Lessons in resistance: How AIDS activism can teach us to save ourselves from hate

The Reagan Administration was determined to ignore the AIDS epidemic. As the death toll climbed across the country, Reagan refused to even say the word “AIDS,” waiting until 1985 to name the deadly illness. It wasn’t until 1987 that he formed a task force to address the disease, and his administration did not implement a single one of its 597 recommendations. 

In response, a group of four gay men in Minneapolis came together to form the Philanthrofund Foundation, or PFund for short, in 1987. Aaron Zimmerman, the current Executive Director of the organization, told LGBTQ Nation the founders’ primary principle: “We need to save ourselves.” All four men donated $1,000 to their new organization – about $2,800 each after adjusting for inflation – and asked the community for support.

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As soon as PFund started, the team needed to get over a major roadblock to community support. At the time, nothing was safe from homophobia. So while Philanthrofund Foundation may seem like a strange name, it reflects the founders’ worries about naming their new foundation something obviously queer. Philanthrofund Foundation was safe – neighbors and mail carriers would never suspect PFund was by and for LGBTQ+ people if they saw mail, signs, or flyers.

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The name is even more important when you learn the second reason PFund was founded. 

After LGBTQ+ people died of AIDS, their estate would typically go to their next of kin. All of their belongings were being returned to the families that abused and rejected and abandoned them; to families that, in all likelihood, never once visited them in the hospital; to families that may have believed AIDS was divine punishment for being gay. The PFund Foundation gave queer people another option – they could write their will and leave part of their estate to the organization instead. When the families read the will, a name like “Philanthrofund Foundation” wouldn’t set off any alarms.

“Oh, half the money is going to Philanthrofund Foundation? Oh, that sounds charitable,” Zimmerman explained. The wills were less likely to be contested by bigoted family members thanks to the neutral-sounding moniker.

As PFund received more donations, the founders decided the LGBTQ+ community should get to decide how they would use the money – after all, it was the community’s money in the first place. They would get together with other LGBTQ+ people and everyone would review the grant applications. Today, PFund calls this community-centered grantmaking (CCG).

Many things have changed in the decades since PFund was founded, but parallels have cropped up in the last few years. Trans health care is being restricted, gay couples are being denied wedding services, and books featuring or written by LGBTQ+ people are being pulled off school and public library shelves. And once again, LGBTQ+ people were left without support during a pandemic. 

“History definitely repeats itself,” Zimmerman said. “It just reaffirms PFund’s reason for existing.”

PFund has also changed over the years – early on, PFund was very gay and lesbian-focused; Zimmerman said that if you ask lesbians about those first years, they’ll tell you it was very gay-focused. In 2015, PFund officially committed to ensuring its grants reached three priority communities: Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people of color;  trans and gender nonconforming communities; and rural LGBTQ+ people. 

“We’ve really tried and tried and failed to define and reimagine over the last 10 years or so to define what it actually means to be equitable in that way,” Zimmerman explained. They’ve worked on their application process, their advertising, their grant review rubrics – anything they can do to improve equity.

Based on the numbers, it’s working.

Last year, PFund’s Equity Fund grants went to some of the hardest-to-reach communities, with almost 40 percent reaching rural LGBTQ+ people, more than half going to trans people, and more than 70 percent reaching BIPOC LGBTQ+ people. As a comparison, the highly-resourced Gates Foundation provided 43 percent of its grants to rural communities in 2023. It’s no wonder the Gates Foundation highlighted their new Equitable Grantmaking Community of Practice, which works on “ideas about community-led strategies, participatory grantmaking, and new funding models” in their 2022 DEI report.

Almost four decades later, community-centered grantmaking remains the center of PFund’s giving philosophy. They’ve refined the process over time of course – at first, the founders would personally invite people to join a grant review board. Now people apply to be on the review boards – an experience volunteers find so rewarding that PFund may soon need to add a limit to how many times each person can apply per year.

PFund also works with far more money than it did at the start – the Equity Fund awarded over $300,000 in 2023 – and that was just one grant program. It has also expanded to cover a larger region and award grants to organizations “across the upper Midwest and the First Nations therein.”

That expansion has changed how it forms its community review boards. The number of people on the review board changes based on the grant. The scholarship review boards have as many as 40 members, while grants with fewer applicants might have 14. PFund also tries to have at least one of its board members in each group of reviewers; that way, the board can make sure PFund’s staff aren’t taking too much control of the process.

PFund also tries to select reviewers that reflect the community the grant is supposed to serve. For example, all the reviewers for their current Transcend Fund – which aims to support trans and gender nonconforming communities – are transgender, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The Transcend Fund reviewers come from four of the five states that PFund serves, which helps ensure the grants aren’t all being given to organizations in PFund’s home state of Minnesota.

Staff create rubrics for reviewers to use while grading applications through an intensive community listening process that determines PFund’s strategic goals. The goals are distilled into principles, and the rubrics try to guide reviewers to applicants who meet those principles. 

This year, for example, PFund heard that first, LGBTQ+ communities feel like they don’t have control over their political futures; second, that they struggle to access basic needs; and third, which came as a surprise to Zimmerman, that LGBTQ+ people feel lonely and want better community spaces where they can gather. Combating those three challenges became this year’s strategic goals.

PFund’s staff and board of directors worked to find principles that apply to each of those goals and came up with five: holistic health; education and leadership; economic empowerment; visibility and advocacy; and vibrancy and community. This year’s rubrics try to help reviewers prioritize applications that support at least one of those principles.

Some things have stayed the same, though: Reviewers get time to read through the applications they’re assigned and grade them, then meet as a group to choose who will receive the awards. Ultimately, the community gets to decide who they want to support, a point that Zimmerman stressed in our conversation.

This year Zimmerman met with a trans theater group and encouraged them to apply to the Transcend Fund. When the application deadline came closer, he reached out again and asked why they hadn’t submitted a grant application. The theater group felt like there were other, more important things that needed to be funded to support trans people.

Zimmerman had heard queer people across the midwest saying they needed more community spaces. He knew that was one of the strategic goals this year.

“It’s best when we can get a diverse set of applicants to really showcase to the community all of the ways in which we’re trying to combat anti-LGBTQ or anti-trans rhetoric and hate and violence,” Zimmerman explained. He hopes LGBTQ+ organizations won’t self-select out of PFund grant applications.

“Why don’t you let the community decide whether or not they want to have theater be one of the priorities?” he asked them. “It’s not my decision or yours. It’s the community’s decision about who gets funded.”

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