Gratitude Report

Pride 2021 Gratitude Report Cover 1140x881

We call this our gratitude report.

It is created with deep appreciation for all who make our work possible.

Since our founding in 1985, thousands of donors, volunteers, grantees, and scholars have come together to fuel equity and justice for LGBTQ+ people across the Northwest.

Every day, our community shows their dedication to building a world where all LGBTQ+ youth, adults, and families live safely and openly as our whole selves, in all the communities we call home. For all this, we share our gratitude.

Keep scrolling for our digital report, or you can click here for our full report.

Together, we are a movement.

In Pride Foundation’s ecosystem every single person contributes something uniquely beautiful and deeply vital. Our collective actions create movement—of energy, resources, love, and care—that ripple out across our communities and region.

Our interconnected movement fuels Pride Foundation’s work to create a more equitable world where LGBTQ+ people have the thriving abundance we need to care for our communities.

We have moved so much and our work is far from over. Together, we are transforming our region.

Scholarships

Pride Foundation scholarships support LGBTQ+ students who, despite having faced incredible barriers, are extraordinary leaders in our community.

Last year, we awarded $601,000 to 95 LGBTQ+ student leaders.

Together, we’ve awarded over $7 million to more than 2,200 student leaders across the Northwest since 1993.

Scholarship Chart V2

Grants

Pride Foundation grants support organizations across the Northwest that are working passionately to meet the needs of our communities and advance justice for LGBTQ+ people.

Last year, we awarded more than 70 grants totaling over $1.6 million.

Together, we’ve awarded more than $10 million in grants to community organizations across the Northwest since 1987.

Grants Chart V2

Community Advocacy, Education, & Research

At Pride Foundation, we believe that one of the most powerful tools to shift culture is telling the breadth of our stories—the stories of our lives, our experiences, and our communities.

TRANSformCulture is our community advocacy, education, and research program that shifts culture through community connection, relationship building, and storytelling.

Since launching TRANSformCulture, the impact has rippled out and is now:

Driven by an advisory group, the Village Council, of 15 BIPOC trans and non-binary people
Working across the 5 Northwest states we serve
Working toward a goal of collecting 600 community stories to shape the narratives of our lives

Resource Mobilization

Pride Foundation began in 1985 with a group of LGBTQ+ leaders around a kitchen table. Their idea sparked a community movement—and what is now the only LGBTQ+ community foundation in the Northwest. We partner with a vast network of supporters to increase the impact of LGBTQ+ philanthropy in the Northwest.

Together, we have mobilized and awarded more than $80 million to build a world in which all LGBTQ+ people can be who we are, where we are.

In fiscal year 2020-2021, we were honored to partner with:

1,343 Donors	463 New Donors
116 Business Partners	221 Monthly Sustainers
46 Donor Advised Fundholders	55 Scholarship Fundholders
363 Visionaries	433 10+ Year Donors

Scholarships

Our scholarship program funds LGBTQ+ students who are leaders—in their own lives, in their families, in their home communities, in their fields of study, or in our movements for justice. Pride Foundation Scholars and Scholar Alumni are not only working to achieve their educational and professional dreams—they are driving movements for equity and justice across the Northwest and beyond.

For this year’s Gratitude Report, we asked just a few 2021 Scholars and Scholar Alumni to tell us more about who they are, and what drives them in their work and education.

I do not study solely for a career. I do not dream of labor; I dream of liberation. My dream is to help facilitate the learning and growth of queer youth by providing more queer-affirming spaces to share information and gain useful skills. Libraries have always been my haven, and I believe that libraries with a commitment to sharing resources are a beacon of hope in this age of information crisis.

Chloe Behan

2021 Scholar

I grew up as a queer kid in a community with no visible queer adults, much less trans folks or community spaces for queer youth. Now I live in rural Oregon, in a community with a similar lack of representation of queer lives, working to create those kinds of supportive, accessible spaces for queer youth as well as intergenerational spaces and queer history conversations, so that young people can see themselves in the places they live.

Eliot Feenstra

Scholar Alum

Grants

Our grant programs fund groups and organizations who are showing up for LGBTQ+ communities in every corner of our region every single day.

We prioritize LGBTQ+ groups that serve BIPOC communities, grassroots groups with limited access to other funding, and groups
that support LGBTQ+ people in places where no one else is.

For this year’s Gratitude Report, we asked a few of these grantee partners to discuss what drives their work.

We are dedicated to building people power, rooted in an Indigenized worldview, toward healthy, just, and sustainable communities for ALL. Through grassroots-led projects, trainings, and workshops, we are dismantling oppressive systems that harm LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit communities. Together, we’re working for social justice, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and the rights of Mother Earth.

Native Movement

Fairbanks, AK

Black and African transgender, queer, non-binary, and intersex communities have long created safety for each other. Our work is grounded in this tradition and history, and prioritizes deep communal connection, cultural recognition, traditional African healing practices, connecting over food, working communally with local healers, reconnecting with the land, and participating in music and art. Through our programming, we are creating even more opportunities to expand the care and safety that will get us closer to liberation.

Black & Beyond the Binary Collective

Portland, OR

Community Advocacy, Education, & Research

TRANSformCulture is our community advocacy, education, and research program that shifts culture through community connection, relationship building, and storytelling. This work is led and developed by the Village Council—a committee of community members from across the Northwest.

Together, we use messaging research and community organizing to increase awareness and acceptance of the breadth of gender diversity, and to empower Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), Two Spirit, trans, non-binary, intersex, and gender diverse community members as leaders within and beyond their own communities.

TRANSformCulture is collecting hundreds of stories of BIPOC nonbinary, Two Spirit, trans, non-binary, intersex, and gender diverse people that will be used to build effective messages about the lives and experiences of our communities. Then, those stories and messages will be shared throughout local and national communities to drive policy, public education, and movement strategy—all with the goal of transforming our broader communities.

Transforming Our Culture

When it comes to advocacy, research, and public education, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. This diagram outlines every step of our process, but this approach shifts and adapts to the needs of every community we work with.

As part of the Village Council guiding TRANSformCulture, being able to be part of a multi-generational group where I can sit across from an Indigenous elder, a Black trans femme activist, a Fa’afafine fellow organizer—having that beautiful blend of people and experiences, has really stood out for me.

Village Council Member

Resource Mobilization

In 2020, we were facing the reality of the long, isolating pandemic, the presidential election was hanging in the balance, and our future was in a state of profound uncertainty. But it was in the midst of this disconcerting new world that Pride Foundation supporters like you showed up in the ways our communities needed most.

We already had big plans for growing our work in 2021—from significantly increasing our grantmaking and offering multi-year support, to offering larger scholarship awards and creating an emergency fund for students. Your generosity, including an unrestricted gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, fueled these bold goals and helped us make an even bigger impact for LGBTQ+ communities during a critical time.

While some gifts receive more press than most, at Pride Foundation, all the gifts we receive are transformational—because that’s what it means to be a community foundation.

Whether it’s the proceeds from a neighbor’s garage sale, or a large bequest—it is your collective support that fuels the work to advance equity and justice for LGBTQ+ people across the Northwest.

For this year’s Gratitude Report, we asked a few of our incredible supporters to discuss what drives them to partner with Pride Foundation.

For much of my life and work in social justice, I’ve had to choose between focusing on issues of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Pride Foundation is so intentional about tackling intersecting identities and creates space for a person’s whole self in this work.

Carol Cheney

Portland, OR

“ Growing up in rural America as a queer person, I always thought my aspirations for life were limited. Organizations like Pride Foundation help LGBTQ+ people realize that our aspirations are limitless.”

Brent Olinger

Havre, MT

We were built to meet this moment.

This gratitude report, as with any nonprofit annual report, gives us all an opportunity to look back and reflect. And looking back to the beginning of our last fiscal year—April 1^st, 2021—it’s clear that we never could have predicted our current reality.

And yet, in so many ways, movements like ours have been building to respond to it.

Alongside our entire ecosystem of grantee partners, scholars, supporters, and community members, Pride Foundation was poised to put our years of experience, planning, and deep relationships into action through the many crises of the past 19 months.

Despite it all, our collective love, care, and resources flowed together abundantly to our meet communities’ needs, growing and transforming our work to meet the moment.

Thank you.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. We hope you’ll take a moment to flip through our full Gratitude Report below, and read more stories of the work that you’re helping make possible every day.