Dear John,
Happy New Year.
I always want January to feel like a clean page. But the world doesn't turn over like a calendar. It carries its unfinished business forward. So do we.
One year ago, the U.S. government froze foreign assistance, a loss felt far beyond budgets and bureaucracy. Over the months that followed, $125 million disappeared from the global LGBTIQ human rights ecosystem. People lost services they depended on to survive. Staff lost their jobs. Momentum built up for decades stalled. Outright had to suspend 120 grants in nearly 50 countries.
Frankly, the damage did not end when the headlines moved on. Funding shocks like this create a multi-year impact. Rebuilding a program, service, a team, a safety net, or a strategy takes far longer than it takes to dismantle.
That started in January 2025. And yet: our determined movement is still here.
Not because conditions improved, but because people refused to stop. Because partners stretched what little they had. Because communities took care of each other. Because some governments — Norway, Iceland, and Sweden included — stepped up when others retreated. Because supporters like you did not walk away when it got hard.
Thailand's marriage equality law, which took effect last January, has now registered thousands of couples. Poland completed its dismantling of "LGBT-free zones." Saint Lucia struck down colonial-era criminalization laws. The Council of Europe unanimously adopted protections for intersex people. Progress didn't stop. It just got harder to see.
What We're Walking Into
2026 is arriving with a harsher geopolitical reality.
Authoritarian playbooks are circulating faster than ever across borders, across languages, across platforms. Disinformation travels at the speed of outrage. Attacks on LGBTIQ people keep being repackaged as nationalism, child protection, or religious freedom. And as democratic space shrinks, the first targets are often the same: trans and nonbinary people, intersex people, lesbian and bisexual women, and anyone who refuses to fit the roles a government is trying to enforce.
At the same time, the funding landscape is tightening. Some governments are retreating from human rights commitments. Many philanthropies say they are overwhelmed by overlapping crises. Movements are being asked to do more with less while facing escalating risk.
This is why Outright's work in 2026 will be about defending the conditions that make rights possible: civic space, safety, and economic survival.
Last year, we chose to fight on two tracks at once: documenting the truth, and supporting our partners on the ground.
We documented the fallout of the aid freeze in our rapid-response report, Defunding Freedom, turning partner testimony into evidence that funders, diplomats, and journalists could not ignore.
We revamped our independent country overviews on the rights and inclusion of LGBTIQ people in 193 UN member states. These are a practical tool for advocacy, decision-making, and accountability when official reporting refused to acknowledge us.
We tracked coordinated attacks on the human rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people globally in A Year in Attacks, and we published Queering Democracy, documenting how anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric became a deliberate campaign strategy in 51 of the 61 jurisdictions we studied. We kept showing up loudly at the United Nations and beyond — because silence is what backlash depends on.
We advanced work that rarely makes headlines but changes what's possible: integrating LGBTIQ inclusion into humanitarian response systems in Ukraine, expanding the evidence base on digital violence, supporting efforts to end conversion practices, and helping establish formal structures inside institutions that were never designed with our communities in mind.
And while we had to terminate grants when funding was lost, we raised new funds to almost make up the gap. In 2025, Outright initiated 86 new grants, committing approximately US$1.6 million to 77 organizations across 47 countries. By the end of January 2026, Outright expects to disburse approximately 90 additional grants, totaling US$2.4 million.
None of this is "business as usual." It is what it looks like to keep building under pressure.
What's Next: Funding Our Freedom
In the coming weeks, Outright will publicly launch a campaign grounded in a simple truth: movements cannot survive on solidarity alone. They need resources that are flexible, durable, and shaped by the people closest to the risk.
There is a quiet violence in asking movements under attack to survive without resources. Solidarity matters. Courage matters. But neither can replace rent, security, legal defense, or staff who are able to stay.
When funding disappears, the burden doesn’t vanish — it is transferred downward, onto the people already carrying the most risk.
We call it Funding Our Freedom — a bold effort to raise $10 million by June to replace lost infrastructure, prevent vital work from disappearing, and strengthen the organizations doing this work in communities worldwide.
Fifty percent of the funds raised will be re-granted to LGBTIQ organizations and groups around the world. The remaining half will sustain Outright’s core programs, including research, advocacy, and rapid-response work.
I'll share more about Funding Our Freedom next week. But I wanted you to be among the first to know. If 2025 taught us anything, it's that we cannot depend on systems designed without us in mind. We need our own infrastructure. Our own resilience. Our own power.
That's what we're building, together, with Everyone, Everywhere.
What I'm Asking of You in 2026
We'll keep going. We'll update our countries overview database. We'll continue tracking and exposing attacks on trans and intersex communities. We'll bring activists to the UN for Advocacy Week. We'll host Outsummit. We'll work with partners in every region, through every setback and every win.
This year will demand clarity. It will demand courage. It will demand resources. But it will also demand imagination — the insistence that a different future is still possible, even when destructive forces are trying to make that belief feel naïve.
It isn't naïve. It's how every victory we've ever seen began.
I don't take your presence lightly. Some of you have been with Outright for decades. Some joined us last year, in the middle of a crisis. All of you are part of why we're still fighting.
If you’re able, I invite you to stay close to this work in the months ahead — to follow what we’re building, to share it with others, and, if you are in a position to do so, to help resource it.
I think about you — reading this, staying informed, staying engaged.
Thank you for being part of this movement. Choosing not to look away — especially when the work gets harder — matters more than you may realize.
We have hard work ahead. Let's get to it.
With solidarity,
