Northern California Grantmakers

With the entire Bay Area a buzz with Pride celebrations this weekend, we thought we’d take a moment to highlight our members who support the LGBT community year round through their grantmaking and initiatives.

Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund: Supporting LGBT Inclusion In Churches Nationwide

In early 2010 NCG member Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund was the lead funder of the collaborative research and planning effort that preceded the launch of Believe Out Loud, a collection of clergy and lay leaders, LGBT activists and concerned individuals working together to use advertising, community organizing and other strategies to build a self-sustaining movement for LGBT inclusion in churches around the country.

The Fund’s goal, together with its partners in this work, is to counter the religious right’s message of intolerance toward gays and lesbians. Through its support for Believe Out Loud, the Fund seeks to support more people of faith, and more churches, to “break the silence” and show their support for equality for all people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Horizons Foundation: Improving the Quality of Life for LGBT Elders

Last year when NCG launched its Snapshots of Philanthropy, we were pleased to work with Horizons Foundation to develop their snapshot showcasing how their foundation partnered with fellow NCG member the California Wellness Foundation to create a program called LGBT WISE: Working to Improve Services to Elders.

WISE is designed to build regional capacity for providing services such as food delivery, access to health care and emotional and social support to promote healthy aging among LGBT elders in Bay Area counties.

The elder participants have reported that the program alleviates feelings of loneliness and isolation, better enables them to be independent, keeps them connected to the LGBT community and has positive impacts on their health and well-being.

Tides:  State Equality Fund

NCG member the Tides Foundation partners with the Gill Foundation, NCG member Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and anonymous donors to administer the State Equality Fund, a fund which primarily focused on supporting one-to-five-year statewide policy-changes in the areas of nondiscrimination, relationship recognition, parenting rights, and safe schools.

Since it was established in 2007, the State Equality Fund has granted almost $8 million to advance LGBT equality on the state level. Toward this goal, grant recipients have included organizations seeking to promote and support news media outlets that serve the Black, Asian, and Hispanic markets in efforts to raise the visibility of LBGT people in communities dominated by immigrants and people of color, to promote safe schools through the adoption of LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying policies, and for the state to recognize same-sex marriages as legal, granting the same rights to all spouses under the law.

Tags: Believe Out Loud, California Wellness Foundation, Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, Horizons Foundation, LBGT, NCG member, Pride, snapshots of philanthropy, Tides Foundation

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Community News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.