Help LGBTIQ Human Rights Defenders Worldwide

Because of your generosity, during Outright International’s 2023 year-end fundraising campaign, we raised more than $265,000 in general operating support (GOS) to power Outright’s global programs for better LGBTIQ lives. General operating support is crucial to the work that Outright does. This type of support allows Outright to be nimble and show up when and where it is most needed. Your donation to Outright drives change and sends a message to LGBTIQ people across the globe that they are valued, loved, and appreciated.

These are just some of the examples of what your help enabled Outright to achieve this past year:

We responded to crises around the world. For example, Outright’s Ukraine LGBTIQ Emergency Fund (launched in 2022) continued to distribute grants to LGBTIQ organizations providing humanitarian relief. At the United Nations and elsewhere, Outright continued to advocate for the transformation of mainstream humanitarian systems to include LGBTIQ people in relief efforts. Outright provided grants to local organizations in Uganda fighting the world’s worst anti-LGBTIQ law, the Anti-Homosexuality Act. With partners, Outright also led advocacy at the World Bank to pause development funding in response to the human rights-violating AHA, which is in stark transgression of World Bank policies.

We completed our first cohort of our global feminist program, LBQ Connect, and welcomed 100 new participants from 29 countries for a comprehensive program of training, mentorship, research, advocacy, and financial support.

Outright helped organize and participated in a historic United Nations Arria-Formula meeting on conflict and crisis, only the second time the United Nations Security Council has explicitly addressed LGBTIQ issues.

With partners and mental health practitioners from Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Nigeria, we drafted the Johannesburg Declaration - which proclaims that efforts to change a person’s SOGIE are unnecessary, harmful, traumatic, unethical, and in breach of internationally accepted professional codes of ethics. It has been signed globally by more than 654 practitioners and their associations.

We published new, groundbreaking research about the persecution LGBTIQ people are facing under the Taliban in Afghanistan, documented the burgeoning of our global movement in Pride Around the World, and highlighted the growth and restrictions on LGBTIQ organizing in The Global State of LGBTIQ Organizing: The Right to Register and the Freedom to Operate.