Gratitude & Action

2022 – 2023 Annual Report

Letter from Leadership

The Challenges We Are Facing

Grants

Scholarships

Community Advocacy, Research & Education (CARE)

Resource Mobilization

Facing the Challenges

Financial Statement

Grantee & Supporter Lists

Letter from Leadership

We are in one of the most challenging times for LGBTQ+ people and communities in decades. There is a growing movement that is hatefully targeting our community in so many aspects of our lives, and it seems that we are closer to the beginning than to the end.

We know that is a hard truth to begin a letter with, but as queer and trans people, we have been feeling and living this reality every day and acknowledging that experience and the impact it is having is important.

While it is true that this moment is dire, it is also powerfully true that LGBTQ+ people and communities across the Northwest are fighting back. In the face of these threats and what we need and deserve being taken from us, we are finding the strength and energy as a community to give one another love and affirmation, connection and belonging, safety and support.

Pride Foundation was dreamed into existence 38 years ago in the midst of another dire time for our communities, to ensure that LGBTQ+ people in the Northwest would have the resources and support needed to confront the challenges and take care of one another.

We were literally built for moments like this.

Since then, we have faced every challenge head on, and found ways to support our community even more. That is what we will continue to do during this time, and we ask each of you to stay in this with us – because together, our community is a powerful force.

Thank you, always, for being a part of that community.

With pride,

Katie Carter, CEO

Carol Cheney & Jason Bergevin
Board Co-Presidents

The Challenges We Are Facing

At Pride Foundation, we know what we are living through right now is having enormous impacts in every corner of our region and country. We know that it is terrifying to witness our rights and our very existence be called into question and chipped away. We know that the lived realities we are facing are affecting our safety, our livelihoods, our mental and physical health, and our ability to live as our whole selves.

It is important to understand this context and reality so that we can continue to build and strengthen our strategies for addressing it. We share these challenges to help support that understanding — and in the rest of this report are the ways that Pride Foundation and our community are responding to these realities.

Educational Outlook

Ensuring that LGBTQ+ students have the resources (both financial and community support) they need to feel supported in school is critical to their educational success and their well-being. Many LGBTQ+ people have additional barriers to accessing education like economic insecurity and lack of familial support. Because of this, more LGBTQ+ people have student debt than our cis and straight counterparts.

of LGBTQ+ adults have significant student loan debt

The Williams Institute

Legislative Environment

Protecting and increasing our legal rights is critical to LGBTQ+ people living and thriving. More than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in the 2023 legislative cycle — more than ever in history. 12 of these were in Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. This staggering attack is highly coordinated nationally, targeting Trans people in particular, and is gaining momentum.

2023 Legislative Session: Anti-LGBT Bills per state

ACLU

Regional Reality

We believe that LGBTQ+ people should be able to be our whole selves in all the places we call home. These legislative attacks, regardless of whether they pass, are impacting our community’s sense of safety and inclusion. They are contributing to a cultural context that is incredibly challenging for LGBTQ+ people to exist in, and many people are being forced to leave their homes to find safety for themselves and their families (and we know that many people don’t have that option). The displacement Trans people in particularly are experiencing is alarming.

43%

of Trans adults have considered moving in the past year due to anti-LGBT climate

of Trans Adults have already moved

Data for Progress

Funding Landscape

Resources are critical for organizations to grow, sustain, and continue to support their communities. Nationally, foundations have persistently and chronically underfunded our communities and despite efforts, this has not changed. LGBTQ+ groups still only receive $0.28 for every $100 invested by foundations, and it is just pennies for Trans groups and QTBIPOC groups.

LGBTQ+ groups still only receive $0.28 for every $100 invested by foundations

Funders for LGBTQ Issues

Grants

As the only LGBTQ+ foundation in the Northwest, Pride Foundation’s Grantmaking Programs strategically and intentionally invest in groups who are led by and supporting LGBTQ+ people and communities. We focus on supporting groups who are:

BIPOC led and serving
Grassroots or who have limited access to funding
In rural areas

Over the past few years, our grantmaking has grown substantially from a single, annual opportunity for groups to receive funding, to multiple funding opportunities and multi-year grantmaking.

This past year, our two key grantmaking programs awarded 117 grants totaling $1.44 million!

Our Community Grants Program

Multi-year grants
Supports many areas of work and communities

Awarded $1,834,000 to 105 organizations in the fall of 2021 and 2022.

Our QTBIPOC Community Care Fund Fund

Larger grants awarded on a rolling basis
Groups led by and serving QTBIPOC communities
Supports groups providing some form of community care

Awarded $551,000 to 15 groups in 2022.

Percentage of Grants Awarded per State

Community Care Fund

Community care keeps us alive and plants seeds for queer and trans futures. It is the antidote for isolation, exploitation, and oppression. It helps create the joy, rest, pleasure, and healing we need to sustain and transform ourselves. There are infinite possibilities for how we protect and care for each other — and the QTBIPOC Community Care Fund supports our community’s collective efforts to practice that care.

This fund has evolved since it was launched in 2020 to be a resource for QTBIPOC community groups who are responding to community threats, harms, needs, hopes, and healing. Whether it is mutual aid, safety planning, or any number of practices — this fund was created to support the many ways that community care can be enacted.

The Community Care Fund has also been an opportunity for Pride Foundation to transform our grantmaking practices to be reflective of more accountable approaches to funding and responsive to what we are hearing from grantees. This includes making our application flexible, simple, and offering phone calls instead of written applications to make the process easier and to create space for groups to talk about their work.

We also developed an “Ask for what you need” grantmaking practice, because we know too often groups limit their ask to what a funder might find ‘reasonable.’ This resulted in Pride Foundation making some of our largest grants ever, including two grants of $100,000 or more because that’s what groups actually needed. Even when it means awarding fewer overall grants, we know that investing this level of support is making meaningful change for our communities.

For Pride Foundation, ensuring LGBTQ+ groups have the resources they need to care for their communities is paramount, and we will continue to evolve our practices to meet these needs.

“The CCF grant has provided our project with the stability to continue solidifying our foundation, offer resources and support, and create networks of community care grounded in intuitive wisdom. We are grateful to be able to create spaces for Trans and gender non-conforming BIPOC – exploring our relationship to, and expanding our knowledge on carework specifically for birthing people, parents and those of us who are birthing ourselves!”

—Lifewerq Project

Scholarships

The past several years has been especially challenging for our students embarking on their higher education journey while battling anti-Blackness, national attacks on LGBTQ+ people and trans people specifically, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all while also navigating increased costs of living broadly, and higher education costs in particular.

In response to these changing conditions, Pride Foundation spent this year updating our scholarship practices to be aligned with our values by further centering the experiences of students. This has included simplifying our application process and prioritizing students who face systemic oppression and barriers to accessing education. It also meant increasing our minimum scholarship award to $5,000 to help students facing higher costs of education.

This year we awarded $759,600 to 113 students.

2022 Scholarship Recipients

Reflections on Home from our Scholars

What constitutes ‘home’ can be complex for LGBTQ+ people, since all too often we have had to seek out, create, or find homes for ourselves. Pride Foundation was founded on the belief that all LGBTQ+ people should be able to live safely and openly as our whole selves in all of the places we call home—that we should not have to leave our homes to be able to be who we are or to find community, safety, and support. Knowing that finding home continues to be something our community strives for, we invited Pride Foundation scholars to reflect on their experiences with home.

Kristina Mays is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and a passionate steward of her language and culture in her home community. Kristina was born and raised on the Flathead Reservation, where she currently lives, pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Native Language Teacher Education at Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana. “Learning my native language, along with our cultural ways, gives me the ability to pass this knowledge along. Helping to revitalize our ways of life. Giving my children, along with future generations, a chance to learn our culture and where they come from.”

Kristina is dedicated to continuing to make the Flathead her home: “Staying within my community will help strengthen and build healthy relationships. I am just a bridge from the elders to our younger generations, helping our people remain in existence. We need to help build our children strong to be able to walk both worlds! And that is why I want to teach and dedicate my life to teaching the language and culture.”

Erasmo Ruiz grew up in rural eastern Oregon, but decided to move as soon as he hit 18 because his experience of home was very hostile towards LGBTQ+ people. “I was bullied and harassed constantly during middle and high school” he says. Pride Foundation helped fund his senior year in college at Portland State University, and now is supporting Erasmo’s next steps in an Emerging Leaders Executive Education program at Harvard University for fall 2023.

Erasmo has called Tacoma home for almost a decade, and he’s put down deep roots. He and his partner own a home, and Erasmo has become civically engaged and is currently running for elected county office. He says it’s been especially meaningful that “we feel safe and welcome in our current community.” All that said, Erasmo admits that now at 32, “I have thought about moving back to my hometown to be closer to family someday. As you get older, you realize how important being near family is – especially during hard times, when you need emotional support and realize everyone is so far away.”

Luna Coen is studying Education at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, OR three hours away from where they grew up. “I think of myself as someone who is a little bit both – someone who left, and someone who stayed” they say. Their hometown’s Pride event is one of their favorite places, “but there’s a lot of Trump signs there even now, and I don’t feel comfortable in my home city.” Luna’s day-to-day now is quite different: “I almost cried when I visited the campus. There are a lot of queer people at SOU. At work they’re there, my roommates are queer, my classes have queer people in them.” Looking ahead after graduation, they plan to get a job teaching near to where they grew up, “it’s rural, but it’s so welcoming.” In a small place, a few people can make a huge difference.

Community Advocacy, Research and Education: CARE

All LGBTQ+ people deserve to live openly as our whole selves, form safe and nourishing connections, and live free and well from discrimination and violence. Pride Foundation’s CARE work takes a broad focus to transform culture in communities across the Northwest to make this vision a reality. Currently, CARE’s primary focus is the TRANSform Culture Program, with emergent programs around safety/wellness and trans-regional coalition-building in development.

Since 2016, the work that has evolved to become the Department of CARE has unapologetically centered BIPOC Trans, Nonbinary, Intersex, and Two-Spirit ancestral knowledge and lives. The ultimate goal of our CARE work is to create a Northwest region that is inhospitable to homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, and all other forms of harm directed at LGBTQ+ communities.

Community Advocacy

We drive change in our region by fueling community power for the breadth and depth of LGBTQ+ community needs — from courtrooms to board rooms to living rooms.

In 2023 alone, over 560 anti-LGBTQ+, and especially anti-Trans+, bills have been proposed. In the Northwest, at least a dozen of these bills have been signed into law with each proposed bill, approved or not, negatively impacting the lives of our community. Nevertheless, Trans+ people and our communities continue to make space for mourning and magic, longing and loving, for truth and transformation.

This is not a new battle for the Northwest: we are home to the first anti-Trans sports Bill signed into law in the country back in 2020 in Idaho. However, we are also home to some of the first pro-Trans bills getting signed into law. This year, Washington State became a sanctuary state for recipients of gender-affirming care.

In the face of this, Pride Foundation is finding new ways to provide support in addition to our grantmaking, from submitting testimony, to sponsoring meals and transportation for activists getting to legislatures, to joining in the collective chant, “My body is my own, I am in control” in the depths of the legislature in Helena, MT.

Our Department of CARE made a round of larger, one-time unrestricted grants to organizations led by Trans+ folks doing gender justice work in the Northwest.

Community Research

“Never stop learning your culture. That’s the biggest thing that helped me when I needed a reason to live. I’ve always had some aspect of my culture in my life.”

– TRANSform Culture Interviewee

Community-based, participatory research is the birthplace for CARE and a central activity of the department. We conduct research to develop messaging that is focused on building narratives that transform culture to be more inclusive of the breadth of LGBTQ+ people, specifically focused on BIPOC Transgender, Two-Spirit, Nonbinary, and Intersex people in communities.

What began as messaging research to defeat anti-Trans bathroom bills in Washington state has evolved into ongoing narrative work in the service of gender and racial justice. It also has grown into the TRANSform Culture Fellowship, which supports the leadership of BIPOC Trans, Two-Spirit, Nonbinary, and Intersex people in the Northwest to collect and share stories and the TRANSform Culture Village Council, a networking project to better connect Trans+ leaders and work in the Northwest.

2023-2024 TRANSform Culture Fellows

MoHagani Magnetek (she/her) – Fairbanks, AK
T MO (they/them) – Juneau, AK
Mija (they/them) – Missoula, MT
Delaiah Robinson (he/they) – Missoula, MT
Jesse Guecha (they/he/she) – Seattle, WA
Mattie Mooney (they/them) – Tacoma, WA
Aodhàn Crawford (they/he/she) – Boise, ID
Brandon Connolly (he/him) – Idaho Falls, ID
Úmi Ver (she/her) – Hillsboro, OR
JJ (they/them) – Portland, OR

Community Education

We nourish Community Education by promoting narratives of LGBTQ+ people and communities in the Pacific Northwest, especially those that are BIPOC and Trans+, which highlight the gender-diversity of the region and sustain or enhance the life of LGBTQ+ Northwesterners.

Decades of movement work has taught us that sharing our stories is one of the most powerful ways to shift culture. As part of a community-driven effort, we collect, archive, and share stories of BIPOC Trans+ experiences.

Our community education support has been expansive and creative: from hosting trainings on collaging and direct action for Trans+ folks, to purchasing mission-aligned yard signs and supporting open mics, to providing trainings to other non-profits and foundation on best practices for our community, we see community education as a both a means and an end.

Resource Mobilization

It is abundantly clear that we are in a moment where LGBTQ+ people across the Northwest and across the country need one another and our allies. It is even more clear that we are ready to show up, fight back, and offer support.

As the only LGBTQ+ community foundation in our region, Pride Foundation helps harness this power and fuel these movements for justice by mobilizing a vibrant and expansive network of supporters – some who got engaged with us this year, and many who have been working alongside us for decades. Fundamentally, our work at Pride Foundation is fueled by you — our community.

Total Donors by Years Giving

Answering the Call

It’s the beginning of March 2023 and 17 community volunteers are slowly trickling onto the Zoom kickoff meeting for our Tend Host Committee, ready to serve as advisors, connectors, and amplifiers of our new, annual Pride month event, Tend. Committee members come from different parts of the Northwest, have different histories with Pride Foundation, and different levels of comfort with fundraising.

They all share one thing in common, though: their response to our icebreaker question, What made you say yes to joining the host committee? Their answers in their own shape and color all boiled down to the same thing: because you asked for help.Their answers in their own shape and color all boiled down to the same thing: because you asked for help.

When we asked for feedback about how to pull off 6 simultaneous events spanning 3 time zones, committee members were undaunted, and enthusiastically shared their regional perspectives on what would work best for their community gathering.

When we asked for help connecting with business sponsorships, committee members brainstormed, reached out to their contacts, and made the asks to secure almost 30% of our fundraising goal before the event even happened!

When we asked them to invite their community to join us at Tend, the committee called, emailed, made Facebook events, and talked to people in line at coffee shops. As a result, 150 new friends were connected to Pride Foundation – and ended up donating more than 30% of our fundraising goal!

Because our Tend Host Committee said yes, together we surpassed our fundraising goal by 90%, raising over $300,000 to resource LGBTQ+ communities in the Northwest. We are filled with gratitude that when we make the ask, we have dedicated, passionate community members in our network who are ready to show up and offer support.

My favorite part of participating on the host committee was connecting with community leaders and community members organically to curate a welcoming and relevant experience. It was especially rewarding to showcase how Pride Foundation has worked to support LGBTQ+ advocacy efforts in Alaska.

– Aud Pleas, Eagle River, AK

Facing the Challenges

While we are indeed living in challenging times, Pride Foundation was built to face moments like this. For the past 38 years, with your help — we have faced every obstacle head on, and found ways to support our community even more.

Together, we are meeting these challenges with powerful acts of resistance. The pages of this report are a testament to what that resistance looks and feels like. The numbers below are just some of the concrete ways we can remind ourselves and one another of the ways we are showing up for one another and LGBTQ+ people and communities in the Northwest.

Together, we are building a world where every queer and trans person can not only live unapologetically and fearlessly, but also openly as our whole selves in all of the communities we call home.

Financial Statements

Pride Foundation ended our fiscal year in a very strong financial position, including increasing our unrestricted assets by 48%. This was the result of a very successful fundraising year from our individual, corporate, and foundation supporters.

Liabilities & Net Assets

Statement of financial position for year ending March 31, 2023.

Assets