SAN FRANCISCO - Horizons Foundation has been awarded a grant from the Community Leadership Project that will bring $500,000 over the next three years to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people of color organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area-one of the largest grants ever to focus on this population. The funding will provide major support for Horizons' POCIBLE (People of Color Initiative to Build Leadership and Effectiveness) program, which made its first grants earlier this year.

The Community Leadership Project is a creation of three of the Bay Area's largest private foundations-the David and Lucile Packard, James Irvine, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations-and is aimed at strengthening nonprofit organizations that are led by or serve people of color in California. Horizons is one of only six regranting partners selected for the Project, which was launched in April 2009 to serve the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Coast, and the San Joaquin Valley.

"This grant from the Community Leadership Project will allow Horizons to expand our POCIBLE program in exciting ways," said Jewelle Gomez, Horizons Foundation's Director of Grants and Community Initiatives. "We designed POCIBLE to strengthen people of color LGBT organizations on multiple levels: their infrastructure, their leaders, and their connections with other POC/LGBT groups and the broader LGBT community. It's a unique opportunity for these organizations to come together as a cohort of their own and truly collaborate with a funder like Horizons."

"While grants for capacity building may not sound exciting, in reality this kind of investment is desperately needed by our community organizations," said Roger Doughty, Executive Director. "It's also a type of funding that's fairly difficult to come by, making the POCIBLE program all the more important and the Community Leadership Project grant to Horizons Foundation all the more powerful."

"Horizons has a long history of addressing the needs of LGBT people of color and organizations," Gomez continued, "but in the wake of Prop 8, this extraordinary support for POCIBLE couldn't be more timely. Across the board, everyone agrees that more people of color needed to have their voices heard during the campaign. I'm thrilled that Horizons Foundation is taking the lead on funding practical solutions."

In the belief that those closest to their communities best know community needs, the Community Leadership Project has elected to work through intermediary organizations in three regions to make the grants. In addition to the six intermediaries that will regrant funds, three additional intermediaries received funding for leadership training and technical assistance programs.

Through these intermediaries, Community Leadership Project funds will be made available to between 50 and 60 nonprofit organizations with annual budgets of less than $2 million, and reach many more with its training programs.

"It is to the enormous credit of the Packard, Irvine, and Hewlett Foundations that they've recognized the complexity of community and identity experienced by LGBT people of color and embraced an inclusive vision of diversity," said Doughty. "In making this grant to Horizons Foundation, the Community Leadership Project is playing a vital role in helping multiply-marginalized communities build bridges across some of the widest gaps between the promise of equality and its fulfillment."

For more information about Horizons Foundation and the POCIBLE grantmaking program, please visit www.horizonsfoundation.org. Founded in 1980, Horizons Foundation was the world's first community foundation that focused on LGBT issues.

For more information about the Community Leadership Project and other intermediary organizations, please visit www.communityleadershipproject.org.