The Trans Justice Funding Project is a community-led funding initiative founded in 2012 to support grassroots, trans justice groups run by and for trans people in the United States, including U.S. territories. We make grants annually by bringing together a panel of six trans justice activists from around the country to carefully review every application we receive. We center the leadership of trans people organizing around their experiences with racism, economic injustice, transmisogyny, ableism, immigration, incarceration, and other intersecting oppressions. Every penny we raise goes to our grantees with no restrictions and no strings attached because we truly believe in trans leadership.

For us, community-led means trusting and supporting trans leadership. We keep our grant process simple and quick, so that groups can get back to their real work. We believe that a short application—and a wise and experienced activist panel to read it—is all it takes to make informed funding decisions. We give unrestricted funds because we think our grantees know best how to use that money. We love to learn from the leaders we support and to share their work far and wide, but we don’t have site visits and we don’t require any reporting. And each year we work hard to put together a geographically diverse, intergenerational, multi-ability, multi-racial panel of passionate new and established trans justice activists to make the grant decisions.

Over the last eight years, we’ve worked with 48 trans and non binary community grantmaking panelists and fellows, received 1425 applications, given away 1166 grants through our community-led process, and distributed more than $4.5 million. This work has been possible because hundreds of donors have joined us and because our communities have supported us in so many ways. Let’s continue to dream big and fund even more trans justice work in the coming years!