About the Network

On May 1, 2018, a small collaborative of LGBTQ organizations, advocates, and researchers, released the first national LGBTQ anti-poverty agenda, Intersecting Injustice: A National Call to Action, Addressing LGBTQ Poverty and Economic Justice for All. This collaborative included Center for American Progress, Family Equality Council, National Center for LGBTQ Rights, National LGBTQ Task Force, Trans Women of Color Collective, The Vaid Group, Whitman-Walker Health and The Williams Institute.

This collaborative produced the report following a series of roundtable discussions with representatives of organizations engaged in anti-poverty work around the United States. Using information gathered in those convenings and collating existing data, the collaborative set out to create an agenda detailing the distinct issues facing low-income LGBTQ communities.

Following the release of the agenda, a group of local and national advocates from LGBTQ, anti-poverty, and anti-hunger organizations convened in Washington, DC in October of 2018 to establish The National LGBTQ Anti-Poverty Action Network (The Network). The Network, under coordination by the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, seeks to cultivate a national economic justice movement that fully includes LGBTQ communities.

By uniting the LGBTQ and anti-poverty movements, we tackle the unique challenges LGBTQ people in poverty in the United States face, while highlighting systemic economic injustice for all. Through advocacy, organizing, education, and mutual support, we work together as a member-based coalition of organizations and individuals for a future where no one is left behind and where everyone can be their authentic selves.

Since its founding, the Network has developed a fact sheet on LGBTQ poverty, a COVID-19 LGBTQ resource guide, a federal anti-poverty policy priority memo for the Biden Administration, coordinated an LGBTQ delegation for the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March on Washington, and hosted a congressional briefing to advance priorities in President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

In 2025, the Network formed a working group to oppose the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which makes the largest federal cuts to health care and food assistance in U.S. history. The working group continues to collaborate to educate the LGBTQ and HIV community about the federal cuts and how to mobilize against them, coordinate economic justice efforts among its members, and support local and state LGBTQ/HIV economic justice initiatives.