GRANT FOCUS

We include grants to organizations or programs that specifically focus on an LGBTI issue or population. This generally does not include funds for programs with a broader focus that may also include LGBTI issues or populations.

For example, a human rights organization receiving a grant to provide asylum services to marginalized refugees, open and welcoming of all refugees including LGBTI people, would not be included in the report. If that same human rights organization received a grant to provide asylum services specifically supporting LGBTI refugees, it would be included.

Similarly, we include grants related to HIV/AIDS or other development funding streams (i.e. education, health, gender equality, economic empowerment) that are specifically focused on LGBTI people.

In some cases, donors who track funding to multiple impacted populations have been able to identify a prorated percentage of a larger grant with demonstrated LGBTI focus. We welcome clarifying questions if you are considering the partial inclusion of such grants.

GRANT TIMING

We report based on when grants are awarded, not when funds are disbursed. Please report the full amount of each grant awarded in the calendar years of 2021 and 2022. For multiyear grants, the full amount is counted in year 1. Please do not include disbursements from multi-year grants awarded in previous years.

DOMESTIC FUNDING

We do not report on LGBTI grantmaking by governments that is focused within the government’s own country (domestic funding). We do include government LGBTI grantmaking for work outside of your country.

However, we do include domestic funding by all other types of donors: foundations, corporate donors, intermediary NGO funders, and multilateral agencies.

FUNDING TO INDIVIDUALS

We do track funding to LGBTI individuals in the form of scholarships and fellowships awarded on the basis of the LGBTI identity, or for LGBTI work. This is not limited to academic activities and often includes items such as travel stipends or scholarships for LGBTI activists attending relevant conferences. There is no need to report the names of individual grantees, but any detail you can share about LGBTI population, geography, or grant focus will be help to ensure the grant can be included.

The Global Resources Report grant database is developed predominantly through self-reporting, with participating grantmakers directly providing data on all LGBTI-related grants. When possible, grantmakers provide information on the grantee name, mission, and location as well as grant description, type of support, year, amount awarded for each individual grant, and other details. The following is a list of the types of funders included:

• Private foundations: Nongovernmental and/or nonprofit organizations or charitable trusts whose funding is typically endowed by a family or an individual donor, or through the sale of corporate assets. Private foundations do not solicit funds from the public.
• Public foundations: Institutions set up to raise funds from the general public in order to award grants. Some public foundations also function as intermediary funders, receiving funds from other foundations or development agencies in order to regrant those funds to civil society organizations and grassroots groups.
• Intermediary organizations: Nongovernmental and/or civil society organizations (CSOs) operating a range of programs, including the regranting of funds received from foundations or development agencies to other (generally smaller) civil society organizations and grassroots groups.
• Corporate funders: Foundations and grantmaking programs at for-profit organizations.
• Governments: Funding awarded by donor governments through a range of agencies and embassies. This report documents government funding focused on international development
  efforts to advance LGBTI rights and does not include governments’ domestic funding.
• Multilateral agencies: Organizations formed by multiple countries for the purpose of joint funding or other types of cooperation.
• Anonymous funders: Foundations and funds seeking to maintain anonymity in their giving.

Data from individual donors is not collected unless the funding was awarded through a philanthropic entity, such as a private foundation or a donor-advised fund housed at a public foundation.

Foundations based in the United States provide data to Funders for LGBTQ Issues, while Global Philanthropy Project collects data for foundations based outside of the United States and for all government and multilateral donors. Funders for LGBTQ Issues and Global Philanthropy Project work closely together to incorporate all relevant data into the Global Resources Report.

Direct data submissions may also be supplemented by a review of official disclosure documents, annual reports, press releases, and online grants databases. Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ data collection method includes a review of U.S. tax returns for foundations and nonprofit institutions. Global Philanthropy Project utilizes additional datasets from the 360Giving database of foundation funding in the United Kingdom and the Candid Foundation Maps global dataset for both LGBT and intersex funding.

We recognize that some funders may need to limit detail in funding data, due to security concerns or other reasons. We aim to support funders in sharing as much information as is safely possible with consideration of these concerns, and work with donors with a variety of needs and reporting restrictions. If you have any specific questions how to document and/or share your data, please contact research@globalphilanthropyproject.org.

• Any detail you can share in the “Grant Description” and “Brief Grantee Description” columns of the reporting template will be a great support to the analysts coding this data. This information will enable increased specificity of issues, strategies, populations, and more.  These descriptions will only be used for grants coding analysis and will never be shared publicly.
• Similarly, any detail you can share regarding Grantee location will greatly enable more detailed analysis and reporting on funding trends, gaps, and opportunities for increased support. This data will also not be reported at the individual grantee level, only in aggregate reporting at the regional and global levels.
• In the case that grantee name should be anonymized due to safety concerns we encourage funders to share the names with our analysis team if possible. In this case, please indicate “Grantee Name [Anonymous]” and we will use the grantee name only to inform the report on relevant general characteristics of the grantee such as type of grantee. These grantees will appear as Anonymous in the Global Resources Report or any additional materials.

Global LGBTI funding streams encompass a complex network of intermediary “regranting” organizations that receive funds from donor governments, multilateral agencies, and private foundations and are entrusted to use those resources to make smaller grants to grassroots organizations.

An intermediary/regranting organization is generally a public foundation, or it may be a nongovernmental organization (NGO) operating a range of programs including grantmaking.

This report tracks funds awarded for the purposes of regranting and eliminates double-counting where appropriate. Specifically, when there is data for both a grant awarded to an intermediary for regranting and the grants ultimately awarded by the intermediary, then only the latter set of grants is included in most tabulations and charts.

The data submission sheet includes a number of columns that aim to identify this information.

• In the sheet for foundations, Column A asks for the Funding Source Name. For intermediary funders, this is a space to share where the original funds came from. This helps to enable our analysis of overall funding flows.
• All data submission sheets include columns asking “Will this grant be further regranted to additional organizations? (Y/N?)” and “If the grant will be further regranted, what percentage of the total will be awarded to additional organizations?” These columns are the space to identify that your organization awarded a grant for the purpose of the awardee then using the funds to provide additional grants, and to identify what percentage of the total grant amount is meant for regranting. If this field is not filled in, we use 20% as an overhead cost estimate which would mean that 80% is awarded for regranting.

For foundations based or headquartered in the USA, LGBTI grants data is collected annually by Funders for LGBTQ Issues for inclusion in their domestic U.S. Tracking Report. Funders for LGBTQ Issues is a key data partner for the global report, sharing grant-level detail for grants focused outside of the USA and aggregrate funding data for grants focused on the USA with Global Philanthropy Project to enable a full global funding overview.

If your organization has submitted your data for grants awarded in 2021 to Funders for LGBTQ Issues, there is no need to re-submit 2021 grants data to GPP – it will be shared between Funders for LGBTQ Issues and Global Philanthropy Project as in previous cycles. See the next points for how to share 2022 grants data. 

New in this cycle:

• For grants awarded in 2022, the global report requires an earlier collection timeline, with a final deadline of September 30, 2023.
• Funders for LGBTQ Issues and Global Philanthropy Project jointly reach out to request this data submission from U.S.-based foundations with significant international funding portfolios.
• Please use this template for your reporting, and note that instructions are included on the first tab.

We are grateful to our partners at Funders for LGBTQ Issues and our foundation partners for adapting together as we coordinate the complexities of international data collection.

Not sure if you have already submitted 2021 grants data to Funders for LGBTQ Issues? Eager to understand the shift in collection process for 2022 grants? Contact us with your questions. 

Government funding is included when the funds focus on countries other than their own, but funding to support domestic programs is not included in our methodology. Likewise, grants to intermediary funders based in-country to regrant for domestic programs are also excluded.

GPP has developed a more extensive guidance document for donor governments participating in the Global Resources Report. Please contact us at research@globalphilanthropyproject.org to request a copy.

The Global Resources Report includes grants made by corporations and other for-profit organizations, and partners with a number of networks for LGBTI-affirming corporations for data solicitation. We encourage corporate donors to share their funding focused on global LGBTI communities, including financial support of Pride events, galas, and other donations to LGBTI causes or organizations. Funds supporting individual LGBTI people, such as scholarships or support to attend relevant LGBTI conferences, are also eligible to be included.

Please note that for this edition of the report, September 30th, 2023 is a non-negotiable final deadline. 

In previous years, we have worked with many institutions to enable reporting after our formal deadline. We are eager to work with donors during our six-month data collection period (March through September) to support you in sharing data by the cut off date.