nine out of ten queer organizations on earth have lost funding, and four in ten may not survive it

via Washington Blade, LGBTQ Nation and GCN.

Skip the percentages for a second and start in Uganda.

There is an organization there that got queer refugees out. Not counselled them, not tweeted about them. Physically moved people who were about to be arrested or killed to somewhere they would not be. That program is gone. Emergency relocation, eliminated, because the money for it stopped.

That is one line in a report Outright International published on Thursday called Breaking Point: The Urgent Need to Invest in Global LGBTIQ Movements, and it is the one to remember when the numbers start.

the numbers, and who pulled out

Now the numbers. Outright surveyed 229 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer organizations across 94 countries, with 23 longer interviews across every region. Of those 229, 203 have had funding cut, suspended or withdrawn entirely since January 2025. That is 90 percent. Nearly half, 49 percent, lost more than half of their total budget. Three quarters lost more than a quarter of it. Forty percent say they are at severe or immediate risk of closing.

Three percent describe themselves as financially stable. Three.

Asked who pulled out, more than half of the groups pointed at a single government. USAID, PEPFAR, the State Department: the United States, which spent two decades making itself the load-bearing wall of queer civil society in places where local money was never going to exist, and then in early 2025 froze and cut foreign assistance across the board. Outright had already documented the first wave in a report called Defunding Freedom. This is what the second year looks like.

where the damage landed

The damage sorts itself in a way that should be read slowly. Groups in countries with weaker judicial systems were more than twice as likely to lose their funding. So the money left fastest from exactly the places where there is no court to go to, no press to call, no domestic donor to ask.

What the cuts actually took, in the report's own examples: IraQueer stopped running safety trainings for activists in Iraq. A West African intersex organization lost its office and its staff. A community center in Ecuador closed on February 1, 2026, after a decade. A Ukrainian advocacy group cut its specialist staff and consultation hours in the middle of a war. The Tonga Leitis Association scaled back HIV prevention. Shelters and safe houses have closed on four continents.

Ecuador is worth pausing on, because we wrote about it a fortnight ago when its National Assembly voted 118 to nothing to bar single gay people from adopting and to make supporting a trans child grounds for losing custody. That is the same country whose queer community center shut its doors in February. The law arrived after the safety net left. That is not a coincidence, that is a sequence.

The report's warning is the least dramatic sentence in it and the most alarming: networks, expertise and trust built over decades cannot easily be restored once they are lost. Money can come back in a budget cycle. The woman who knew which border guard to call does not.

what donors are being asked

Maria Sjödin, Outright's executive director, is asking donors to move now rather than wait to see who survives. Realistically most of the people reading this cannot fill a hole worth more than 125 million dollars a year.

What you can do is know that it happened, and say it out loud when somebody tells you the cuts were about waste. They were about a bus out of Kampala.