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TRUTH
FOR EVERY $100 AWARDED BY U.S. FOUNDATIONS, 34 CENTS GOES TO SUPPORT LGBTQ ISSUES

2018 marked twenty years of LGBTQ community-focused grantmaking at Chicago Foundation for Women, beginning with the creation of The Lavender Fund in 1998. The first grantmaking entity in the city of Chicago to provide grants exclusively to lesbian communities, the Lavender Fund was created by the foundation’s Lesbian Outreach Task Force – which eventually became the LBTQ Giving Council – to provide the entire community and heterosexual allies with a vehicle to support the LGBTQ community.

Now, the Lavender Fund supports grantmaking by the LBTQ Giving Council of CFW, an affinity-based group committed to fundraising in order to provide grants to organizations and programs benefiting lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning women and girls in the Chicago region.

Kim L. Hunt has been a member of the LBTQ Giving Council since 2014. She initially joined the Council because “creating the opportunity for more resources to be directed to [LGBTQ] organizations was important to me.”

“As a nonprofit executive director, I came to appreciate how important it is to have donations both from foundations but also the community you’re serving,” she adds.

Community is central to the mission of the LBTQ Giving Council. “One thing about this giving council, because there are community groups around the table, there is an awareness of community groups that might otherwise fly under the radar of a foundation because the council members are in the trenches doing that work,” says Kim.

Over half of the organizations first funded by a Giving Council or Giving Circle of CFW – many of which are emerging organizations for whom CFW is the first institutional funder – have gone on to receive general funding through the foundation.

For Kim, an affinity-based giving council is “a form of activism too. Philanthropy is something that we often associate with wealth, but anybody can be a philanthropist. It’s taking what resources you have and using them to support causes that you’re interested it.”

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SINCE 2004, THE LBTQ GIVING COUNCIL HAS MADE 55 GRANTS TOTALING $169,850

This year, the Council made grants to Brave Space Alliance, the first Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ Center located on the South Side of Chicago, and Transformative Justice Law Project, which provides free and holistic support, advocacy and criminal legal services to poor and street-based transgender people in Illinois.
“Funding those small scrappy organizations that are doing work that may escape the gaze of larger organizations is critical,” Kim adds.

For Kim, one of her proudest memories is a Council conversation that led to the funding of Assata’s Daughters, a collective of young Black women providing year-long education programming through a queer Black feminist lens to young Black girls and Black teens, and Black Youth Project 100, a member-based organization of Black youth activists creating justice and freedom for all Black people.

Although both groups focus specifically on racial justice, they are led by and inclusive of young queer and gender nonconforming people. “The lens they bring to the work and the intersectionality they bring to the work is hugely important for the movement work going on,” says Kim.

In addition to bringing her own community affiliations and values with her to the grantmaking table, the LBTQ Giving Council also created space for new community building. “It’s also about building a network, expanding and building skills and developing some really incredible relationships,” Kim says. “I have friends from this Council who will be my friends even after I step away.”

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