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What Is Lost When LGBTIQ Organizations Close
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October 23, 2026
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At the beginning of last year, a few weeks after the U.S. government froze almost all of its foreign assistance, Outright published Defunding Freedom, a rapid assessment of what that meant for LGBTIQ organizations around the world. What began as a freeze became permanent cuts. Last month, we published Breaking Point, which examines the longer-term impacts of cuts from the U.S. and other funders throughout 2025. What does it mean for LGBTIQ people when these organizations are stripped of the resources they need to deliver to the communities they represent?
I’ll start with what I have learned in more than 25 years in this movement: LGBTIQ organizations are the most important driver of lasting change for the communities they serve. Few societies simply decide to become more inclusive. They are pushed by organizations and activists who demand change. You can see that push in the streets. Last year in Nepal, LGBTIQ activists marched in the youth-led protests that brought down the government, insisting that the rights in the constitution apply equally to everyone. In Brazil this month, students marched ahead of the presidential runoff, and one told the Associated Press that the rights of LGBTIQ people, women, and people of color were at stake. Protest can open a door, but it does not guarantee anyone a place in what comes next. LGBTIQ organizations build alliances and keep pressing for rights to be recognized and upheld long after the crowds have gone home.
LGBTIQ organizations are also where people go to access legal help, health care, a safe place to stay, or simply someone who understands. When they close, people can be left with nowhere to go, and the change they pushed for can stall. Losing them means losing some of our collective ability to turn political change into lasting progress.
What funding cuts look like on the ground
For Breaking Point, we surveyed 229 LGBTIQ organizations in 94 countries. Almost 90 percent told us they had lost funding since January 2025. Among organizations that lost funding, nearly half lost more than half of their budgets. More than one in three anticipate having to close within a year.
The effects on services are already clear. Half of these organizations have cut health services, and 45 percent have reduced or stopped HIV prevention, treatment, or care. Sixty-three percent can no longer respond to emergencies such as violence, arrests, or displacement. Trans, nonbinary, and gender-diverse people and lesbian, bisexual, and queer women were the groups most often named as hardest hit.
In Saint Lucia, Raise Your Voice had to give up both of its safe houses. Someone forced out of their home by a landlord who learns who they love is now referred to a government system that can take up to 90 days to respond. In Liberia, the Lesbian and Gay Association of Liberia lost the funding behind its peer navigators, who carried HIV medication to people too afraid to collect it at a clinic. The organization told us that two of its clients died in March.
The loss reaches well beyond LGBTIQ communities. Health ministries depend on community-led organizations to reach people who will not walk into a public clinic, so cuts to HIV services put national HIV goals further out of reach. Humanitarian and development agencies rely on the same organizations to find and protect LGBTIQ people when a crisis hits. Governments, UN agencies, foundations, and companies that want to be inclusive lose partners with deep knowledge of local conditions and the trust of the communities they serve.
Why international funding matters
Government funding for LGBTIQ communities has always been small. According to the Global Philanthropy Project’s latest Global Resources Report, government foreign assistance for LGBTIQ issues in 2023-24 amounted to 4 cents for every US$100 of official development assistance (0.04 %). Even so, many LGBTIQ organizations have few other options. Some cannot safely raise money in their own countries, and in some places the organizing itself is against the law. Among the affected organizations, 43 percent work where same-sex relations or gender nonconformity are criminalized, and 40 percent work under restrictive laws on civil society.
Losing donors is not the only threat. Authoritarian governments know that when people organize, change can follow, and cutting organizations off from international support is one way to weaken organizing and discredit those involved. In Türkiye, police raided the offices of nine associations in September, including HIV organizations, and the justice minister said they receive funding from international sources. It was presented as grounds for suspicion. The operation was announced as a defense of the family. The same language runs through election campaigns. In 14 of the 24 countries that held elections in the first half of this year, candidates or parties campaigned against LGBTIQ people, according to our Queering Democracy Monitor. But the demand for dignity and equal rights comes from LGBTIQ people in Türkiye themselves, and they would be organizing with or without international support. That support helps them sustain their work and reach people who might otherwise have nowhere to turn.
These restrictions reach beyond our movement. Laws written to restrict LGBTIQ organizations, through bans on foreign funding or “propaganda,” are usually drafted broadly enough to be used later against journalists, women’s rights groups, and environmental organizations. The organizations that can explain how these laws work in practice are often the first to be targeted. They are also a major source of information reaching the United Nations, other governments, and regional human rights bodies. When they are silenced, fewer people hear about the abuses, and the abuses continue.
What the report asks for
The report ends with five requests to governments, foundations, companies, and individual donors:
- Move money quickly and outside normal grant cycles. Organizations are closing in months, not years.
- Give multi-year, flexible funding that can pay for staff, operations, and reserves.
- Restore community-led health services, including HIV prevention and treatment.
- Fund protection directly, including emergency response, shelter, and relocation.
- Make sure resources reach the people hit hardest, including trans and gender-diverse people and lesbian, bisexual, and queer women.
You can help by making a gift to support Outright’s work, introducing us to a potential funder, or sharing the report with someone who makes funding decisions.
Many of these groups are now running on volunteers, staff working without pay, and funding their own communities have pooled for legal aid. That cannot go on much longer. What they have built is still there: knowledge of local laws and needs, relationships with officials and allies, and the trust of the communities they serve. Funding can still protect all of that.
Where the conversation continues
At Outsummit on November 6 in New York and online, you can hear directly from activists and allies about what this moment demands and the future they are working toward. This year’s theme is The Future We Claim. Laverne Cox (she/her) opens the day in conversation, ALOK (they/them) joins the program, and one livestreamed session asks how LGBTIQ movements can shape the next global development agenda before it is written, with Jay Gilliam (he/him), former USAID Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator, on the panel. The program streams live, and online attendees can put their questions to the people on stage. Register for the livestream and send us an email at [email protected] if you’d like to attend in person.
Five days later, on November 11, Outsummit Asia takes the conversation online with activists and allies from across the region, with interpretation into Mandarin Chinese and Bahasa Indonesia. One session looks at how movements in Mongolia, Bhutan, and Timor-Leste use Pride as a strategy when resources are scarce.
On the cover of Breaking Point, activists stand outside the Palace of Justice in Lima, weaving the Quipu de la Memoria, an Andean record of knotted cords. Each knot stands for a person killed because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Peruvian activists tie it every year because the state has never counted those deaths itself. We put it on the cover because rebuilding starts with someone keeping the record when no one else will. The work doesn’t stop.
Thank you for being part of this.
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