Recently, my best friend went to ask his local "gay-friendly" doctor about PrEP. When he told me she had no idea what he was talking about, I was alarmed by the implications. When medical practitioners aren't intentionally LGBTQ inclusive and culturally competent, they often fail to meet the needs of LGBTQ people and pass up an opportunity to improve overall public health.
In their goals, both medicine and philanthropy have a lot in common. Both aim to improve peoples' lives and change the world for the better.
However, we can't solve the world's big problems when we're missing pieces of the puzzles. Excluding whole portions of a population from our analysis inevitably prevents us from adequately addressing the issues we're attempting to correct.
And yet, Funders for LGBTQ Issues' brand new report - 2014 Tracking Report: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Grantmaking by U.S. Foundations -- finds that a majority of 100 of the largest foundations in the United States provide zero funding for LGBTQ communities. Collectively, these 100 foundations award more than $15 billion annually. However, a detailed audit finds:
- 62 foundations awarded zero dollars to LGBTQ communities;
- 15 foundations awarded50,000 or less to LGBTQ communities; and
- Only 5 awarded more than1 million (which was roughly equivalent to between 1 and 3 percent of their grant-making).
Collectively, these 100 foundations invested less than $36 million in LGBTQ communities -- which amounts to less than a quarter of one percent of their collective grant making. If all of these foundations awarded one percent of their grant making to LGBTQ issues, we could practically double the amount of funding for LGBTQ communities. And when you look at what we've done with limited resources so far, imagine what we could do with twice the resources.
Just as it would be unwise for a doctor to prescribe a new regimen of medicine and then never check in with the patient to confirm they in fact got healthy, so it seems premature for funders to exit the LGBTQ space after marriage equality without addressing the underlying societal issues that keep LGBTQ people down. If anything, the increased awareness and new data we have showing how LGBTQ people are disproportionally poor and suffer from alarming health disparities should drive philanthropy to increase its investments in LGBTQ communities.
There is a real impact philanthropy could have in improving the lives of LGBTQ people around the world, and it wouldn't take a major reallocation of resources. All it would take is looking at LGBTQ communities as piece of the whole -- which we are.