Matthew Hart, Executive Director of the Global Philanthropy Project (GPP), and Sarah Gunther, the Fund Our Futures Campaign Manager, had one critical thing in common; both are deeply and personally embedded in the very movements they are trying to defend, leading to the success of their record-breaking campaign.

Hart’s involvement in queer movements was shaped by early encounters with homelessness and police violence during the AIDS crisis emerging in the 1980s. Gunther, in conversation, was quick to credit the work of Black and queer feminists of colour, from Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga to Gloria Anzaldúa, as foundational to her political work with LGBTQI activists around the world.

In this interview, Hart and Gunther open their playbook, sharing how and why GPP managed to mobilise so much money in a time where institutional support for gender and sexuality is backsliding, rapidly.

Why Now? A Record-Breaking Campaign Rooted in Data

By the time the record-breaking campaign was conceived in 2024, the Global Philanthropy Project had been doing diagnostic work for years, tracking the steady growth in funding for LGBTQI rights while monitoring the rise of anti-gender and anti-rights work across the globe.

‘This campaign was born at a staff retreat at the start of 2024′, explained Hart. ‘It was here that we looked back at our first ten years of data on LGBTQI funding and looked ahead to the ‘year of elections’, some of which were taking place in countries whose governments were big funders of movements in the Global South and East’.

‘This was when we realised that the decade of wins we were having around LGBTQI rights – including legislative wins, but also wins of hearts and minds and resources – was shifting. We were identifying major spots of vulnerability in the financing of our movements. If these vulnerable spots were to all fall sequentially, it would be catastrophic for LGBTQI rights globally. The winds were moving in the wrong direction’.

Read the full article about the Global Philanthropy Project's Fund our Futures Campaign by Kit Muirhead at Alliance Magazine.