Shared Foundations: Lessons from Organizations Supporting LGBTIQ+ Communities and Outcomes

FEBRUARY 2026 | NAIROBI, KENYA | Hosted by Alemé

How This Work Emerged

This brief was prompted by a growing recognition among organizations directly serving LGBTIQ+ communities that challenges we face are shared, recurring, and insufficiently addressed through existing structures for funding, collaboration, learning, and support. Across different regions, sectors, and organizational models, practitioners have increasingly found ourselves navigating similar operational pressures, safety concerns, sustainability challenges, and questions around how to strengthen services within environments that are often politically, socially, or institutionally constrained.

Over several years, organizations, practitioners, and ecosystem partners have increasingly connected through informal exchanges, collaborations, convenings, and shared work, often without dedicated structures to support ongoing coordination or collective problem-solving. These conversations consistently pointed toward a broader need for stronger shared infrastructure, more practical collaboration, and clearer pathways for collective learning, visibility, evidence generation, and resource mobilization. While many important advocacy, movement-building, and community platforms already exist, discussions repeatedly pointed to a gap in more practice-oriented infrastructure focused specifically on organizations delivering services and support within complex and often constrained environments.

Between November 2025 and February 2026, a more intentional process was undertaken to explore what forms of collective support or shared infrastructure might be most useful and realistic across the ecosystem. Consultations were conducted with practitioners, service organizations, funders, advisors, technical experts, and other ecosystem actors working across multiple sectors and geographies. Through these discussions, several common priorities emerged, including:

  • strengthening shared approaches to practice and service delivery;
  • improving how evidence, learning, and impact are captured and communicated across the sector; and
  • expanding pathways to more diverse, sustainable, and collaborative funding approaches for organizations supporting LGBTIQ+ communities.

In February 2026, these ideas were further explored and tested through a small practitioner working session held in Nairobi involving contributors with diverse lived experience, organizational roles, and regional perspectives. Contributors included grassroots organizers, clinicians, activists, technologists, fundraisers, and cultural practitioners working across multiple countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and refugee-led and cross-border communities. Many are operating in environments where visibility, safety, and formal recognition remain constrained, shaping both how services are delivered and how insights are shared.

The session focused on identifying areas of shared practice, surfacing practical challenges and emerging approaches, and assessing where collective efforts could most meaningfully strengthen organizations and communities. This brief introduces an initial set of shared practice areas that emerged across discussions and were further refined through the Nairobi convening, alongside practical areas for shared learning and ecosystem development towards structured, collective support.

Emerging Areas of Shared Practice

The following five practice areas represent a starting point for organizing ideas, approaches, and lessons across the ecosystem. They reflect patterns seen across diverse organizations and programs while leaving space for adaptation, experimentation, and continued learning.

Particular attention was given to areas carrying heightened relevance for LGBTIQ+ communities and other highly marginalized or intersectional populations. While many aspects overlap with broader social impact and service delivery work, these areas repeatedly emerged as especially important within this context. The areas are intentionally overlapping rather than rigidly separated. In practice, organizations often navigate several at once, adapting them differently depending on context, community, size, and risk environment.

1. Protection

Protection is a continuous practice of managing exposure, risk, and harm across all aspects of service delivery. For many organizations, it shapes not only safety, but whether individuals are able or willing to engage at all. Decisions around communication, visibility, data, space, and participation are often inseparable from broader questions of trust and survival.

In practice, this includes:

  • Designing safe spaces for engagement across physical and digital environments
  • Managing data and communication practices to reduce exposure and protect identity
  • Developing safeguarding, crisis response, and risk mitigation approaches

2. Representation

Representation is not only about inclusion or visibility, but about how power, legitimacy, resources, and decision-making are distributed and who remains excluded, underrepresented, or disproportionately exposed to risk. Within LGBTIQ+ contexts, communities are highly diverse across identity, visibility, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, age, migration status, faith, and lived experience, with different groups often experiencing very different forms and degrees of exclusion, including (and importantly) between groups within the LGBTIQ+ community itself.

Many organizations also work across overlapping movements and marginalized communities, recognizing that LGBTIQ+ experiences are often inseparable from broader realities of gender inequality, displacement, poverty, racism, disability, and religious or social exclusion.

In practice, this includes:

  • Embedding diverse lived experience within leadership, governance, design, and delivery structures
  • Reflecting intersectionality and differing levels of visibility, access, influence, and risk across communities
  • Building partnerships and decision-making approaches that strengthen accountability, solidarity, trust, and shared ownership

3. Affirmation

Affirmation shapes whether services are experienced merely as accessible, or as spaces where people feel recognized, respected, and able to participate more fully. In many contexts, affirmation becomes part of how organizations rebuild trust, belonging, confidence, and connection in environments where identity is routinely stigmatized, erased, or politicized. For many organizations, affirmation is closely tied to wellbeing, retention, trust, confidence, and longer-term outcomes.

In practice, this may include:

  • Creating affirming experiences of identity without requiring disclosure or visibility
  • Integrating joy, creativity, culture, and community connection into programming
  • Supporting pathways toward confidence, agency, healing, and self-definition

4. Economic Inclusion

Economic inclusion reflects the reality that financial insecurity, informal labor, and survival economies often shape whether individuals can engage with services consistently or safely. Many organizations also operate within the same economic realities affecting the communities they serve, balancing community support, organizational survival, and long-term sustainability at the same time. Economic participation, mutual support, and sustainability are therefore often deeply connected rather than separate concerns.

In practice, this may include:

  • Structuring compensation, economic participation, or mutual support within services
  • Designing programs around livelihood realities, financial instability, and time constraints
  • Recognizing and engaging with informal, community-based, or survival economies

5. Navigation

Navigation reflects the ongoing work organizations undertake to operate within politically restrictive, socially hostile, legally ambiguous, or institutionally inconsistent environments. Unlike many other sectors, strategies typically associated with organizational success (increased visibility, formalization, public positioning, institutional integration, or scale) increase exposure and risk for organizations, the communities we serve, and individuals connected or perceived to be connected to the work.

As a result, decisions around visibility, language, partnerships, funding, growth or scale, and engagement with formal systems are inseparable from questions of safety, legitimacy, reach, and organizational survival are a continuous operational reality rather than a separate strategic function.

In practice, this may include:

  • Calibrating visibility, language, and public positioning across different audiences and environments
  • Determining when and how to engage with governments, institutions, and formal systems
  • Structuring partnerships, funding relationships, and external engagement to balance access, legitimacy, sustainability, and risk

Priorities for Shared Learning and Collective Support

The Nairobi working session served as an early opportunity to test, refine, and validate the emerging practice areas across participants working in different sectors, organizational models, and operating environments. While the framework remains intentionally flexible and evolving, discussions reinforced the relevance of these areas as a potential shared structure for organizing learning, strengthening practice, and supporting more coordinated ecosystem development over time.

Alongside the practice areas themselves, participants also focused on identifying more immediate and practical next steps. Discussions explored what organizations could begin learning, adapting, or leveraging directly from one another, as well as where stronger shared infrastructure or collective approaches could help address challenges that are difficult for organizations to navigate alone.

Several areas for continued work consistently emerged through these discussions, including:

Shared Learning

Several actions reflected approaches already being tested across contexts, suggesting opportunities for organizations to learn from one another and adapt these practices to our own environments:

  • Strengthen secure data approaches, including the use of anonymous and offline systems where formal systems create risk
  • Establish dedicated safeguarding capacity, including clear roles, protocols, and rapid response mechanisms
  • Introduce intentional partner and staff screening practices to ensure alignment with inclusive values
  • Draw on queer cultural histories and practices such as ballroom, drag, and other forms of expression as tools for connection, visibility, and resilience

Collective Support

Other actions highlighted the role a collective can play in strengthening organizations’ ability to operate, engage, and sustain our work particularly where visibility, legitimacy, and risk must be carefully managed:

  • Expand shared storytelling and impact communication support for organizations that cannot be publicly visible
  • Develop shared approaches to framing, narrative, and representation including common language and collective storytelling to strengthen credibility with funders while managing risk
  • Create mechanisms for collective representation, including acting on behalf of less visible organizations in engagements with funders and partners

Building on Emerging Practice

This brief represents an early effort to organize and connect emerging practice across a highly diverse ecosystem of organizations working in complex environments. Rather than offering a fixed model, it is intended as a foundation for continued learning, collaboration, and refinement shaped directly by practitioners and communities themselves.

Several next areas of work emerged through the process. These include developing more practical guidance and tools for practitioners, strengthening how funders and partners engage with organizations operating in constrained environments, and continuing to create spaces for shared learning, convening, and collaboration across sectors and regions.

Over time, the broader aim is not only to strengthen individual organizations, but to help build the shared infrastructure, relationships, and collective capacity needed for organizations and communities to operate more safely, sustainably, and effectively while navigating increasingly complex environments.

Contributions and working sessions were convened through Waypoint Commons, contributors to this brief include individuals and organizations participating through consultations, convenings, informal exchanges, and ongoing collaboration. Named contributors and affiliated organizations are included only where explicit consent has been provided, recognizing that many individuals and organizations contribute within environments where visibility, safety, or formal affiliation may carry risk. Listed contributors represent only a portion of the broader ecosystem of practitioners, organizations, and communities whose experiences, insights, and work have informed this process.

NAMED CONTRIBUTORS:

Akudo Oguaghamba (she/ her), Founder & Executive Director, Women's Health and Equal Rights Initiative (Nigeria) Aliganyira Brian (he/ him), Founder & Executive Director, Ark Wellness Hub (Uganda) Jono McKay, Co-founder, SameSame (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana) Judah Njoroge (he/ him), Founder, Integrative Wellbeing Whitney Blessing (she/ her), Community Manager, Black Queer Movements

Tyler Nelson (he/ him), Convener, Waypoint Commons (Global)