Enchanté Network pitches federal government to scope endowment fund for 2SLGBTQI+ organizations — who are “at risk of closing their doors”

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In January, the Enchanté Network made a pitch to the federal government to provide funds to scope the creation of a national endowment fund to support 2SLGBTQI+ community organizations in Canada.  

Enchanté is Canada’s largest national network of 2SLGBTQI+ organizations, and put the ask to the Ministry of Finance in their 2023 pre-budget submission, requesting $150,000 to conduct a feasibility study on the idea. The federal budget is expected to be tabled sometime later this winter or early in the spring. 

“Queer and trans organizations are closing their doors or are at risk of closing their doors every year at the end of fiscal,” says Tyler Boyce, the organization’s executive director. “We can do something about that. We can get out of this really vicious loop of lifesaving services no longer being available in communities across Canada. The solution to do that is a 2SLGBTQI+ endowment fund.” 

Boyce says the ask to the government is the first step in a public campaign to build community support for an endowment fund, which he says would be modeled on the Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund and the Equality Fund — two funds endowed by the federal government over the past few years which support Black and feminist community organizations respectively. 

An endowment is a fund established by a charity with the intention of providing long-term, sustainable funding. Typically, an endowment’s capital is invested in the market where it generates interest. As with the Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund, the model of the 2SLGBTQI+ would have it granting out this annual interest to sector organizations. 

With assets of $200 million, as the Enchanté Network is requesting, the endowment could expect to generate interest of between $4 million – $16 million annually, before fees and operational costs, assuming annual investment returns of between 2-8 per cent. 

By comparison, the Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan, announced in August 2022, promised $100 million in support over five years, with no commitment to future funding. 

Boyce says an endowment would help insulate organizations from the “boom and bust” fluctuations of project-based funding and help ameliorate chronic under-funding of the sector. 

“We deserve to have stable funding so that we can get to work — not focus on whether or not we’re going to have the resources to be able to do the work,” he says.

While there is no comprehensive study analyzing the share of donations that flow to 2SLGBTQI+ organizations in Canada, donation data from CanadaHelps, a leading donation platform, shows queer and trans causes get a tiny fraction of the overall donations made on their platform. 

In 2021, LGBTQ charities garnered just 0.3 per cent of total donations ($592,456) on the platform, according to the charity’s data. By comparison: that same year, religious charities garnered 28.3 per cent, education charities netted 18.4 per cent, and charities focused on animals took in 5.5 per cent of all donations. 

Could an endowment offer a chance for feds at ‘reconciliation’ with queer communities? 

Meagan Jubenville’s organization is one of many queer and trans-serving organizations in Canada that has struggled to raise enough money to sustainably serve its community.

“People sometimes say that they live ‘paycheque to paycheque,’” says Jubenville, policy and grant writer with Trans Wellness Ontario. “The thing we say is we live ‘grant to grant’ — we’re always chasing the funding and always trying to make sure that we can keep going what we started.” 

Established in 2016, the charity serves trans and gender-diverse communities in Ontario through a variety of programs, including in-person and virtual counseling services and an ID clinic, which facilitates name and gender marker changes on driver’s licenses and other official documents. 

But raising sufficient funds each year hasn’t been easy, Jubenville says. Many grants are program-based, providing limited funding for core operating costs, and few funders are specifically focused on supporting queer and trans-serving organizations. 

Jubenville says this funding environment works at direct cross-purposes with their mission: “When we have to worry about lack of sustainable funding, it’s a detriment to our own health and wellness [because we have] the stress of always trying to keep things going.” 

It’s for these reasons she’s supportive of the idea of a 2SLGBTQI+ endowment, believing it could save her organization many hours of searching for grants, reduce stress, and help to provide sustainable funding for their programming. 

The idea is also a popular one with Sam Katz, co-chair of the board of directors of the Community One Foundation, a public foundation which provides grants supporting queer and trans communities across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. 

Katz says a 2SLGBTQ+ endowment would have a “tremendous impact” on queer and trans communities and also give the federal government an opportunity to “put their money where their mouth is,” with respect to their support for queer and trans communities. 

He says funding for 2SLGBTQ+ communities has not been sufficient to reconcile the systemic discrimination queer and trans communities have faced at the hands of the federal government. 

In Canada, gay sex was a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment, until 1969. Until 2021, federal law, too, permitted the use of so-called “conversion therapy” a practice meant to convert people to heterosexuality or cisgenderism. As a result of these, and other federal policies, queer and transgender people in Canada have experienced job loss, institutionalization, housing insecurity, and other forms of systemic discrimination. 

“We can’t have reconciliation and good relationships between our community and the government without the organizations serving our communities receiving proper funding,” Katz says. 

Is the policy window right for a new, big-ticket ask? 

However, 2SLGBTQI+ community organizations may face an uphill battle in securing a federally-funded endowment. 

Boyce says Enchanté Network has included the same ask — for funds to conduct a feasibility study on the creation of such an endowment — in each of their last two federal budget cycles, with no response from the government. 

Further, the government released its five-year, 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan in September 2022, with no mention of an endowment fund. 

Still, Boyce is optimistic. 

He says that by design, the government’s Action Plan for queer and trans communities “leaves a lot of space” for communities to engage with the government on co-design, co-development and co-implementation of the plan, which could include the creation of new initiatives. 

He notes, too, that it took six years of advocacy by feminist organizations for the federal government to endow the $300 million Equality Fund, and three years of advocacy by Black-led organizations for the federal government to put $200 million into the Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund. 

He says the Enchanté Network is at the very beginning stages of their advocacy campaign on this issue. 

On March 10, the organization will host a panel discussion on this topic with their members, as part of a “Fund the Rainbow” virtual summit. 

Boyce says he’s hopeful with collective support, the government will see the merits of the proposal. 

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