From .org to .com

Remember Beyoncé in that photo after she won five Grammys for her debut solo album? That’s totally me right now. If you told me four years ago that Mossier would be a thriving organization making a positive impact for Queer people, I would have tripped on my stiletto.

Our organization started with the Mossier Foundation making their final grant after twenty years of funding grassroots LGBTQ causes. With this accelerant and Kevin Mossier’s legacy in my pocket, we had the resources and opportunity to be a part of a long legacy of uplifting LGBTQ people around the world—a world that is so dramatically different from six years ago.

IYKYK, I go big. In those first years, our programming was focused on large-scale events and episodic consulting. We connected LGBTQ topics to Fortune 500 businesses, and we invested more than $200,000 in LGBTQ people’s businesses all over the world. Our events were a turning point for businesses to take action on Queer-inclusive workplaces. While energized by our success, I started to see that we were merely fulfilling our mission, and I yearned for more. Even though the grantmaking and events parts of Mossier were successful, I wanted to make a more profound impact.

We were also encountering many of the institutional and bureaucratic roadblocks that non-profits face: Complicated governance through grant-making processes, restrictive criteria on funding, excessive reporting requirements, and, in our case, a general lack of philanthropic understanding (and dollars) committed to global LGBTQ causes. 

Then the pandemic happened. The 2020 election was the first time we got involved in a GOTV campaign to spark employee engagement, and we became acutely aware of the limitations of what we wished to do and say–an autonomy that was most important to our values. 

So, as of 2022, we’re a for-profit organization. Our global programs are transitioning to one of our long-time partners, the Organization for Refuge Asylum and Migration (ORAM), and we plan to share ongoing updates about this partnership with you.

As a for-profit organization, we’ll have the freedom to engage in political advocacy more deeply without  nonpartisan restrictions. Washington isn’t coming to rescue the Queers, so organizations need to level up their political advocacy and we’re going to be way more equipped to help them do so. We’ll be able to rely less upon grants and instead seek innovative investments to grow our team and bring training, education, and events to a larger scale. Most of all, we can create our own governance and accountability outside of the western, White-dominated ideas of what success looks like—the most appealing  change for me, really. 

Like Madonna, reinvention is Mossier’s past and future. Over the last six years, Mossier and I have evolved and invented, reinvented, repurposed, and rethought. That’s the norm, and I’m so incredibly humbled and proud of what our incredible partners have supported us in. The world is less scary with all of you, and I’ve never felt so good about the future as I do at this moment.