# Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice Founded in **1977** in New York City by a multiracial collective of lesbian-feminist activists. Astraea is the **first multiracial lesbian-feminist foundation in the United States** and one of the few major American LGBTQ-focused grantmaking organizations that has continuously operated for nearly five decades. Its grantmaking focus is the LGBTQ-rights movements of the **Global South** — Astraea is the largest single U.S.-based funder of LGBTQ organizing in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe. ## Founding and Structure The founding collective explicitly built Astraea as a **multiracial, lesbian-led, intersectional organization** — a deliberate response to what the founders perceived as the white-feminist limits of organizations like NOW and the white-gay-male limits of the mainstream gay-rights organizations of the 1970s. The original collective included Katherine Acey (longtime executive director through 2011), Jewelle Gomez, and others who would become significant figures in lesbian-feminist American organizing. The organization is named for **Astraea** — the Greek goddess of justice — but the lowercase styling of the name signals the deliberate small-collective, anti-hierarchical politics of its founding. ## What Astraea Funds Astraea's grantmaking covers: - **U.S. domestic grants** — particularly to lesbian-led, trans-led, and women-of-color-led LGBTQ organizations, with a longstanding focus on small grassroots groups that larger funders (Ford, Gill, Arcus, Open Society) often overlook - **Global LGBTQI grants** — Astraea is one of the few American foundations whose primary grantmaking targets the Global South. Grantees over the past three decades have included organizations in Uganda, Kenya, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, India, and dozens of other countries facing severe anti-LGBTQ political and legal environments - **Movement infrastructure** — including media, research, leadership training, and emergency-response funding for LGBTQ activists facing immediate threats (the Astraea Global Rapid Response Fund disburses emergency grants to activists in crisis situations) ## Why It Matters Astraea fills a **distinctive niche** in American LGBTQ philanthropy: it is the lead funder for international LGBTQ work coming from a U.S. base, and it operates as an organizing partner (rather than a top-down grantmaker) with the movements it supports. The organization is particularly important in countries where domestic LGBTQ funding infrastructure does not exist and where international funding from U.S. sources is the primary means of survival for movement organizations. ## Place in the Vault Astraea sits at the **intersection of LGBTQ rights, feminist philanthropy, and global-solidarity organizing** — three threads that don't always intersect in American queer-political infrastructure. Its half-century continuous operation under multiracial-lesbian-led governance is unusual in American LGBTQ organizational history and represents one of the few sustained operational realizations of the intersectional principles theorized by figures like [[Audre Lorde]] and the [[Combahee River Collective]] in the 1970s. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Audre Lorde]]