APRIL 2026 | OXFORD, UNITED KINGDOM | Hosted by The Sidebar
During Skoll World Forum week in Oxford, this funder-focused dialogue was convened as part of a broader set of social impact and philanthropy gatherings taking place across the city. Hosted by The Sidebar, the session engaged philanthropic funders in a candid, practice-oriented conversation about what enables or constrains meaningful LGBTIQ+ inclusion across philanthropic portfolios. The discussion focused on how decisions are made within funding institutions, where barriers emerge, and where tensions remain unresolved.
Despite the relevance across development sectors, conversations related to LGBTIQ+ communities have historically remained peripheral, fragmented, or absent across global social impact and philanthropy convenings. For organizations operating within highly constrained environments, barriers related to safety, visibility, institutional access, and legitimacy leave many structurally sidelined from philanthropic ecosystems.
Philanthropic portfolios already intersect meaningfully with the lives and realities of LGBTIQ+ communities without being intentionally recognized or supported as such. However, this work is still frequently understood primarily through rights-based, advocacy, or activist frameworks rather than as essential service delivery, community infrastructure, or population-focused programming.
While intentionally designed as a funder-only dialogue, the conversation was informed by insights gathered through virtual and in-person convenings and discussions with practitioners operating across diverse and often constrained environments. This created space for more open reflection on institutional dynamics, funding realities, and operational challenges while ensuring practitioner perspectives remained present.
Inclusion often depends on internal champions
Meaningful inclusion of LGBTIQ+ outcomes within philanthropic portfolios rarely happens passively. Support often begins with individual conviction inside an institution, driven by staff or leadership with personal commitment, lived experience, or a broader belief that these communities should not remain invisible within social impact funding.
Because LGBTIQ+ inclusion is still perceived as politically sensitive, operationally complex, or outside existing priorities, advancing support often depends on individuals continuously translating and advocating for the work across institutional decision-making structures. Even where openness exists internally, organizations and initiatives still need to demonstrate alignment with institutional language, measurement expectations, or strategic priorities.
Individual conviction may bring LGBTIQ+ programs to the table, but institutional systems determine whether they can move forward and be sustained.
Many of the tensions explored throughout the discussion emerged from this broader challenge: not simply whether institutions care about LGBTIQ+ inclusion, but whether existing systems are equipped to understand and support organizations operating within highly complex environments.
Emerging themes from the session
Risk is both highly influential and poorly understood
Questions of risk emerged as one of the most influential themes throughout the discussion. Even where interest or openness existed, institutions often struggled with how to safely assess, contextualize, support, or publicly engage with organizations operating in constrained environments.
In many cases, the perception of risk alone prevents organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities from being considered for funding or even entering philanthropic pipelines to begin with.
Risk was also discussed as extending beyond the organization, its leadership and staff, but also for community members, partner organizations, other grantees within a portfolio, and the funders themselves. Participants described uncertainty around how to responsibly promote, communicate about, or publicly position organizations whose safety may depend in part on strategic invisibility, adaptive language, or careful navigation of local political and social environments.
Practitioner perspectives brought into the discussion reinforced that these risks are often real, immediate, and continuously negotiated in practice. Service organizations regularly make decisions about how much personal, organizational, or community risk they are willing to absorb in order to secure resources, maintain partnerships, or remain legible within funding systems, at times accepting heightened levels of exposure because alternative pathways to support remain limited. Organizations are often unable or unwilling to publicly promote their work, affiliations, or identities in the same ways expected across conventional philanthropic ecosystems.
The discussion highlighted a broader institutional challenge: many philanthropic systems remain insufficiently equipped to distinguish between visibility and safety, compliance and protection, or accountability and exposure within constrained environments where navigating risk is already an operational reality.
Existing funding structures struggle to accommodate informal or complex ecosystems
Intermediaries, pooled funds, and other collaborative funding structures consistently play key roles in helping resources reach organizations and initiatives. These structures often serve as practical responses to gaps in institutional understanding, flexibility, contextual knowledge, or risk tolerance within larger philanthropic systems.
Intermediaries create flexibility around funding flows, absorb administrative burden, support smaller initiatives, and fund work that may otherwise remain inaccessible to larger institutions.
Organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities often operate through informal initiatives, unregistered structures, small collectives, or adaptive community-based models that emerge directly from local realities and constraints. In some contexts, formal registration itself may create exposure, political difficulty, or legal barriers, leaving many organizations structurally excluded from conventional funding mechanisms that are poorly aligned with these forms of organizing.
At the same time, intermediaries carry their own strategic priorities that shape which organizations become aligned for support. Even highly supportive funding ecosystems may unintentionally produce forms of exclusion within already diverse and internally complex communities.
Organizations are often held to uneven standards
Organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities are often evaluated through expectations and funding frameworks that do not reflect the complexity of their operating environments. Organizations serving highly marginalized or intersectional populations frequently face challenges demonstrating reach or scale in ways that align with broader portfolio expectations.
The work itself, however, often requires exceptionally high levels of trust, specialization, adaptability, safeguarding, and long-term relationship-building. One strategy for advancing support internally has been emphasizing the quality, depth, or uniqueness of the work being delivered rather than the overall scale of populations reached.
Organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities are often held to disproportionately high standards compared to peers operating in less politically or operationally complex environments.
Questions of cost-effectiveness surfaced in similar ways, as reaching highly marginalized populations requires more resource-intensive and context-specific approaches. Comparisons emerged to other complex or difficult-to-reach populations and issue areas, including displaced communities, out-of-school girls, or abortion access.
Rather than framing these dynamics as exceptional cases, the discussion pointed toward a broader institutional challenge: whether philanthropic systems are adequately equipped to understand forms of impact, complexity, and operational effectiveness that may not fit neatly within conventional assumptions around scale, visibility, or efficiency across portfolios.
Visibility, evidence, and the limits of conventional measurement
Philanthropic systems rely on approaches to data, attribution, and impact evaluation that do not fully account for the realities of working with LGBTIQ+ communities.
Identifying, mapping, or quantifying LGBTIQ+ populations may at times be unsafe, inappropriate, or operationally unrealistic.
Identities may be fluid, context-dependent, intentionally undisclosed, or shaped by concerns around safety, stigma, criminalization, and exposure. Existing population models or prevalence estimates are also frequently drawn from high-income contexts and applied to low- and middle-income countries despite major differences in visibility, criminalization, culture, and social norms.
These tensions create significant operational challenges for organizations attempting to demonstrate impact within conventional philanthropic systems. Additionally, many outcomes particularly relevant to LGBTIQ+ communities may not always align neatly with more conventional philanthropic metrics focused primarily on scale, income, education, or standardized health indicators alone.
The discussion highlighted a broader tension within philanthropy: systems built around visibility, standardization, and quantifiable attribution struggle to recognize impact within environments where safety, invisibility, and adaptive forms of identity are essential to survival.
Emerging opportunities and continued dialogue
While barriers, tensions, and institutional challenges surfaced throughout the convening, opportunities for progress and adaptation across philanthropy also became clear. A growing body of experience and emerging practice presents important opportunities for continued learning and collaboration around how organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities can be more meaningfully engaged across philanthropic portfolios.
LGBTIQ+ organizations strengthen broader portfolios: Organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities are already operating across healthcare access, livelihoods, migration, mental wellbeing, and other development sectors. Their approaches to trust-building, outreach, adaptation, and service delivery strengthen broader philanthropic portfolios rather than sit outside them. Intentional inclusion strengthens portfolio diversity and the ability of funders to reach otherwise underserved populations.
Practitioners already hold critical operational expertise: Organizations operating within constrained environments are already navigating many of the realities philanthropic institutions are attempting to better understand, often daily and at far greater levels of personal, organizational, and community exposure. Their adaptive approaches to risk, visibility, trust, and community engagement offer important learning opportunities for philanthropy itself.
While still at an early stage, the convening demonstrated strong value in creating more candid spaces for dialogue, reflection, and peer exchange across philanthropy. Continued progress will require broader engagement across additional funders, intermediaries, practitioners, and ecosystem actors, alongside more intentional collaboration to translate emerging practitioner approaches and operational realities into funding practices and institutional systems better equipped to support organizations operating within highly constrained environments.
This dialogue was informed through ongoing collaboration, consultations, convenings, and informal exchanges with practitioners, organizations, and ecosystem partners. Named contributors and affiliated organizations are included only where explicit consent has been provided, recognizing that visibility, public affiliation, or participation may carry differing levels of professional, institutional, or personal risk across contexts. Listed contributors represent only a portion of the broader ecosystem of organizations, practitioners, funders, and communities whose experiences and perspectives continue to shape this work.
NAMED CONTRIBUTORS:
Karen Keating Ansara (she/ her), Founder & Board Chair, Network of Engaged International Donors (USA) Marline Oluchi (she/ they), Steering Committee Member, The Global Equality Fund (Africa) Shauna Carey (she/ her), Independent Consultant (USA)
Tyler Nelson (he/ him), Convener, Waypoint Commons (Global)