We Are By No Means Home Free. Six Questions for Horizons … – Inside Philanthropy

Roger Doughty recently celebrated his 20th anniversary as the president of Horizons Foundation, a 42-year-old trailblazing funder “of, by and for” LGBTQ communities. Under Doughty’s leadership, the small, San Francisco-based funder has built a national and international reach, weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, and created the Horizons’ LGBT Community Endowment Fund in an effort to tap into the potentially huge legacy of what Doughty calls “the Stonewall generation.” 

Prior to his work at Horizons, Doughty’s career included leadership at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles and Chicago and, as an attorney, specializing in asylum cases on behalf of immigrants fleeing gender and sexual-orientation-based discrimination in their home countries.

IP recently had a wide-ranging conversation with Doughty, during which we discussed topics including the current state of funding for the LGBTQ movements and his contention that LGBTQ organizations are “blowing the single best opportunity we have had or will ever have to build significant resources for this movement.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s different now in the world of foundation support for LGBTQ causes? What trends are you seeing, and where do you see cause for hope or concern?

I would say, at a broad level, things are better than they were 20 years ago. Not as much better as I wish they were and as I would have, if you’d have asked me 20 years ago, expected that they would be. 

If we look at the last few years of the (Funders for LGBTQ Issues) tracking report, it looks like foundation support is kind of plateauing, leaving aside the blip that happened with the Orlando massacre. The numbers are going up, I guess it’s a good amount, in the last 10 years or so. But right now, we’re at barely, what? Is it 20 cents out of every $100? (Editor’s Note: according to the 2019–2020 Funders for LGBTQ Issues Tracking Report, LGBTQ nonprofits receive just $.23 of every $100 awarded in U.S. foundation grants.)

The other thing is that foundation support for LGBTQ issues is really distressingly top-heavy, meaning that the top six, the top 10 funders, I think it is, provide more than 60% of the dollars. It’s very concentrated.

And we’re seeing the Evelyn Walter Haas Jr.fund exiting the field. They’ve been probably our closest partner in the last 20 years, so I have a lot of respect for that. It’s really unfortunate they’re leaving because A, it’s not like there’s not work to do, and B, they’re seen as a leader in this. So when they leave, others might say, “The Haas Jr. Fund doesn’t think this is important, maybe we don’t need to do it, either.” And then, I think they were granting maybe $5 million a year or so, so they weren’t the biggest funder, but they were one of the top 10, for sure. There’s nobody out there that’s just beating down the door to fill that hole.

I’ve also asked some folks who lead movement organizations if they have seen any kind of trend in foundation giving around general operating support. And they’ve said for the most part that unless they’ve gotten McKenzie Scott money, they really haven’t seen any change in that.

I do think that in the field, there’s kind of a more general acknowledgment that LGBTQ people exist, that we’re part of the country and the world. I remember back around 2006, the Foundation Center (which merged with GuideStar to become Candid in 2019) did this whole early report about diversity and philanthropy, and it didn’t talk about LGBTQ people at all! And in 2008, there was proposed legislation for a diversity reporting requirement for big foundations with like $250 million or more in assets. As introduced, it dealt only with race, ethnicity and gender, I believe. And so we got some folks to intervene, and got sexual orientation and gender identity added. 

And foundations were freaking out about this! You would think the Gestapo was really at the door, and then when the gay stuff got added, they lost it. I remember being on a conference call with a whole bunch of foundation heads at that time, and I have never heard so much concern for gay people, because this might violate their privacy and all that. I remember saying something to the effect of, I don’t mean to be cynical, but it’s remarkable how all of a sudden, foundations are so concerned about our community because it’s now useful to be able to use us. It was just disgusting. I hope we’ve passed some of that.

In my experience, the problem is that foundations and wealth holders overall don’t like being held accountable. If they accepted a 10th of the accountability they expect from their grantees, the world would change. 

I think you’re right; I don’t think it’s because the foundation world was filled with homophobes. For one thing, they’d simplify their requirements because they’d be like, “This is a drag! This isn’t fun at all.”

What other trends or challenges are you seeing, whether in terms of foundation funding or mainstream funding for LGBTQ communities more broadly?

I don’t have any data, but I have absolutely no doubt that what has been commonly called the myth of gay affluence, or LGBTQ affluence, is still in the room. There’s no question about it. And a lot of just good-hearted foundation people think that all queer folks look like me, and we have our nice little houses or big houses or whatever, and gosh, now we can get married! And there’s some drugs to help with HIV. So, it’s not even necessarily a conscious process, but it is so deeply ingrained in people. What that ignores, of course, are all these folks who don’t fit that. They don’t look like me; their lives are entirely different.

There’s been a little bit more attention to some trans stuff, which is good. There’s been some more attention to LGBTQ POC stuff in recent years. That’s good. I don’t know that it’s increasing the amount of money that is out there for the community overall. I think it’s more shuffling money from one place to another. So while, of course, I’m supportive of it, this does mean that maybe there’s less funding for youth programs, there’s less funding for the arts or whatever. To my knowledge, it’s not really new money.

The other thing related to the myth of affluence, did you see the Funders for LGBTQ Issues report on the philanthropic closet? They did a survey of professional folks in philanthropy and they got responses from 36 foundations, of which a significant number were social-justice- or LGBTQ-focused, and then there were others that were just kind of general foundations. So overall, they found that at foundations with a social justice or LGBTQ focus, 44.6% of people reported not being out at work. Forty-four point six percent. And for those foundations with another focus, 63.6% reported not being out at work. I think that that’s another indicator of the fact that we’re not home yet by any stretch of the imagination.

We’ve talked about mainstream foundation funding, but what about funding from inside the LGBTQ communities? What’s happening there?

The Movement Advancement Project does an annual report about movement organizations now, and I believe that that’s been mostly going up in terms of their receipts, which I think is a sign of their increasing sophistication as organizations and as fundraisers on the whole. 

Now, I don’t know how much changed among LGBTQ people. There are even people within our own community who believe the myth of gay affluence. Sometimes, we’ve even played into that myth when we — accurately — talk to corporations about how valuable the LGBTQ market can be for them. But most of us know that great swaths of our community live far more precariously, and that in much of the country, we still lack even some basic kinds of equality. I would say the level of overall philanthropic awareness about some of the complexity in the community is not that bad. It’s really not that bad. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people give their dollars that way.

There was an interesting project that we, Haas Jr. and some other folks got involved in after the election of the 45th president. Because, as we saw with the ACLU and other marquee organizations, that election was also a fundraising machine. And so, as bad as the situation was, we wanted to research and find out, can LGBTQ organizations leverage this moment? It was fairly inconclusive, to be honest, we certainly didn’t come out with any silver bullet messaging. It was a little disappointing in that way.

But we really made a run at it, because the way I see it, anybody who thinks that we can predict the future after the election of the 45th president (who, as you notice, I’m not in the habit of naming), COVID, Orlando, and now Colorado Springs has their head in the sand! I mean, the wave of anti, mostly anti-trans legislation in the states — it’s really harder than it used to be to say that things are OK. 

We’ve touched on this, but I wanted to get your deeper thoughts on funding for marginalized communities within the greater LGBTQ community. My perspective may be skewed, as I’ve recently covered Groundswell’s Black Trans Fund, the Black Trans Travel Fund, and Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ GUTC pledge, but is funding for trans and other marginalized people within the LGBTQ movement actually taking off?

To a degree, it is happening. You’re not just making that up. And I think that the funders’ data bears that out. I’m not aware of new funders that have shown up, but there has been meaningfully more money going toward trans-specific, LGBTQ people of color, and sometimes, all of that together. I think 2020 and George Floyd certainly had something to do with that. And I have to credit, especially on the trans side, great advocacy. They have taken what little cracks and openings might have been forming and they have just busted right through. They deserve a lot of credit for doing that. That would have been a far dream 20 years or so ago.

In closing, what are some things you wish that people understood about LGBTQ funding that they just don’t — whether they themselves are LGBTQ or are outside of the community?

In no particular order, the fact is that the myth of gay affluence is a myth, and that we are by no means home-free. I think that there are too many straight folks for whom being an LGBTQ ally in their giving is just not their focus. And they’re not horrible folks, their passions lie elsewhere. Of course, there are exceptions to this. And there are organizations, like the Trevor Project, for example, which focuses on LGBTQ youth. I believe that they have a significant number of straight folks who give to them. But most of our LGBT organizations, it’s overwhelmingly an LGBTQ support base. 

The other thing, and I have to warn you that this is my personal area of zealotry, so I will attempt to remain seated and not get up on the soapbox, which I always have over here.

The single biggest thing in my mind that folks in the LGBTQ movement have failed at is building middle- and long-term funding strategies. Because foundations alone are not going to be able to do it. We all know that most money comes from individuals; it’s well documented, and it’s no different in our community. 

But the one thing that is different is that our community’s opportunity in planned giving is staggering. Nothing short of staggering. You work in philanthropy, so I assume you know about the whole intergenerational transfer of wealth thing. The most recent thing I saw on the subject was a study about three years ago that said it was $9 trillion coming in just the next 10 years. Not all to charity, that was for everything. But let’s just say 3% of the population is LGBTQ, more or less. That’s probably conservative. Three percent of $9 trillion is $270 billion in 10 years — that’s $27 billion a year! If we could get even 4% of that money to come to our community, it would be more than a billion dollars a year; six times more than foundations give in total. 

And our community could be even more generous for two reasons. One is that, at this point in time, nearly two-thirds of us do not have children. Of course, that’s changing in our community, and that’s wonderful, but that means as more LGBTQ people have children, that window that is so open now is going to start narrowing. And there’s clear data that people without kids are significantly more likely to leave charitable legacy gifts, and larger ones. 

The second is that people who are now very roughly in their 50s to 80s, roughly the Stonewall generations, everyone in these demographics remembers what it was like to be a queer kid, and what a hell it was. We remember what it was like when the world just hated us from every corner. We remember HIV, when the rest of the world didn’t give a damn, and we had to do it all ourselves. We built our communities out of nothing. We created Pride. For people who have been a part of that, it’s an enormously powerful incentive to be like, why wouldn’t you want to leave some portion of your estate to the community that you helped create and that has fostered you, as well? I don’t have any data to back this up, but it just makes every bit of sense in the world that the Stonewall generation is going to be the single best planned-giving demographic we will ever see; I would say that, on a per capita basis at least, that we currently have the single best planned giving demographic in the history of humanity. 

Any planned giving officer in the country would give their right arm to have our demographic! So what are we doing about it as a movement? Basically, nothing. A very small number of organizations like Lambda Legal, the LA Center and some others like Horizons have done a fair amount with it. But other organizations, there’s just no capacity, there’s no investment, there’s no means of trying to let donors be aware that they could do this. 

There’s just one very important caveat, which I know you understand, but it’s so easily misheard. A planned giving strategy has absolutely nothing to do with thinking that we’re richer than anybody else. That’s just assuming we’re average! 

I’ve seen so many donors who, when they realize that they can actually leave part or maybe all of their legacy for their own community? They’re overjoyed! But the connections just aren’t being made. And literally billions of dollars every year are going to colleges, universities, cultural institutions, all these non-LGBTQ places. They’re targeting our communities, as they should, that’s their job. But they know what a rich potential source of support we are, and it’s incredibly ironic that our own LGBTQ movement itself isn’t doing shit. Honestly, it breaks my heart, because I believe we truly have the single best opportunity we ever will have to build significant resources for this movement, and we are completely blowing it.