At the beginning of our 40th Anniversary year in 2020, Horizons' board of directors adopted a new, five-year strategic plan to guide our work as we enter our fifth decade. Building upon our four decades of experience, partnerships, and deeply held values, our new strategic plan sets out ambitious goals and actions that will dramatically advance our vision in the years ahead.
COVID-19 grantee partner The Oakland LGBTQ Community Center, ready to provide food and supplies to their community.
The COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the Bay Area just two weeks after Horizons adopted this strategic plan. Once the pandemic hit, the foundation leapt into responding to this massive crisis. It has made painfully clear how profoundly vulnerable many LGBTQ people remain, notwithstanding all of our movement's epic progress.
And Horizons has been clear throughout this crisis that the vision put forth in this new strategic plan stands now as even more critical than it was adopted — critical for hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ people today, and for millions in LGBTQ generations to come.
We plan to double our annual community grantmaking with sharpened priorities.
We will maintain an “Open Door” policy in our community grantmaking, intentionally offering a wide range of LGBTQ nonprofits opportunities to seek funding. Horizons has long prioritized those within our community that have especially great, often disproportionate needs, and the strategic plans calls for sharpening still further our community grantmaking priorities around six populations:
Transgender
people
lgbtq People
of color
Bisexual
people
lgbtq youth
lgbtq elders
lgbtq refugees
and asylees
We will develop a major community-informed, multi-year grant initiative focused on transgender people of color.
This initiative will provide targeted support to transgender people of color, who are among the highest-need members of the LGBTQ community. In keeping with Horizons’ long-held values, the initiative will be developed via a participatory grantmaking process, in which community experts and partners deeply inform the initiative.
We plan to catalyze greater community philanthropy by growing Give OUT Day by 250% and doubling our donor-advised fund program.
We'll expand the impact of Give OUT Day, our national day of giving for the LGBTQ community, providing increased support for hundreds of LGBTQ nonprofits across the country.
Horizons also plans to grow its donor-advised fund program, which makes up a significant portion of Horizons' total grantmaking. We will deepen our services for advisors and work to link them more closely to our community priorities and grantmaking.
We plan to identity an unprecedented total of $250 million in future legacy gifts for the LGBTQ community.
Horizons will build on the landmark success of the Now and Forever Campaign in order to serve donors and bring dramatically greater resources to the LGBTQ community by capitalizing on our extraordinary collective opportunity in legacy giving.
We plan to amplify our longstanding commitment to equity, inclusion, diversity, and belonging in every aspect of the foundation.
We believe that our community and the foundation itself must manifest and practice diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in every aspect of our work and in our culture. We believe that we cannot do our work ethically, nor can we be effective in our mission, without being relentlessly serious about DEIB.
We will strategically deepen the foundation’s leadership in the LGBTQ movement at the local, state, national, and global levels.
As we move into our fifth decade, we strongly reaffirm Horizons’ role as a leader on multiple issues and on multiple levels – the San Francisco Bay Area, the state of California, the nation, and the world. Moving forward, Horizons will leverage its positions to provide leadership on key issues close to the foundation’s mission, to advocate for our community, and to raise the foundation’s profile.
