San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ Community Needs Assessment 2018 About Horizons Foundation Horizons Foundation is a community foundation rooted in and dedicated to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community, and we exist to: • Mobilize and increase resources to the LGBTQ movement and organizations that secure the rights, meet the needs, and celebrate the lives of LGBTQ people • Empower individual donors and promote giving as an integral part of a healthy, compassionate community • Steward a permanently endowed fund through which donors can make legacy gifts to ensure our community’s capacity to meet the future needs of LGBTQ people About Learning for Action JT Taylor, Allison Sponseller, Irene Farnsworth, and Jessica Xiomara García of Learning for Action wrote this report. Additional support was providing by Meg Boatwright, Amy Fourrier, and Grace Lee. These authors designed and conducted the needs assessment in close partnership with Roger Doughty and Francisco Buchting of Horizons Foundation, whose commitment to lifting up the needs of our diverse LGBTQ community made this work possible. Established in 2000 and based in San Francisco, Learning for Action provides highly customized research, strategy, capacity building, and evaluation services that enhance the impact and sustainability of social sector organizations across the U.S. and beyond. LFA’s technical expertise and community-based experience ensure that the insights and information we deliver to nonprofits, foundations, and public agencies can be put directly into action. In the consulting process, we build organizational capacity, not dependence. We engage deeply with organizations as partners, facilitating processes to draw on strengths, while also providing expert guidance. LFA’s high quality services are accessible to the full spectrum of social sector organizations, from grassroots community-based efforts to large-scale national and international foundations and initiatives. How to Cite this Report Horizons Foundation (2018). San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ Community Needs Assessment. San Francisco, CA. Retrieved from https://horizonsfoundation.org. Bay Area LGBTQ Needs Assessment | 2018 | 2 Foreword from Horizons Foundation Nearly half a million lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals live in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. LGBTQ people are found in every community and in every demographic group. Understanding the needs of this diverse community has been at the heart of Horizons Foundation’s mission since our founding in 1980. As the first community foundation dedicated to LGBTQ causes, Horizons has provided nearly $40 million in grants to organizations that secure the rights, meet the needs, and celebrate the lives of LGBTQ people. Because the Bay Area has a worldwide reputation as a welcoming place, it might be assumed that LGBTQ people here are, put simply, doing fine. And it is true that many in our community are thriving. At the same time, many in the Bay Area’s broad and diverse LGBTQ community face significant obstacles to participating fully and equally in society and to accessing programs and services to meet fundamental needs. Indications of those needs permeate the scores of applications for grant support that come to Horizons Foundation each year. Why this Assessment? Why Now? There has been no systematic effort to assess a wide range of needs among LGBTQ people in the Bay Area in 23 years when Horizons Foundation first conducted such a study. The world has changed considerably since 1995. Because of the importance of knowing the community’s needs – especially as described by diverse LGBTQ people themselves – Horizons commissioned a needs assessment and retained the highly regarded firm Learning for Action to lead the project. Following more than a year of intensive research, compilation, and analysis, Horizons is proud to share this assessment. It testifies to a wide variety of needs among LGBTQ people in the Bay Area, ranging from mental health and medical services to civic engagement and community connection. The assessment also analyzes who in the community is most affected by certain key issues – and the patterns the data reveal. This needs assessment has many strengths and contains critical insights for nonprofit leaders, activists, donors, and foundation and corporate funders. At the same time, Horizons wants to be transparent about its limitations, some of which are discussed in the first section of the report. Bay Area LGBTQ Needs Assessment | 2018 | 3 Foreword from Horizons Foundation, continued Implications and Call to Action Horizons intends for this report to serve several specific, action-oriented purposes, including: • For LGBTQ nonprofits: The assessment and analysis may contain information relevant to the issues and/or populations your work addresses. We hope it proves useful both for program development and for providing data to support your solicitations for needed funding support. • For LGBTQ donors: Horizons hopes that this report is informative for the thousands of individual LGBTQ people whose donations to the nonprofits serving the community make their impact possible. • For foundations: Especially given the low level of foundation funding for LGBTQ nonprofits in the Bay Area, Horizons intends for this report to be useful in understanding the richly diverse LGBTQ population – and this population’s diverse and significant needs. • For corporate funders: Corporate support for the LGBTQ community and its needs is important for many organizations and the thousands whom they advocate for and serve. As with foundations, corporate partners of the LGBTQ community can use this report to inform their funding strategies and decisions. Executing such an ambitious LGBTQ needs assessment plan would not have been possible without working in partnership with LGBTQ nonprofit representatives that served on the Needs Assessment Advisory Committee and with all of our nonprofit partner organizations which helped disseminate the survey and recruit participants across the nine-county Bay Area. Horizons is also grateful for the dedication and skill that the team at Learning for Action brought to their work in leading this project. Horizons Foundation envisions a world in which all LGBTQ people live lives of pride, dignity, justice, and joy. The foundation’s board and staff sincerely hope that the findings of this needs assessment, the conversations it spurs, and the actions it inspires, will bring that world closer to reality for every member of the community that Horizons exists to serve. Sincerely, Roger Doughty Francisco O. Buchting President Vice President of Grants and Programs Bay Area LGBTQ Needs Assessment | 2018 | 4 Table of Contents page page page 6 10 16 Executive Summary Introduction Context page page page 21 84 98 LGBTQ Community Priorities for LGBTQ Appendices Survey Findings Communities: Perspectives from the Field Bay Area LGBTQ Needs Assessment | 2018 | 5 Executive Summary Key Findings Photo by Peter Hershey on Unsplash Executive Summary Introduction The 2017 San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ Community Needs Assessment was commissioned by Horizons Foundation (Horizons) and conducted by Learning for Action. This report, based on the findings from a survey of over 1,400 LGBTQ community members and nearly two dozen interviews with field experts, describes the needs and experiences of diverse LGBTQ community members across the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area in the topics of: basic needs and safety, including economic and housing security; medical and mental health care; drug and alcohol recovery; housing; legal assistance; community connection and social life; and civic engagement. Key Findings of the Needs Assessment The needs assessment surfaced the following key findings: A strong majority of respondents surveyed feel it LGBTQ community members seek economic stability, safety, and equal rights. When asked to is important to have access to share their biggest overall concerns right now as a member of the LGBTQ community, survey LGBTQ-specific services in respondents most commonly named: the high cost of living and limited affordable housing every area included in the opportunities in the Bay Area, being targets of violence and discrimination, and fears of losing survey, from health care and rights and access to services, including health care, in the current national political climate. Service behavioral health to drug and priorities include: employment opportunity programs; affordable and secure housing, particularly alcohol recovery services, legal for LGBTQ older adults; and increased access to high-quality and LGBTQ-competent health care. and housing services, and social There is continued need for funding and services to focus on community safety and and community spaces and economic safety net direct service provision for LGBTQ community members in the Bay events, though most do not Area. LGBTQ community members across all Bay Area counties, income and education levels, have access to LGBTQ-focused racial identities, sexual orientations, gender identities, and ages report feeling unsafe in living their providers. A combination of daily lives; have had trouble meeting basic needs such as housing, food, and medicine in the past strategies to expand the 12 months; and have had unmet need for critical services such as health care, legal, and housing availability of LGBTQ-focused services or have had negative experiences getting such services in the past three years. direct