National LGBTQ Task Force

1. A significantly greater portion of the U.S. population, especially those LGBTQ people who face discrimination based on multiple identities, will benefit from laws, policies, regulations and practices that advance freedom and justice for LGBTQ people and families throughout the country.

2. A diverse, well-trained, cadre of leaders and advocates will be prepared to serve in leadership roles that advance freedom and justice for LGBTQ people and families.

3. An increased number of non-LGBTQ-specific social justice organizations will be explicitly working to advance inclusion, freedom and justice for the most marginalized LGBTQ people in communities across the country.

4. The Task Force will lead in innovations, adaptations and effectiveness in advancing freedom and justice for LGBTQ people.

The strategies the Task Force employs to achieve these overarching goals fall into three broad areas of activities: Organizing & Advocacy, Education & Training, and Movement Building. Our theory of change (to wage winning campaigns; to build capacity and infrastructure for the movement; to disseminate a world view; and to create opportunities for personal transformation) posits these three arenas as crucial to building the political and social power required to implement policies and to catalyze the change of hearts and minds necessary for LGBTQ equity.

Organizing & Advocacy at the Task Force is closely aligned with amplifying the voices of those people who are disenfranchised or otherwise invisible or neglected. We advocate for equity and fair treatment under the law as well as to change the laws at all levels to assure the impartial and just treatment of all LGBTQ people around the country. The Task Force conducts much of its work for social justice in coalition or collaboration with many national, and local, organizations. We aspire to use our role and leadership as a convener and coalition-builder to influence the LGBTQ Movement, and the broader Progressive Movement, to adopt progressive social justice goals and approaches and to advance freedom and justice for the most marginalized.

The Task Force defines Education & Training as teaching people a particular skill or strategy around being an effective advocate for LGBTQ, and broader progressive issues. We help prepare activists to advocate for themselves and to mobilize others to do the same. Training by the Task Force takes place in different ways and permeates how we interact with our diverse constituencies. Given the broad range of issue areas that the Task Force focuses on under the umbrella of social justice, training people to become activists and advocates for LGBTQ rights is a critical vehicle in building the LGBTQ Movement. The Task Force presented 30 trainings in this past year. More than 6,000 people benefited from these trainings, including those who attended Creating Change, which was held in Washington DC in January 2018.

Seeding the ground for change, both political and cultural, requires the hard, tedious and often unseen work of Movement Building. One of the Task Force’s core strengths is as a leader in building the LGBTQ Movement, acting as the progressive voice in the movement and providing year-round opportunities for individuals and organizations to develop capacity and participate in strengthening our collective power and influence. The Task Force has developed a powerful reputation as one of the most intentionally intersectional progressive organizations in the country. Leading with a deep understanding of the many places that people live and meet to do this work affords us the opportunity to partner with a wide range of organizations and individuals from almost every sector of the progressive arena.

The National LGBTQ Task Force Foundation builds power, takes action and creates change to achieve freedom and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their families. As a progressive social justice organization, the Task Force works toward a society that values and respects the diversity of human expression and identity and achieves equity for all. Over the next few years, the Task Force will focus on engaging larger numbers of people in the work for positive change for LGBT people and families. The Task Force will power the LGBT Movement with innovative tools and transformative experiences to energize the next era of the Movement for LGBT justice and freedom. We will work to build a broad Movement that supports all LGBT people, including those living at the intersections of multiple identities, to express their leadership and transform our Movement and our society. The impact of the Task Force’s work will be that all LGBT people are given opportunities to thrive, whether through explicit attention in federal agency directives; through exposure to leadership development programs, skills-building initiatives and other targeted trainings; or through being included in the broad campaigns/agendas of social justice movements that illuminate and address the extent of the disparities they face. Our efforts focus on building strong local leaders, organizations and communities to help ensure that all LGBT people are treated fairly and equally in their cities and states across the country.

We work closely in communities with people who are often left out of mainstream efforts: people of color, transgender people, progressive people of faith and non-LGBT allies. One of the most important goals of the Task Force is to be the LGBT voice within the Progressive Movement and the progressive voice within the LGBT Movement. It is through the enactment of progressive, pro-LGBT policies that LGBT people are most likely to achieve the full equality, freedom and justice that they deserve. These policies also prioritize endowing individuals and communities with dignity and self- and community-advancement.

Key elements of the Task Force theory of change include being able to equip individuals at the local and state level to work toward achieving meaningful changes in the lives of LGBT people and families; enabling diverse leaders using new and innovative advocacy tools to make lasting change in their own communities; pushing the Movement to see an array of social justice concerns as LGBT issues; and working to ensure that there is a collective progressive movement emphasis on the broad array of issues that impact the lives of LGBT people and families. Much of this involves engaging more and different leaders at the national, state, and local levels, including ethnically, socially and economically diverse staff, boards and volunteer teams, to lead the Movement to advance freedom a

The Task Force has always had a long-range view of social change. The current social, political and economic landscape is replete with challenges given the current administration’s hostility towards the Task Force’s constituents, including LGBTQ people and families, immigrants, black and brown people, those struggling with low or no income, people caught in the criminal justice system, people coping with life-threatening illness (including HIV/AIDS) and progressive people of faith. Implicit in these many challenges are opportunities for the Task Force to exercise leadership within the LGBTQ movement and the wider progressive movement. As an organization that expresses bold leadership through a values-based intersectional lens on issues affecting LGBTQ people and their families, the Task Force serves as the connector between issues and movements affecting our constituents, including reproductive justice, criminal justice, immigration, disability, religious exemptions, poverty, and family formation, among others.

Over the past three years, the Task Force has engaged, mobilized and trained more than 17,000 people across the country, including thousands of people at Creating Change, and thousands of people working to ensure that LGBTQ people are not discriminated against. Over the past three years, Creating Change has been in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington DC for its 30th anniversary.

One of the roles the Task Force plays through our powerful FedWatch project is as a “watchdog” for changes being made by the Trump. We have nearly 300 members from more than 120 organizations. In 2017, we added more than 140 new members. Through this monitoring tool, we uncovered that the administration was going to remove a question about sexual orientation on the National Survey of Older Americans. We mobilized a response, created public pressure, and the sexual orientation question was returned to the survey.

On July 24, 2018, the Task Force teamed up with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to launch FedDataWatch: a unique resource and coalition built to ensure that our communities have the information and resources they need to advocate effectively for more robust and inclusive data collection. Each year, the federal government spends billions of dollars conducting research to inform decision-making on everything from health programs and housing access to policing and pollution. Yet federal surveys often fail to ask questions that would yield valuable information on topics of critical importance to social justice advocates. If advocates know when surveys are being fielded and work with federal researchers to improve survey instruments, they can make a real impact on the universe of information we have available to support our advocacy efforts and make an impact on policy decisions.