2014 Year in Review

Partner Updates

Matthew “Matty” Hart, Founder and Principal
In 2014, Hart continued to serve as Board Chair of The Calamus Foundation (DE) and as a Board Member of Funders for LGBTQ Issues.

Hart also served as Funders Concerned About AIDS (FCAA)’s Senior Strategist for Europe. In this role, Hart traveled to London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Geneva for meetings, trainings, and info-sessions with key members and potential members, staff, consultants, and other stakeholders. Hart collaborated on FCAA outreach, communications, meeting development, and stakeholder engagement for the June 2014 Geneva conference “Sustaining HIV and Human Rights Programming in Challenging Contexts: Continued Criminalization of Key Populations and Shrinking Resources,” co-hosted by FCAA and UNAIDS. Hart also attended the International Human Rights Funder’s Group (IHRFG) 2014 San Francisco Conference as a representative of FCAA.

Ezra Berkley Nepon, TLP Partner, received the 2014 Leeway Foundation Transformation Award, an unrestricted award given to women and trans* artists living in North America’s Delaware Valley region who create art for social change and demonstrate a long-term commitment to social change work. In March 2014, Nepon published a thought-provoking article in the Grassroots Fundraising Journal: “Emily Post-Capitalism and the Revolutionary Etiquette of Crowdfunding.”

2014 Highlights

Publication of Who Decides: How Participatory Grantmaking Benefits Donors, Communities and Movements

Click to download report. In April 2014, The Lafayette Practice released a new report analyzing and comparing the practices of eight premiere international Participatory Grantmaking Funds (PGF).

The funds included in this report are: Disability Rights Fund, FRIDA – Young Feminist Fund, GMT Initiative, HIV Young Leaders Fund, International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC) HIV Collaborative Fund, Red Umbrella Fund, Robert Carr Networks Fund, and UHAI – the East African Sexual Health and Rights Initiative.

For more information, read: “Paradigm Shift: Participatory Grantmaking Comes of Age”, by Matthew Hart for IHRFG.

Collaboration with ILGA-Europelogo

In April 2014, Matthew Hart facilitated a day long Fundraising Training Session focused on Individual Donations for ILGA-Europe staff and Board members.

riga_2014_largeAt the October 2014 ILGA-Europe Annual Summit in Riga, Latvia, “MOVEment: Leading Sustainable Change“:

  • Hart developed and delivered a double session on individual donor development, campaign management and NGO best business operations practice. These sessions were delivered to a standing-room-only group of 40 participants.
  • Hart developed and moderated the second plenary for the Summit: “Mobilizing Leadership.” Watch a video of this plenary here!
  • Hart also convened and facilitated a day-long donor stakeholder meeting with private philanthropic partners.

Prague Pride Fundraising Trainingprague full group

Designed, and coordinated by Prague Pride, Open Society Foundation, and The Lafayette Practice and held during Pride Week in Prague, August 13-15, 2014.

Beginning in May 2014, TLP worked to organize a three-day training for a pre-selected cohort of Open Society Foundations (OSF) grantees/LGBT organizations in the Eastern and Central Europe regions. The training centered on cultivation of domestic philanthropy with particular attention to recruiting individual private donors and generating corporate and local business support. Through tailored organizational analysis, key trainings, and strategic fundraising planning support, TLP aimed to support each organization to articulate their skills, weaknesses and opportunities, and build strategic capacity in new areas of fundraising and organizational development.

Nine groups were represented at the training: Accept of Bucharest, Romania; Estonian LGBT Association of Tallinn, Estonia; Hatter of Budapest, Hungary; KPH (Campaign Against Homophobia) of Warsaw, Poland; Lithuanian Gay League (LGL) of Vilnius, Lithuania; Mozaika – Association of LGBT and their friends of Riga, Latvia; Prague Pride and Proud of Prague, Czech Republic; and Zagreb Pride of Zagreb, Croatia.

 

Reaching the Moveable Middle: Counteracting the Attack on LGBTI and Reproductive Rights in Europe.

Designed and coordinated by The Lafayette Practice in consultation with Open Society Foundation, and held in Barcelona from September 28-30, 2014.

Reaching the Moveable Middle created a unique space, bringing together donors, activists, and NGOs. This meeting was the first of its kind, convening LGBTI activists, sexual health and reproductive rights (SHRR) activists, and faith communities to explore the creation of a shared framework for activities and strategy development. This stage one meeting was intended to set the groundwork for key areas of shared activities, strategy and knowledge development, and donor alignment. In total, sixty-nine participants gathered for three days. This included ten OSF staff, fourteen panelists, and thirty-eight general participants. In addition, seven donor representatives attended, from Mama Cash, Astraea, Arcus, Wellspring, and Sigrid Rausing Trust.