Bay Area Reporter - December 20, 2007
Heather Cassell, h.cassell@ebar.com

According to Horizons' report, "LGBT Giving to LGBT Organizations: Building a New Tradition of Philanthropy," about 61,000 LGBT individuals out of an estimated 432,174 LGBT individuals in the Bay Area made a financial contribution to a national or regional LGBT organization. That was almost $14 million in the last year alone, the report stated.

Looking at donations to LGBT organizations, just over 2 percent of LGBT individuals living in the Bay Area - one in 47 - made a gift to a local or regional LGBT organization, while 2.6 percent - one in 39 - gave to one of the national LGBT organizations surveyed, according to the report. When HIV/AIDS organizations are included the total number of LGBT donors is 14 percent, or one in seven of the LGBT population. There were 380 known planned gifts, donations to organizations through an individual's will or estate, reported, according to the report.

The figures in the report "paint a broadly accurate picture," said Roger Doughty, Horizons executive director.

"We are essentially a very young movement," said Doughty. "We are not only a very young movement in terms of years and time, but because of the epidemic, we, in a way, had to grow up really fast, and we did."

It took "a great deal of our attention, emotional energy, and everything else," Doughty said, but 27 years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Doughty believes that it is time to "start thinking about the longer term future and how it is that we are going to build a strong, resilient, sustaining community and movement for LGBT people, because we are not going anywhere."

Doughty pointed out that there "have been many improvements and victories that we've won in the last number of years, [but] the truth is we are still not equal under the law Our kids still suffer in schools, our elders still suffer in elder care facilities, [and] everybody in between can face housing discrimination and everything else."

"It's still a homophobic world," he said.

Doughty wants to increase the percentage of gays giving to LGBT groups and believes that it's up to those individuals to build up the community.

There are four places where funding for organizations comes from: wealth, government, corporations and foundations, and individuals. Doughty said that he doesn't expect wealth to manifest itself or appear, but if it does he will take it. Government funding has helped somewhat, mostly with HIV/AIDS, but he doesn't expect Uncle Sam to support the LGBT movement.

Given that individuals make up the bulk of nonprofit organizations' donor bases and now that the LGBT community has assets - mostly those in the baby boomer or "post-Stonewall" generation - LGBT individuals have an opportunity to create a future for generations to come.

"LGBT folks are going to be here forever," said Doughty. "LGBT youth have been coming to San Francisco and they are going to be coming out for as far as any of us can see."

And foundation giving is dismal. Doughty told the Bay Area Reporter that while there has been an increase in funding for LGBT causes from foundations, it is still less than .1 percent of overall foundation funding.

To compile its report, Horizons distributed a survey to 48 national and regional LGBT and HIV organizations in the fall of 2006 requesting data about annual giving, major-donor giving, and planned giving. Some follow up took place in 2007. Thirty-eight organizations responded - seven national or statewide and 31 regional. The report did not look at LGBT political organizations or candidates for public office, Doughty noted.

The report is the first of two surveys studying LGBT philanthropy. The second report, where 1,000 LGBT donors were recently surveyed, will be released in 2008.

The purpose of the report was to look at the health of LGBT organizations and LGBT donors to those organizations, especially with being a "young movement" that endured an epidemic almost immediately after establishing communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities across the United States. HIV/AIDS could have crippled the budding LGBT civil rights movement, but Doughty said, "This community's accomplishments around the epidemic ... are epic."

"The very first generation that built the modern gay movement - built these communities, built the Castro, built Greenwich Village, built West Hollywood ... those that are still with us ... there is an opportunity there's such a connection ... of being a part of something that is world historic," said Doughty.

That generation of individual wealth both acquired and inherited along with leadership can take the LGBT community organizations off of the "hamster wheel," responding to crises and operating at attrition levels that hold the movement back, he explained.

"We are part of a community. We are part of a movement," said Doughty. "Truly, every gift counts and it counts because of the dollars, but it also counts because that is part of forming and strengthening of community [where] everyone ... participates."

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