Embracing Our Reach in 2025. Fortifying Our Future Together.
Looking Back on Our Impact in 2025
In a year shaped by political attacks, funding cuts, and growing uncertainty, one truth held steady: when our community embraces one another, we build something stronger than fear. In 2025, Stonewall Community Foundation celebrated our organization's milestone 35th anniversary by moving more than $1 million back into LGBTQ+ communities. Together with supporters like you, we fueled the work of 179 organizations across 31 states, advancing care, safety, creativity, and justice at a moment when these resources were urgently needed. This is what embrace looks like in action.
Rooted in New York. Reaching Everywhere.
Stonewall was born in New York City. For 36 years, this state has been the soil where our movement grew deeper roots. In 2025, more than half of our grantmaking was invested right here at home, strengthening the organizations and leaders who anchor queer life, culture, and advocacy across New York. From Queens classrooms to Staten Island community hubs, from legal advocacy to health initiatives, your generosity fortified the places where our people gather, heal, and organize. And from those roots, our reach extended outward. In the last year alone, we funded organizations in 31 states, from Maine to California. What begins in New York does not stay in New York: it strengthens communities across the country who look to this city for courage and clarity.
In 2025, Stonewall’s impact included 229 grants to grassroots LGBTQ+ organizations across 31 U.S. states. In total, we channeled $1,094,984 to 179 groups doing critical work to keep the LGBTQ+ movement charging forward.
In addition to our grantmaking, we also invested $45,000 in scholarships and moved $226,646 in in kind resources. Behind every one of these numbers is a life touched. A queer youth housed. A trans person accessing lifesaving care. A survivor finding safety. An artist telling the truth. A community refusing to disappear.
From Embrace to Endurance
One of our largest grants of the year — $35,000 to the HEAT Program through our Stonewall Quarter Share initiative — provided critical fuel to an incredible Brooklyn-based organization providing lifesaving, judgment-free, and culturally-competent healthcare queer and trans youth in one of the city’s most underserved neighborhoods. This grant reflects the heart of our approach: investing in organizations that meet urgent needs with dignity and expertise. Across our portfolio, we prioritized trans-led and BIPOC-led organizations and grassroots leaders whose lived experience makes them the best-equipped leaders to respond to their community’s particular needs. But the need continues to grow, and LGBTQ+ organizations requested far more support than philanthropy could meet.
That reality calls us into our next chapter. If 2025 was about embracing our reach, the year ahead is about fortifying what we have built together over the past 35 years. It is about strengthening our roots in New York. Deepening our partnerships across the country. Stabilizing the leaders on the frontlines. Ensuring that our movement is not only visible, but durable. Embrace allowed us to grow. Fortifying will allow us to endure.
Because of you, Stonewall is not simply responding to crisis. We are building infrastructure. We are sustaining leadership. We are protecting futures.