As the queer mom of a little girl (for now), this time of year has special resonance for me.WIth Lesbian Visibility Day on April 26 and as my daughter heads into the end of her school year, I feel deeply grateful to live in a state that recognizes the love that my wife and I share and lets our daughter talk about her two moms safely at school. I recognize this isn’t true for many other LGBTQI children and parents, as we’ve seen a swath of legislation in United States with an abrupt rise in states attempting to make LGBTQI persons invisible in their own schools, homes and communities. As a community, we hope this day allows us to take stock, stand in solidarity and celebrate the gains of our vibrant community as we push towards full liberation. 

Globally, only 8% ($20.6 million) of the total $560 million in LGBTI funding could be identified as LBQ-specific. In 2021, Astraea gave over 20% of our funding to LBQ-led groups and supported numerous groups and organizations in regions like those in the U.S. South and the global south that have historically overlooked or obstructed lesbian and queer activists — and still do to this day. I’m proud we supported these groups that work intersectionally and across issues of gender, racial, environmental, and economic justice to meaningfully realize what justice looks like for all of us. To be clear, for us at Astraea, women includes all women, cis, trans, and intersex.

LBQ organizing around the world is growing and the groups are nimble, resourceful and robust in their organizing strategies. Most LBQ groups (89%) have been founded in the last twenty years! Utilizing cultural change strategies, knowledge production and research as well as capacity-building, advocacy and movement building strategies, these groups have achieved incredible strides with few resources. Our report “Vibrant Yet Under-Resourced: The State of Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Movements” (published with Mama Cash) reminds us that grassroots LBQ groups are often underfunded or under-recognized, facing barriers that prohibit them from fulfilling their full potential. 

The innovation of LBQ groups is also rooted in collaboration and partnership across geographies, across movements and at all levels from the hyper-local to the international stage. Grantees like Movimiento Lesbia (Peru) and Women in Front (Cameroon) invest in feminist leadership to increase visibility of LBQ leaders within different social justice movements, while also focusing on transforming LGBTQI movements as well. We-Change Jamaica (Jamaica) is claiming political space by increasing the participation of LBQ women in national and regional leadership and decision-making processes. LIFS Peru (Peru) is organizing at the national and international level to push for increased protections related to diverse families and for policy-making to ensure that LBQ women are seen as rights holders and political subjects. 

On that note, I invite you to join Astraea as we celebrate Lesbian Visibility Day 2022 and continue to uplift, resource and stand with our LBQ colleagues, family, and members of the global community. Please watch and share our video above with your networks!

Dear Friends,

I hope the beginning of 2022 has been a healthy, safe, and generative period for you and your communities. At Astraea, we began the year with a renewed focus on our transformative work. As we continue to navigate through challenging and uncertain times, Astraea is reinforcing our commitment to collective care and continuing our everyday work to build power and resilience with LGBTQI movements around the world.

I write to you as we reach the end of Black History Month – an annual month for reflection and appreciation to collectively pay tribute to Black communities across the U.S. and around the world, and to recognize their contributions and sacrifices in shaping our nation, and our world. 

We condemn the systemic racism that overtly and covertly perpetuates injustice in institutions and communities across the United States. The field of philanthropy itself is not immune to structural racism; we are acutely aware that we have much work to do to better practice our values of equity and justice within our own organization. This moment is an opportunity to elevate the fight for racial justice and honor the Black-led organizations and leaders who have given so much in the name of liberation and justice.

But our commitment extends far beyond the month of February. Astraea was founded on the principles of supporting lesbians and women of color and has a long-standing commitment to uplifting Black leaders and movements in the United States. LGBTQI People of Color battle historic and contemporary structural inequalities, as they live and work at the intersections of racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and classism. Astraea strengthens organizations and movements that acknowledge and fight these multiple barriers to self-determination. We stand on the shoulders of the Black, Indigenous, People of Color, trans, and queer movements that have come before us and are committed to supporting and resourcing sustainable movements. 

Last year, 97% of our U.S. funding supported queer and trans BIPOC-led groups, including grantees such as Law for Black Lives, BYP100, MediaJustice, Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, just to name a few. On top of that, 100% of our trans and gender nonconforming U.S. funding was for groups led by and for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. As our former staff member Sandy Nathan noted in her poignant blog post last year, “I am Black everyday: A reflection on Black History Month”, “these are our foundations, the legacy on which we build to ensure Black liberation, and indeed the liberation of all peoples and the healing of our planet.”

To celebrate the month this year and advocate for Black liberation, we launched the #BlackLGBTQIFutures campaign across our social media platforms, including Instagram and Twitter. We invite you to join us in sharing these stories and the stories of other Black heroes who have carried the torch for justice. We continue to work through our own internal challenges with racism and have begun the deep work to hold ourselves accountable for past mistakes and ask the tough questions, to help cultivate an inclusive, anti-racist, thoughtful and productive workplace culture and a community that authentically reflects our values. I’m humbled by your support and camaraderie in my first few months as Executive Director. I’m excited to work with each and every one of you to identify and resource radical movement leaders who are pushing for true equality. Let us lead with empathy as we fight for those who have been overlooked, underrepresented, silenced and disempowered. 

In Solidarity,
Joy Chia

Image credit: Intersex Community of Zimbabwe (ICoz)

In the Northern Hemisphere today marks the Winter Solstice, which means that while today might be the shortest and darkest day of the year, tomorrow and onward bring only more light.

As we come to the end of a long 2021, I am reflecting on the past year and holding close the challenges that we have faced as both individuals and as communities. Yet even as I think about the heaviness this past year has brought and worry about what might lie ahead, I find myself turning to the advice of Bing Crosby in one of my favorite songs: “If you’re worried and you can’t sleep, just count your blessings instead of sheep, and you’ll fall asleep counting your blessings.”

In my first three months at Astraea, I have felt incredibly blessed to witness glimpses of the bright sparks, bold imaginations, and incredible power of our many feminist, LGBTQI communities around the world, and what I do know for sure is there so much more of that to come.

With that, I want to extend my gratitude to all of you, the Astraea community – our staff, our grantees, our partners, our donor activists, and our board members – for welcoming me into the Astraea ecosystem and family with such open arms. You have made my transition an exciting and enjoyable one, and I am thankful to be on this journey with you.

I am grateful to our powerful grantee partners, who are some of the strongest, most resilient LGBTQI and feminist activists, artists, organizers, and changemakers around the world, working towards our collective liberation. We are immensely grateful for your dedication and courage.

I am grateful to everyone who remains deeply committed to making sustained social change. This work of building power and shifting resources requires time, energy, collaboration, and long-term investment. As a global public feminist foundation, Astraea’s mandate is to make those dedicated investments in our LGBTQI, feminist, People of Color, and Global South-led movements so that they can go on with the daily work that is history-making. I am grateful for the important responsibility that Astraea holds to resource this critical work well.

From December 17th until the new year, the Astraea staff are hitting “pause”. This is part of our now bi-annual tradition to take a break, truly disconnect from work, share dedicated time and space with our loved ones, and importantly, to rest. I hope that many of you will also be able to take some moments of rest as we bring this year to a close, and prepare for all the good fights ahead of us in 2022, and beyond.

Until then, sending my absolute best to you and yours.

By Red Schulte and Alisha Walker
with contributions by Mihika Srivastava, Astraea Communications Program Officer
Image credit: Commissioned as a gift to the Support Ho(s)e Collective by Matilda Sabal, a pen pal and comrade of Alisha’s, this beautiful piece was created by Amira Lin

June 2, 2021

This year, the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice is commemorating International Sex Workers’ Day by sharing a personal essay from fellow sex worker organizers and close friends, Red Schulte and Alisha Walker. Red is a community organizer currently based in New York. They coordinate the Justice for Alisha Walker Defense Campaign and are a member of Survived & Punished NY, Hacking//Hustling, and the Support Ho(s)e Collective. Alisha is a 28 year old former sex working person originally from Akron, Ohio. She was criminalized for an act of self-defense when a regular client threatened her life and the life of a fellow worker in January 2014. 

Told through personal narrative and reflecting on years of visits to Alisha that have been mediated by prison technologies, Red reveals the violent ways these technologies seek not only to disconnect those on the inside from those on the outside but to further punish them. The piece illuminates how sex workers and political organizers (and most often, individuals at those intersections) are no strangers to attempted and successful stigmatization, infiltration, entrapment, criminalization, risk of arrest, jailing and/or incarceration, and the ways in which those experiences prepare them to creatively navigate these complex systems of surveillance as a form of resistance.

This piece is part of our ongoing political education and advocacy work to highlight the intersections of criminalization and surveillance, centering movement and organizers’ voices. This work began with our report, Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures which launched in December of 2020. The report explores the ways in which queer, trans, Two-Spirit, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and sex worker communities in the U.S. are disproportionately impacted by criminalization and surveillance, and highlights the powerful community-centered technologies and interdependent networks of care and solidarity they are building to fight back.

——

My entire friendship and comradeship with my fellow organizer Alisha Walker is mediated by prison technologies. Our knowing each other initially in this life was determined by state violence, and our friendship has been maintained in spite of it. The mutual care and love that we continue to foster and grow between us is routinely scrutinized, accessed, recorded, and used to further punish her while she’s incarcerated. We’ve been communicating and dis/connected, for over five years now. 

Alisha is an artist, inside organizer, criminalized survivor and former sex worker currently incarcerated at a state prison in central Illinois. She was sentenced to fifteen years for an act of self-defense, saving herself and a fellow sex worker from a violent attack on their lives while working. Alisha and I have used every available outlet for sanctioned communication: ConnectNetwork, JPay, Western Union, Securus Tech, GTL Network, the United States Postal Service, FreePrints, Amazon, etc. Each of these methods falls short, intentionally, of allowing for unfettered, authentic connection because of the prison gaze. 

Communication Technologies, Weaponized 

Prison technology is state violence. The same modes of sanctioned communication to “connect” people outside to those inside also exist to alienate, exploit, and disconnect. This dual communication experience is meted out through prohibitive costs, intentional obsolescence, scrutiny, surveillance, and censorship. 

I can never really shake the first time Alisha described the full body cavity search before our first video visit. That thought hadn’t actually occurred to me, that they’d force the same visitation protocols for a remote visit, but then again (like Mariame Kaba reminds us) prisons are sexual violence. The digital obstacles to video visiting are immense. Lost connections equal lost time and visits altogether—once I blew a fuse at my apartment, lost power, and had to use a personal hotspot to stay connected to Alisha; it shot my phone bill through the roof. Pixelated versions of ourselves greet one another each video visit. My beautiful friend is transfigured into small, disparate squares that jarringly jump on my computer screen. My partner and I were once almost banned from video visiting because of the t-shirts we were wearing: me something sleeveless and him an undershirt; the prison gaze creeps into your home. 

“They’re not just surveilling my body, but images and words and relationships too,” says Alisha. She has frequently alerted us to correctional officers’ name-dropping outside loved ones and comrades’ social media names and profiles, and mentioning things that they could only know if they were watching our online posts and clicking through to find out more about our other online personas. Another way this played out was as Alisha was building networks of care and social support inside: “They [the correctional officers] were watching my (and of course everyone’s) relationships inside to use against me, and when you get punished they find what hurts you most, they find the thing you need most and take it away.” 

Alisha has frequently noted the stressful impact of the rigid and ever-shifting policies the prison enacts against phone use, making it harder for those inside to reliably communicate and organize with loved ones. “Rigid policies since the pandemic began have shifted from no calls, to 15-20 minute enforced call times at various times during lockdown, to housing unit specific call days or times, to “odd and even” call days or nights, and of course everything is subject to the mood of the correctional officers on duty.” 

Alisha says, “Most of my mail gets sent back or is heavily censored or disappears due to retaliation from the correctional officers. Mostly we don’t have the kinds of pens, sharpened pencils and paper we need to correspond available when we shop [commissary]. Mail is so important to us, and it’s a terrible feeling to get your mail and see it torn open every time or to wonder how much mail is actually being kept from you.” 

Sex workers’ resilience in navigating systems of surveillance

Alisha and I are no strangers to creative modes of communication catalyzed by state surveillance. Outside political organizing and sex work can come with their respective experiences of attempted and successful stigmatization, infiltration, entrapment, criminalization, risk of arrest, jailing and/or incarceration. I learned early when I was becoming radicalized about the history of informants, watch lists, and raids on dissenters, community leaders, and movement people. I experience(d) first hand overt and covert attempts by state agents to disrupt and destroy movements and campaigns I was organizing amongst. Community organizers engaged in work that challenges or opposes state violence and unaffiliated radicals are accustomed to being vigilant about communication, actions, and identities because of the level of state surveillance. From these experiences I’ve developed gut checks, careful vetting of what I share, and with whom, and shared security culture with trusted comrades. I’ve translated much of learned personal and work safety protocols I use while organizing from those passed to me through sex working community. 

“I can’t speak freely, I’ve been locked up for 5 years, I’m forced to learn new ways to speak, I guess I’m institutionalized…” For Alisha, who is currently incarcerated, her relationships are not only mediated through technologies, but her communication has also been institutionalized, meaning that she has been forced to learn new ways of speaking and behaving in order to avoid retaliation and further punishment from correctional officers, prison counselors, and the administration in general. “I have a voice, but it’s not always my own voice,” Alisha says. 

Because of these overlapping shared lessons, experiences, and strategies for mitigating all the harms and dangers they can bring with them, Alisha and I were fire-tested and (un/fortunately) better prepared to creatively code our language and gut check when communicating and trust building—radical community organizers, formerly incarcerated activists, and sex working people taught us. That being said, the violent obstacles, frustrations, and impediments were (are) still many.

As the Astraea Foundation’s report, Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures, finds, “Platform moderation, or the policing of a platform’s content, is a critical site where the criminalization of sex work intersects with threats to internet autonomy. The 2018 congressional bills FOSTA-SESTA further police sex work online and exacerbate existing platform policies and practices that censor online sex work and suppress digital organizing efforts, such as shadowbanning, content moderation, and deplatforming.” 

As sex workers, we are accustomed to our relationships being mediated by (surveillance) technologies, but that certainly does not engender a complacency with this violence. Whether the relationships be monetary or exchange-driven (i.e. between worker and client), social (in public or virtual space), marketing (between worker and potential clientele), romantic, or one of banking (between worker and financial institution), each of them is monitored and poised to be terminated by an algorithm, a new online content policy, a processing discrepancy, stigma fueled by rescue industry narratives and violent, discriminatory legislation, moral and social “policing,” and good old fashioned bodily harm, trauma, and incarceration. 

Imagining community care, technology support, and resourcing

When people are released from jails, detention centers, psychiatric wards, and prisons, there are immediate, extensive material, communal, and emotional needs that must be met. Some of the most basic immediate needs involve accessing and using technology—including: hardware, systems, and support. Not everyone on this side has access to computers, cell phones, social media platforms, government and organizational websites, knowledge of search engines (to name a few), but our chance of access are exponentially higher than those who are currently incarcerated, and still higher yet than those people newly discharged from the state’s cages. As such, we take our respective levels of access for granted, and do not fully realize the extent to which technology support must be amongst the basic necessities of those coming back into community, back home, or charting a new course/building a new place for themselves after incarceration.

Alisha and I have been organizing together with the Support Ho(s)e collective for almost five years now. Support Ho(s)e is a small collective of current and former sex workers and trusted accomplices seeking to build radical community for sex working people in Chicago and NYC. During this time we’ve both also become more involved with another sex work focused collective, Hacking//Hustling, which has given Alisha and I the space and resources to try and imagine what comprehensive “tech support” could look like post-incarceration. Together with Support Ho(s)e, we’ve co-created a compensated opportunity to experiment and explore direct tech resourcing by piloting the Formerly Incarcerated Worker Support Program, funded by Hacking//Hustling and envisioned by mine and Alisha’s experiences with dis/connected tech while she’s been inside.   

Upon Alisha’s release, this will be the first trial of the Hacking//Hustling Formerly Incarcerated Workers Support Program, naming Alisha as the first recipient. This program would span three to five months depending on the tailored needs of Alisha and her support crew. We intend to approach the program with the flexibility and understanding of post-release catch-up and also with an eye toward Disability Justice focused crip time. Post-release catch-up can mean a lot of things depending on how much time the state stole from someone—filling technology gaps, re-meeting friends and family, navigating a different sort of surveillance, taking time to explore adjustment and creating one’s own schedule, in brief, all that comes with absorbing the changes (or lack thereof) in the world on this side of the Wall. 

The Formerly Incarcerated Workers Support Program works with comrades, and organizations that can help us acquire free/funded technology-focused training, computers and phones, college level or vocational school courses, ensuring that at all times the majority of the funding goes directly to the recipient, helping them re-establish financial independence. The program will be in direct collaboration with the needs of those it supports. After an initial trial period, Alisha can do an exit interview and/or remain on as part of the core collective team to become a mentor themselves. 

The need for sustained support post-release cannot be overstated. Time and time again, when people are finally released from prison or jail stints, they have virtually no financial, technological, housing, or sustained community support. Basic needs, skill sharing and financial support must be made available to those folx establishing themselves after the violence of incarceration. We must also resource and build sustainable support programs that equip those of us on the outside (especially those who have been impacted by incarceration) to show up for those navigating life within and beyond prison/jail/detention. 

The Astraea Foundation’s report finds that work and programs such as the Hacking//Hustling Formerly Incarcerated Workers Support Program are critical to helping communities learn more about the dangers of carceral technologies and creating interdependent networks of care and solidarity that disrupt the state’s reliance on punishment and policing. Yet, this work is resource intensive and at present movements, organizers, and movement technologists face significant financial barriers to implementing and maintaining digital safety strategies and community-owned and centered technologies.

Community-centered harm reduction technologies have always been an answer. The mutual aid, creativity, and the creation of networks of interdependent care and solidarity in the face of criminalization, censorship, surveillance, and punishment has long been a way of life and organizing for marginalized groups such as queer, trans, undocumented, rural, migrant, Two-Spirit, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and sex workers, survivors of gender violence (including online doxxing), and currently and formerly incarcerated people. These are the communities that have created community safety in the face of constant threats and danger, who have been forced into technological creativity. 

We invite you to listen and learn from these community members and unapologetic resource makers. Imagine a world where technology isn’t synonymous with violence and exploitation, and the prevention thereof. Invest in this work. Dream alongside us, and support our people to build the abolitionist technologies and community-centered networks and systems we need to live fully liberated lives free from surveillance and state violence. 

Learn More:

• Support The Justice for Alisha Walker Campaign

• Hacking/Hustling has released two reports of extensive community-based participatory action research documenting the impacts of on/offline criminalization, censorship and surveillance. 

• Read Astraea’s Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures report 

• Follow @redschulte, @hackinghustling and @supporthosechi on Twitter for more on how to support Alisha and other sex workers and sex worker organizing in the U.S.

***

Read more blog posts on our Collective Care Blog!

May 17 marks the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT). The annual event was created in 2004 to draw attention to the violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex people and all other people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities or expressions, and sex characteristics. 

This year on IDAHOBIT, we recognize and honor the LGBTQI grassroots organizers, advocates, and artists who are fighting not just for equal rights and an end to discrimination and violence, but for dignity, joy, healing, and care. We are living through a time marked by overwhelming grief: from a global pandemic that has disproportionately impacted the most marginalized around the world and legitimized states’ use of surveillance technology to crackdown on these communities; to the alarming rollbacks of queer and trans rights; to increased police violence against queer, trans, Two-Spirit, Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities; and a growing climate crisis. Yet through it all our movements are continuing to care for their people, fighting hate and discrimination through transformative policy and culture change, and building solidarity and resilience within and across communities.

• In India, grantee partner Ondede filed for a public interest litigation (PIL) for COVID-19 relief measures for transgender communities. Subsequently, the Karnataka High Court directed the state government to supply free rations to transgender persons.

• In Fiji, which has recently been affected by natural disasters on top of the COVID-19 pandemic, grantee partner DIVA for Equality has provided feminist support and aid directly to over 15,000 Fijians living in urban poor, rural and maritime areas overall, in ways that are underlaid by ongoing accompaniment, advocacy, referrals, and direct service provision.

• Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Croatian grantee partner Zagreb Pride launched an online campaign against the government’s use of surveillance technology to track the movement of citizens, and succeeded in their efforts!

• Grantee partner Mesahat played a critical role in national grassroots LGBTQ effort to change Sudan’s sodomy laws. In July 2020, as a result of grassroots advocacy efforts Sudan’s Sovereign Council made critical change to Article 148 of the penal code, abolishing the death penalty and flogging for same sex activities. However, with the imprisonment sentence increased from four to seven years, the work continues.

Make no mistake. The threats to our communities are greater than ever, as we witness the rise of authoritarian regimes around the world, the ongoing closing of civil society spaces, and the growing influence of far right anti-gender movements. Trans rights in particular are experiencing a “global recession” according to LGBT activists at Transgender Europe (TGEU) who say that governments are using the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to rollback trans rights while simultaneously religious, anti-gender, and trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) groups continue their attacks on trans rights around the world. Here are just a few of the hostile contexts our LGBTQI communities are living under in the current moment:

• In the United States, coordinated efforts by hate groups and right-wing elected officials have led to legislation targeting trans youth in 33 states. According to the National Black Justice Coalition, no other year on record has seen as many anti-trans pieces of legislation compared to 2021. A staggering 117 bills have been introduced in the current legislative session that target the transgender community. It’s the highest number the organization has recorded since it began tracking anti-LGBTQ legislation more than 15 years ago. Four states—Arkansas, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee—have already passed anti-trans bills or implemented parts of those bills through executive action. A new study by the Williams Institute finds that more than 45,000 transgender children are at risk of losing the health care they need amid this year’s record-breaking wave of anti-trans legislation.

• In India where a devastating second wave of COVID-19 has swept the country, trans communities continue to be disproportionately impacted. When the pandemic first hit India in early 2020, trans communities overwhelmingly lost access to livelihood, food, shelter, and healthcare. Trans community members and trans-led organizations also noted that trans communities were left out of the relief package announced by the government in March 2020. Now, as the situation grows more dire, with infections and deaths on the rise and ongoing lockdowns, trans communities have once again been left without critical safety nets, and access to basic provisions and safe housing.

• In Ghana, outcry from religious groups, politicians, and anti-LGBTQ rights organizations earlier this year forced the temporary closure of the country’s first LGBT+ community center. The situation deteriorated into a witch hunt of LGBTQ people with many hiding out in their homes or seeking shelter elsewhere after harassment from their own communities. Last year, as a result of major lobbying from far-right Christian groups, the Ghanain government banned the Pan Africa conference of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans Association while in 2019, the World Congress of Families, the Global Christian anti-LGBTI lobby hosted their summit in the country. In Ghana, same sex activities are punishable with up to three years imprisonment.

The global anti-gender and far-right movements have built and funded a network across different religions and bridging secular and religious divides. If we want to end homophobia, biphobia, intersexphobia, and transphobia and systemic discrimination against our communities, we must bring the kind of committed funding and support to our movements that far-right, fascist groups have brought to anti-gender movements. 

This is precisely our mandate as Astraea, a feminist funder of the LGBTQI grassroots for over 44 years. Our unique vantage point puts us at the nexus of the very communities most under attack – LGBTQI communities, People of Color, ethnic and religious minorities, Indigenous people, and women. We exist to shift power to these very communities, particularly those whose voices are most often silenced, but who as the most impacted, are best suited to make lasting change. We do this by providing funding that is necessarily flexible, that is nimble, and that is long-term – funding that is responsive to the needs and priorities of our movements, so that they can care for their communities. 

Until we are all free, none of us are free. Our collective liberation is dependent on protecting, nurturing, listening, supporting and sustaining the radical LGBTQI grassroots visions of the future – ones that are rooted in self-determination, radical love, accountability, collective care, right relationship with the earth, and with each other. That is the resilient, joyful future we have a responsibility to support. Join Us.

To read our additional stories, visit our Collective Care Blog here. 

LBQ activism is young and growing all over the world. According to Astraea and Mama Cash’s 2020 report, Vibrant Yet Under-Resourced: The State of Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Movements, 89% of LBQ groups have been founded in the last twenty years. These vibrant groups are determinedly doing their work with intense commitment and very little money, often in quite harsh and repressive circumstances. In their organizing across diverse movements, they are improving the lives of LBQ people while advancing multiple social justice causes.

They are, however, also struggling. LBQ groups are under-resourced and under-staffed, and they have weak safety nets. 40% of groups have an annual budget of less than $5,000 and one-third receive no external funding. Today, only 8% of the total $560 million in LGBTI funding can be identified as LBQ-specific, according to the latest Global Resources Report. LBQ groups organize intersectionally but are typically funded through narrowly defined portfolios. They envision creating long-term structural and systemic change, but are principally funded with short-term, often project-based grants.

As Astraea, we are proud that nearly 40% of our grantee partners identify as LBQ-specific groups. LBQ groups work intersectionally and choose not to be constrained by artificial issue “silos” that can limit work across movements and issues. More than half of LBQ groups identify with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans movements and women’s rights movements because their lives sit at the intersection of both. They also identify with broader movements and issues such as sexual and reproductive health and rights (45%), the right to healthcare (32%), HIV and AIDS (30%), rights of intersex people (29%), young people’s rights (26%), and sex workers’ rights (20%), among others. Here are some examples of the LBQ-led organizing we are so honored to support:

• Aireana (Paraguay): Aireana Grupo por los Derechos de las Lesbianas was established as a lesbian feminist group in 2003. They are concerned not just with lesbian liberation or the ‘LBQ collective’, but with the liberation of all oppressed peoples, including trans people, other sexual and gender dissidents, cis-straight women, and all those who are economically and racially oppressed. Their intersectional approach is embodied in the visible presence of their drums band which performs in other movements’ demonstrations, such as those led by peasants or by the families of victims of institutional violence and in their leadership of a multi-stakeholder coalition, including people with disabilities, Indigenous and rural peoples, and migrants, among others, that led to the Anti-Discrimination Bill in Paraguay. Aireana works at many different levels ranging from political advocacy to running a hotline for those in crisis. However, they view their cultural change work—projects like their theatre group or drums band—as having the greatest and most lasting impact.

• Mesahat (Egypt and Sudan): Since its founding in 2015, Mesahat Foundation for Sexual and Gender Diversity has emerged as a critical support for LBQ people in the Nile Valley area (Egypt and Sudan). Activists created Mesahat to elevate the concerns of LBQ people and respond to the ongoing threats, discrimination, and violence they face. Mesahat uses a three-pronged approach to improve the lives of LBQ people in Egypt and Sudan: 1) building the capacity of queer youth leaders, 2) providing holistic security, including personal safety through protection and sheltering, tools and awareness on digital security, and self-care and psychologcial well-being, and 3) compiling queer oral history that captures the life experiences of queer people in Egypt and Sudan. This past year, Mesahat launched its campaign #NotEnough to spark a conversation around the recent reforms to the Sudanese Criminal Code and its impact on the status of Sudanese women and individuals of sexual and gender diversity in Sudan. The campaign also presented recommendations and demands for improving the living situation for women and queer communities in Sudan.

• Queer Sista Platform (Armenia): Queer Sista Platform was formally founded in 2019 and is led by and for queer women in Armenia, where LGBTI communities continue to face widespread discrimination and hostility from the public and the state. The organization’s programming is currently focused in the areas of healing and well-being, and community organizing. In 2020, Queer Sista Platform re-opened their “Queer Home” space, as part of their work to create more safe, inclusive spaces of LBQ womxn in Armenia. The Queer Home serves as a critical community organizing and community building space, and will be a central hub for the organization to hold meetings, trainings, self-care and well-being workshops, and more. The space will also serve as a temporary shelter for those facing homophobia-fueled violence, discrimination, and homelessness. Another achievement for the organization in the past year has been the organization of their “Queer Camps” which center wellbeing and collective care and build community and solidarity. In the next year, they hope to keep up the operation of their healing community space as well as the organization of camps, if possible, given the pandemic.

By providing more and better quality funding to LBQ-led groups, donors can unleash the power of LBQ groups to secure transformative change in their communities. Given rising conservatism, nationalisms, and fundamentalisms around the world, and the importance of building and supporting strong movements to fight back, funding grassroots LBQ groups who are working intersectionally and addressing some of the most pressing challenges facing our world is a smart and underutilized strategy that will enable all donors to support and advance progressive political organizing around the globe.

For more, read our full 2020 report, Vibrant Yet Under-Resourced: The State of Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Movements at fundlbq.org.