What does it mean to have you and your team’s work recognised with this MBE?
I’m incredibly moved and pleased to receive an honour in the King’s first Birthday Honours list. It is also great to see GiveOut and LGBTQ+ rights recognised by the King during Pride Month. I am so proud of what we have achieved over five years, as you mentioned, we have granted £1.75 million to over 40 LGBTQ+ organisations, made possible by the GiveOut team and our supporters.
Launching and growing GiveOut has been such an incredible privilege and pleasure. Seeing the support and solidarity from our community and allies has been really rewarding and it is wonderful to know that with GiveOut we are creating a sustainable source of new funding for the global LGBTQ+ movement. That’s really the achievement I’m proudest of, and the MBE is a very meaningful recognition on top of that.
What was the process of founding GiveOut like?
Before founding GiveOut, I had been actively supporting LGBTQ+ charities for several years and was also a leader in BCG’s global Pride network. But sometime around 2015, I realised something was missing.
For those who wanted to support our communities in some of the hardest places to be LGBTQ+, there was no way to do it in an effective and efficient way, with good governance. I remember thinking, “There must be a way we can do this”.
Speaking with a range of international LGBTQ+ activists, I realised that there were so many incredible LGBTQ+ organisations to support. So, together with a group of friends and colleagues, we decided to push ahead with setting up GiveOut to grow the pie for the movement – that is to increase the resources available for LGBTQ+ activism around the world.
It certainly wasn’t easy. Plenty of people along the way told us it would be too hard for various reasons. But several others, in particular Wanja Muguongo, a leading Kenyan LGBTQ+ activist, Neville Gabriel of The Other Foundation in Southern Africa, and Amir Ashour, founder of IraQueer, guided and encouraged us. BCG was also hugely supportive and encouraged our work, and they even became our founding sponsor.
A pivotal point was finding Rupert Abbott to launch the organisation as our founding Executive Director. Our shared vision and spirit of partnership has been one of the real joys of the past few years – I really don’t think we’d be where we are today without his leadership alongside that of our board.