Canada’s first federal fund to help frontline LGBTQ+ services with capacity-building costs is set to expire at the end of March 2022 – and the recipient of its largest single grant says the results for LGBTQ communities will be catastrophic if it isn’t extended immediately.

The LGBTQ Community Capacity Fund offered $15 million in grants to 76 LGBTQ service organizations who needed money for salaries, administrative costs, or internal projects. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the Fund paid for better HR management at the Quadrangle LGBTQ Community Centre. It helped launch a Canada-wide community networking campaign for Gender Creative Kids Canada, helped develop workshops at the Rainbow Coalition of Yellowknife, and advocacy efforts by the 2 Spirits in Motion Foundation.  

Tyler Boyce, the executive director of the Enchanté Network, an organization that connects LGBTQ service providers across Canada, said many of its 160 members are included among the Fund’s recipients. (Enchanté received a $700,000 grant). He spoke glowingly of Marci Ien, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth, and her mandate to continue government investments in LGBTQ organizations across Canada – but said the lack of any concrete timeline for new funding is worrisome.

“We’re just over two months from a whole sector being decimated across the country,” Boyce said.

Without an immediate replacement for the LGBTQ Community Capacity Fund, Boyce said “dozens” of the 76 organizations it currently supports will be forced to close their doors. This will be devastating for the many LGBTQ staff at these frontline organizations – as Boyce points out, queer and trans Canadians are already under and unemployed as it is. “If this fund doesn’t resume, we’re going to see all of them laid off,” he said. Some LGBTQ service staff, uncertain of whether they’ll lose their jobs after a funding cut, are already leaving the sector for other prospects.

Many of the smaller, more rural organizations that received grants through the Fund, such as the Quadrangle LGBTQ Community Centre in Newfoundland and Labrador, were also the first LGBTQ community service organizations of their kind in their region – and their closure would be devastating for local queer and trans people.

“It means that a trans teen in rural Manitoba is no longer going to have a service organization that they can turn to,” Boyce explained. “A young person looking for gender-affirming care can’t receive it. A queer person that gets kicked out of their home and is looking for somewhere to go – because the shelter system can also be incredibly transphobic and homophobic – won’t have a clear place to turn to.”

In a statement to Future of Good, Maja Stefanovska, a spokesperson for Women and Gender Equality Canada, called LGBTQ organizations a “critical lifeline” in communities across Canada. “LGBTQ2 organizations across the country urgently need support to deliver critical community services,” the statement said.

Stefanovska pointed to an announcement in the 2021 federal budget of $15 million in funding over the next three years for a new LGBTQ2 Project Fund geared for organizations “to undertake community-informed initiatives to advance equality”, as well as $7.1 million over three years for the LGBTQ2 Secretariat – an entity that links LGBTQ organizations with funding opportunities available elsewhere in the federal government.

However, there is no official timeline of when the new LGBTQ2 Project Fund will launch. Women and Gender Equality Canada also didn’t offer additional details on whether the LGBTQ2 Project Fund would only cover base project funding, or whether it would mimic the LGBTQ Community Capacity Fund by offering grants to cover capacity-building costs. 

Boyce said news of the LGBTQ Project Fund is welcome, but a potential delay between the end of the Community Capacity Fund and the launch of the Project Fund – whenever that may be – worried him. Even if the LGBTQ Project Fund was announced tomorrow, Boyce said a two-month turnaround would be incredibly tight. “The bureaucratic mechanisms to get money out the door after an announcement takes time,” Boyce explained. “With the LGBTQ Community Capacity Fund, there were months of delays between the announcement of the funds and organizations actually receiving those funds in their bank accounts.”  

The Enchanté Network wants the Canadian government to extend the LGBTQ Community Capacity Fund for all of the 76 organizations it funded and give a reasonable timeline for when new recipients could apply to the new projects fund. “The government cannot press pause on funding the essential frontline (2SLGHBTQI+) pandemic services,” Boyce said.

For many queer and trans Canadians, these LGBTQ service organizations provided critical services during the pandemic: mental health services and suicide prevention work, access to hormones, access to gender-affirming care, systems navigation, housing services, and migrant support work.

“All of that is what LGBTQ2S+ organizations do. It’s frontline. It’s essential to continue during the pandemic,” Boyce said. “In addition to clapping for workers, I want the federal government to make sure that applause and those words of appreciation are followed with the funding that will allow folks to continue to do that work.”

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