Announcing the 9th Round of Funding from the Out in the South Fund

Announcing the 9th Round of Funding from the Out in the South Fund

By: Funders for LGBTQ Issues Staff on January 14, 2025

Funders for LGBTQ Issues is pleased to announce its ninth cycle of Out in the South Fund grantmaking, which awarded $650,000 to 12 LGBTQ and allied grassroots intermediary funds across the US South in the fall of 2024.

The Out in the South Fund is a collaborative fund awarding general operating grants to build and sustain locally-driven Southern intermediaries supporting LGBTQ movement work. Over the past nine years, the Fund has distributed over $4.3 million dollars to catalyze a funding infrastructure supportive of local and hyperlocal queer and trans organizing.

This grantmaking cycle, we increased our awards to all grantee partners by 30% to account for inflation and an increasingly hostile legislative landscape for our communities.

Out in the South’s unique strengths lie in its deep understanding of the Southern context, as well as the relationships, lived experiences, and institutional capacity it has built over time. This enables Out in the South to effectively support the capacity building and grantmaking infrastructure of grantees. In addition to general support and technical assistance for grantee partners, Out in the South has allocated an additional $50,000 in accompaniment funds to provide tailored support that caters to the specific needs of each of our grantees.

The grantee partners of the Out in the South Fund support robust funding infrastructure networks deeply rooted in community; an intervention to traditional funding streams that is needed now more than ever.

This year we are pleased to announce our continued support of ten grantee partners:

1. Blackbelt Community Foundation, Selma, AL

2. Co-Thinkk, Asheville, NC

3. Campaign for Southern Equality/Southern Equality Fund, Regional

4. Contigo Fund, Orlando, FL

5. LGBTQ Fund of Greater Birmingham, Birmingham, AL

6. LGBT Fund at Spartanburg County Foundation, Spartanburg, SC

7. LGBT Fund of Mississippi, Jackson, MS

8. Southern Power Fund, Regional

9. Southern Vision Alliance: Queer Mobilization Fund, NC and SC

10. Texas Pride Impact Fund, Dallas, TX


We are also thrilled welcome two new grantee partners to our cohort: 

Appalachian Community Fund, Knoxville, TN

Maria Fund, Puerto Rico

The Out in the South Fund is a central element of the Out in the South program and a critical piece of Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ own strategy to transform philanthropy in the U.S. South.

We are growing and learning alongside our grantee partners as we build a community of practice with regional and national funders. In service of this learning, in 2024 we undertook our first external programmatic evaluation with the support of See What I Mean (SWIM) Consulting. As we celebrate our tenth anniversary this year and look ahead to the next decade of work to follow, we look forward to sharing key findings and the story of our impact with our network ahead of our Funding Forward conference in April.

We thank the members of the Out in the South Steering Committee for their invaluable guidance and stewardship of this program. We also thank our funders without whom this work would not be possible: Arcus Foundation, Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, Ford Foundation, Foundation for a Just Society, Kicking Assets Fund, Laughing Gull Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Tzedek Social Justice Fund, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.

Our gratitude to former grantee partners: Southern Movement Infrastructure Exchange (SMIE) and AR+ Collaborative for their years of work resourcing Southern LGBTQ communities.

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