Lighting the way to LGBTQI+ liberation
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice crafts interconnected, contextual, and resilient strategies for LGBTQI+ resistance. We do this by centering the people closest to the problem and the solution, collaborating with our grantee partners in every step of the process.
The Astraea Foundation employs regional strategies that strengthen our global impact. As outlined in our 10-year strategic vision, Towards Liberation, our approach “co-creates resourcing strategies by prioritizing long-term, trust-based, and flexible funding models that ensure those who are most impacted decide how resources are allocated.” When we ground our work in activist-led priorities, we sustain diverse and globally interconnected LGBTQI+ movements.
Regions shaping our strategy
The Astraea Foundation’s philanthropic portfolio spans the globe across three funds:
– the International Fund includes six regions
– the U.S. Fund covers the United States and its claimed territories
– the Intersex Human Rights Fund operates globally
Our regional strategies are informed by close relationships with local activists and ongoing social science research. In-depth, activist-led research, like our recent report “Mapping LGBTQI+ Activism in Central Asia & the South Caucasus,” helps us and the philanthropic community respond to the unique regional contexts of global LGBTQI+ movements. By researching and giving voice to underserved and underfunded LGBTQI+ communities, we illuminate how philanthropy can best support liberation movements.
Astraea Foundation communities are facing organized and well-funded anti-rights actors and coordinated challenges to progressive LGBTQI+ initiatives. The current anti-rights opposition is also joining forces across borders and increasing its harmful impact. Anti-rights groups seek to deny LGBTQI+ people their fundamental rights by rolling back or stalling progress through draconian laws, anti-LGBTQI+ violence, and escalating rhetoric. By co-opting social justice language and depicting LGBTQI+ communities as threats to the status quo, these groups continue to mobilize public support to derail the advancements of progressive movements.
To meet these challenges, the Astraea Foundation encourages cross-regional and cross-movement solidarity alongside our core, sustainable, flexible funding. Among our key regional strategic priorities are healing justice and language justice.
Healing Justice provides mental health support, rest, joy, and collective care to address collective harm and trauma. This sustains activists in their fight against anti-rights movements.
Language Justice encourages global engagement by making our work accessible in multiple languages. To support this effort, the Astraea Foundation is engaging more French-speaking activists in Africa and Portuguese-speaking activists in Latin America. Where anti-rights efforts seek to divide us, language justice connects us and builds solidarity.
Movement building within and across regions are also key tactics for sustaining liberation efforts. For example, the Astraea Foundation’s activist convenings bring our grantee partners together to strengthen movements, build community, and decrease burnout. When LGBTQI+ organizers and activists have time to reflect, collaborate, and share strategies, movements can build power and effect lasting change.
Core, sustainable, flexible funding is a fundamental strategy at the Astraea Foundation. Unlike project-specific grants, core funding supports general operations, enabling grantees to pay their staff and keep their lights on. Social change does not often happen in a 12-month grant period, so we commit to grantees for the long haul, often for five to 10 years. We believe that donors and funders invested in making meaningful change must commit for the long haul. Flexible funding, based on trust, allows activists to make decisions based on their immediate needs and priorities to sustain their work toward liberation. Stability for LGBTQI+ activists at the frontlines is a foundational part of the Astraea Foundation’s approach.
The Astraea Foundation works alongside grantees to build power and create sustainable change. Our regional strategies consider the unique contexts of activists and identify opportunities for sustainable impact. As we continuously refine our strategies for each region, we are grateful for our grantee partners’ feedback, expertise, and unwavering commitment to LGBTQI+ liberation.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice develops its philanthropic strategies through close relationships with local activists and ongoing research into the state of LGBTQI+ movements. Our U.S. Fund centers the liberation of Two-Spirit, intersex, queer, and trans people of color (QTPOC) in the United States and its claimed territories. Since its start, the U.S. Fund has challenged the criminalization of LGBTQI+ Black and Indigenous people, migrants, women of color, mothers, sex workers, and youth, all of whom experience high levels of violence and oppression.
The Astraea Foundation maintains that housing is a fundamental right, and our communities are better able to care for themselves when they have access to this basic need. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing weather disasters, environmental racism, and an oppressive system that creates and perpetuates cycles of houselessness, Two-Spirit and LBTQI+ people—particularly QTPOC—are experiencing high rates of housing insecurity.
The U.S. Fund focuses on organizations that are prioritizing purchasing land that supports queer and trans people for the foreseeable future. This includes housing, farmland, and community land trusts that are directly developing and restoring housing for our communities.
To sustainably take on this work, activist leaders also need respite and rest to continue the struggle for collective liberation in a way that models the world they are seeking to build. To help sustain our communities at the forefront of the work, the U.S. Fund continues to fund healing justice and joy.
The Astraea Foundation strives to build the power of frontline communities who are interrupting systems of oppression and confronting all forms of violence and criminalization, lighting the way for queer liberation.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice shapes our regional strategies around the unique contexts in which our grantees live, work, and organize. Our strategies identify opportunities for sustainable impact, as in the International Fund’s strategy for Latin America.
Despite numerous legislative victories and advancements led by LGBTQI+ movements, the Latin American region has also experienced a resurgence in anti-rights and anti-gender ideologies. There have been coordinated attacks by anti-rights groups, as with portrayals of LGTBQI+ people as “enemies of peace” in Colombia and “enemies of family values” in Guatemala.
As a way to address these threats, the Astraea Foundation is prioritizing language justice to encourage dialogue and action across movements and regions in Latin America. By making our work accessible to more people, we further global participation in our mission towards collective liberation. To support this effort, the Astraea Foundation is actively engaging activists and groups in Brazil, as in our recent call for proposals.
In our ongoing LGBTQI+ movement research, we also intend to spark critical conversations between activists and funders by publishing upcoming reports in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Where anti-LGBTQI+ groups seek to divide us, language justice builds solidarity and furthers our mission across regions.
Within the International Fund, the Caribbean region has recently witnessed gains in LGBTQI+ rights. The High Courts in Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Barbados decriminalized consensual same-sex sex between 2021 and 2022. Activists are concerned that the rise of anti-gender opposition could threaten civil society spaces and the political landscape. We continue to explore methods for responding to these challenges while addressing pressing issues in the region such as climate change and food insecurity.
The Astraea Foundation’s Caribbean grantee partners take action on a range of issues including anti-discrimination, gender-based violence prevention and response, trans inclusive and gender affirming health care, and sustainable farming.
The Caribbean portfolio aims to inspire dynamic collaboration rooted in honest and transparent conversations between funders and activists, across movements and regions.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice designs regional strategies around the goals of local community activists, rapidly evolving social contexts, and emergent needs. Underlying each strategy is the goal that the Astraea Foundation’s grantees and partners—who have been historically under-resourced—have the power, the capacity, and the funding to create the conditions for their communities to live authentic and free lives.
Within the International Fund, the Africa portfolio seeks to strengthen LGBTQI+ movement building, center grantee partners working at the intersections, and create opportunities for cross-regional connection.
Tactics like teach-ins foster connection between activists, enabling the identification of common strengths and the dissemination of resistance strategies. Positioned as participatory dialogues between LBTQI+ movement leaders and actors across the Africa region, they provide an opportunity to strengthen relationships between grantee partners in different regions of the continent.
Additionally, the Astraea Foundation remains committed to language justice efforts and is seeking to increase the number of Francophone grantee partners. As we continue to challenge norms and attitudes that limit marginalized communities, we work towards the affirmation of their human rights and active participation in society.
The Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia (ECCA) region poses a diversity of regional movement contexts, ranging from well-resourced and easily accessible to scarcely resourced and nearly inaccessible. As highlighted in the Astraea Foundation’s recent report, “Mapping LGBTQI+ Activism in Central Asia & the South Caucasus,” closing civic spaces pose an increased threat to LGBTQI+ organizing in parts of the region. Due to this and related challenges, some funders have withdrawn or reduced their presence, leaving gaps which the Astraea Foundation is seeking to fill.
In response to broader issues of climate change, displacement, and xenophobic violence, we will focus on groups that support refugee and migrant rights. Through continued long-term support and multi-year grants, the Astraea Foundation will help activists meet their immediate needs while sustaining them in the face of long-term challenges.
Together we can push philanthropy forward to sustain diverse global LGBTQI+ movements. Grounded in activist-led priorities, the Astraea Foundation’s regional strategies focus our global impact and shine light on the unique regional contexts of activists around the globe.
In regions like Asia and the Pacific, we commit to supporting activists for the long-term. Currently, we support 60% of our Asia and Pacific grantees for five to 10 years – making their critical work more sustainable and impactful.
We are committed to centering the people closest to the problem and the solution. The Astraea Foundation prioritizes programs and initiatives led by and for diverse communities, particularly groups led by Indigenous gender diverse communities, anti-caste LBTQI+ groups in India, and ethnic and religious communities experiencing persecution.
Due to authoritarian governments and religious conservatism, it is challenging for groups that do intersectional work. Through a healing justice framework, we support our grantee partners in prioritizing mental health support, rest, joy, and collective care to address collective harm and trauma. As demonstrated through our 2023 Global Activist Convening in Thailand, healing and joy are essential for LGBTQI+ liberation.
Within the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, the Astraea Foundation’s strategy is tailored to meet the needs of LBTQI+ groups, most of which operate underground due to societal and legal challenges. Activists need long-term, sustained support to meet their specific contexts and needs. To provide greater context into the social and legal landscape, the Astraea Foundation will be publishing research sharing insights into SWANA activist priorities and needs.
Going forward, we will also explore supporting SWANA diaspora collectives and groups led by displaced people. By building connections across regions, we can provide support for refugee and migrant rights work, including advocacy, digital awareness-raising, and grassroots activism.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice believes those closest to a problem often have the best solution. That is why we work alongside our grantee partners to create interconnected, contextual, and resilient strategies for LGBTQI+ resistance.
According to Funders for LGBTQ Issues and Global Philanthropy Project, LGBTQI+ organizing receives 0.5% of global funding, and out of that less than 1% goes to intersex causes. Through the Intersex Human Rights Fund (IHRF), we support activists and groups in navigating new threats, obtaining resources, and working for legislative and social progress for intersex people.
People with intersex variations face invisibility, stigma, discrimination, and violence. As anti-rights opposition groups gain momentum around the world, intersex activists are focusing on building narrative power around bodily autonomy to shift the discourse and advocate for a world where intersex people can live authentically and with dignity. The IHRF supports groups and organizations across the world who work in a variety of political contexts and languages, including Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, and Hindi.
Another barrier for intersex-led organizations is limited access to funding. Most organizations receive little to no external funding and run entirely on a volunteer basis. About one in five intersex organizations do not have an operating budget. The IHRF’s strategy remains focused on supporting unregistered and underfunded groups with flexible funding and multi-year core support. By giving activists the financial flexibility they need, we sustain their work in the long term, creating sustainable change.
We are thrilled to share our regional strategies that illuminate the Astraea Foundation’s current work. To explore all our transformative liberation strategies, please visit our blog. Your generous support today gives activists the tools they need to thrive.
The philanthropic and LGBTQI+ rights landscapes continue to rapidly evolve. The Astraea Foundation is rising to meet the moment by collaborating with our grantee partners to craft regional strategies for long-term resilience and growth. Our layered, regional approach supports safety, stability, and healing for LGBTQI+ communities worldwide. As we continuously refine our approach, we are grateful for our communities’ unwavering commitment to LGBTQI+ liberation.
