Photo courtesy of SisTers PGH)

In my work at the Fund for Trans Generations (FTG), I partner with funders who are committed to supporting trans-led organizing for a future where transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people live with freedom, safety, and self-determination. Since FTG was created in 2016, we’ve raised and deployed more than $10 million to directly support trans organizing, and donors have come to deeply understand and work in alignment with trans movements.

Yet funders who are not in this space often ask: Why do this work, with its specific focus on supporting small, emerging organizations led by trans people of color? To me, the answer is clear: Because freedom and liberation for all people starts when we center trans people of color.

As a program officer, translatina philanthropy leader, and former movement grantee partner, I understand what’s at stake in an embodied way—from knowing my community’s beauty and hardships to my personal experiences navigating life in a world built on racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other oppressive systems, to everything I’ve learned and done as a professional grantmaker and nonprofit leader. I also have seen up close that how funders see their role and how they show up to do their work has a critical impact on the success of movements working to secure equity in our lifetime.

From this perch and perspective, I want to offer some reflections to my colleagues in philanthropy who are genuinely interested in partnering with and supporting trans-led social change.

1. All funders working toward equity should be in solidarity with trans organizers.

Trans rights, like trans lives, do not exist in silos. Trans communities exist at the intersection of many lived identities, issues, and movements—from reproductive health, to racial, gender, and economic justice, to decarceration and community safety. Because of this reality, when funders choose to invest in social change in ways that erase rather than acknowledge and center trans people of color, they are missing the chance to build truly inclusive futures.

This is especially true of LGBTQ and women’s funds, many of whom have long supported power building, but who have not explicitly invested in trans members of the community. In recent years, some funders have evolved their support toward gender justice and trans rights and organizing. As Jennie Agmi, Senior Program Officer for Gender Justice at the Libra Foundation, shared "when Libra shifted its portfolio from Reproductive Rights to Gender Justice in 2019, it gave us an opportunity to invest in trans-led work that has often been made invisible by philanthropy. Although this area of work was new to us, we quickly found that adopting a trans-inclusive analysis enriches and strengthens our gender justice portfolio overall."

At the end of the day, just as our liberation is interdependent, so must our fight for it be.  “Organizing from a solidarity framework calls on us to see and value one another in all our complexities–and to understand, too, how interlocking oppression is,” notes Borealis Philanthropy President Amoretta Morris. “It necessitates that we’re able to weave the roots of white supremacy with ongoing assaults on bodily sovereignty and rising attacks on trans folks’ existence. And it’s knowing that if we want a safe, just, and multiracial democracy, we only win as a strong movement ecosystem that sees the whole board.”

2. Invest in trans-led organizing, including emergent organizations and ideas.

Trans advocates are already organizing and building power in and beyond their communities, and are often one-stop shops for a range of community needs. FTG grantee partners, especially local groups in Southern states and rural areas, create empowering spaces to foster connection among trans community members, access direct services and basic needs, develop opportunities for leadership, and so much more. For instance, TAKE (Transgender Advocates Knowledgeable and Empowering) in Alabama is a place where Black trans women can find name and gender marker legal advice, housing and shelter support, and access to trans-affirming health services. While they tap into these resources, they plug into organizing campaigns for trans rights and learn to lead policy advocacy work. Emerging trans-led organizations like TAKE build community power and find ways to heal collectively as they help members connect to a larger community.

It can be tempting for some funders to center their own program areas, issues, and strategies as they consider expanding their portfolios to support trans communities, but this can actually pause or peel back hard-won progress and momentum based on years of movement strategy and coordination. Instead, funders should build relationships with on-the-ground groups and leaders, and fund the work and strategies that communities have determined they want and need.

“FTG was one of our very first funders,” shared Emanuel H. Brown, Executive Director of Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom in Georgia. “Having the autonomy to determine how to spend those dollars meant that our central question was: what is essential to the health and healing of our community? We were not distracted thinking about what was expected of us.”

At the FTG, most of our grantee partners are small, emergent groups led by trans people of color. (Over 80 percent of organizations have budgets of $300K or less, and more than 85 percent of partners receiving general support grants are BIPOC-led). FTG prioritizes moving resources to historically under-resourced areas, including the U.S. South, where 40 percent of our grantee partners are based. Nascent groups are often the ones doing the most leading-edge, impactful work in close relationship with trans and nonbinary communities, and yet they are often overlooked by larger, established funders. Funding that may find its way to the wider “LGBTQ funding” bucket rarely trickles down to these powerful trans-led nonprofits. Funders for LGBTQ Issues 2018 Tracking Report found that “for every $100 awarded by U.S. foundations, only four cents supports transgender communities.”

3. Your commitment to trans liberation (or lack of it) is showing up in your grantmaking processes.

How funders do their work, and how they show up to do their work, matters. This has been said before in many forms and forums, but it is especially critical when working to support trans and nonbinary leaders of color. This comes down to the accountability funders have to communities. Are we supporting grantee partners in ways that affirm and lift up their wisdom and creativity? Are our processes accessible? Do our words and practices align with our equity and justice values?

The Fund for Trans Generations uses a participatory grantmaking approach, with community members in strategic decision-making roles. FTG’s grants provide general operating support so that movement partners can best determine where they need to invest toward the progress they’re building. Capacity building is included in all grants so that nonprofits can continue to grow their leadership and get the specific support they need, from coaching to healing justice offerings. The Fund for Trans Generation’s staff, like the majority of our grantee partners, is led by trans and nonbinary leaders of color. In recent years, FTG has also learned from the Disability Inclusion Fund, a sibling fund at Borealis Philanthropy, about what it means to truly center disability justice in our programs and processes. As a fat, disabled, formerly undocumented migrant from Peru, accessibility to me has always included language justice practices, including multilingual processes, an awareness of philanthropy jargon (and commitment to leading with clarity), and challenging tacit and implicit dominant culture norms.

These are all steps we’ve taken to ensure that our grantmaking reflects our values and commitments, and yet, this is part of an ongoing journey that we will continuously learn from. For example, as FTG learned when we partnered with a monolingual Spanish-speaking grantee for our advisory committee, following through on our commitment to language justice meant creating a budget for translation for all of our forms, providing simultaneous interpretation services, and working with Babilla Collective, a language justice team. It also brought us into deeper conversation about how to challenge the linguistic gender binary in Spanish and other languages in alignment with our values.

4. Fund flexibly with multi-year, general support that makes space for trans joy.

Our end goal in this work is for communities to thrive, access joy, and experience love of all kinds. But in the day-to-day of this work, that can feel a long way off. As I wrote earlier this year, a rapid rise of anti-trans speech, policy, and state violence has helped fuel a culture “that normalizes gender-based violence on all trans people and, in particular, puts trans women of color at high risk by fueling transmisogyny on the interpersonal level.”

While holding a both/and approach, funders can resource rapid response work and increase their giving for the short-, middle-, and long-term. In the first year of the pandemic, FTG was able to move over $1 million in COVID-19 relief efforts. These dollars were generally redistributed to communities through trans-led mutual aid efforts, creating healing spaces, and organizing for justice. While trans communities urgently need resources now, we know that in order for there to be robust trans movement building, it will require larger, long-term investments from philanthropy to build the infrastructure and capacity of trans-led movements. It is beautiful to see that funders and individuals are giving more to support trans communities, but can we get to a place where this support exists not just when the physical and legislative attacks against our communities are in the headlines?

As a fund, one of our core values is to “trust trans leadership.” Practicing this value has meant being nimble and not expecting our grants to have immediate quantifiable returns, but rather trusting that trans leaders are meeting urgent community needs while building organizational capacity. For example, at the onset of COVID, several grantee partners independently organized mutual aid funds, redistributing resources to communities already experiencing houselessness, food insecurity, and lack of care networks. Arts and culture groups have shown to be life-sustaining spaces for trans communities as well. Comfrey Films, based in North Carolina, produces films by and for Black trans communities as a form of cultural organizing and narrative change, including on gender euphoria, full embodiment, and world-building free from violence and policing. Funding trans futures requires larger monetary investments and a paradigm shift that centers trans communities of color needs, dreams, joy, and desires as part of our collective liberation. 

An Invitation

There are lots of reasons funders who are interested in supporting trans organizing may not feel like they can begin immediately or directly funding this work, including lack of relationships with grassroots groups, lack of issue area expertise, or lack of capacity to make small grants. For funders who are new to supporting transgender communities, consider joining a funding collaborative that is already in deep relationship with trans movements, including many smaller, emerging groups. Studies have shown what we already know: a collaborative approach is more impactful, efficient, and equitable. When funders work together on shared goals; when the work is led by staff who understand and have shared lived experience with the communities they serve; when we focus not just on the potential of individual grants but on what a full, more connected, and better-supported movement ecosystem can achieve; we will make greater progress for our communities. As we transform trans communities with our resources, our field should also be open to being transformed by trans communities’ models of sharing power, creating inclusive and accessible spaces, and moving with self-awareness and conviction.

The work of defending, affirming, and meaningfully funding trans communities has never been more critical. As funders, we have a unique opportunity to help bring about transformational change, starting with investing in trans- and BIPOC-led organizing.

Read more stories by Aldita Gallardo.