Amber Barnes, executive director for the LGBT Center for Central Pennsylvania, stands outside the center in August 2025.
Jordan Wilkie / WITF News
Politics and economic uncertainty put Pa. LGBT centers at risk of closing
Federal funds, corporate donations, and individual giving all down, says LGBT Center of Central Pa. leader.
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Jordan Wilkie/WITF
Jordan Wilkie / WITF News
Amber Barnes, executive director for the LGBT Center for Central Pennsylvania, stands outside the center in August 2025.
After opening what it called a permanent location on Harrisburg’s Front Street in spring 2024, the LGBT Center of Central PA is struggling to stay afloat. Amber Barnes, the center’s executive director, said it has been a close call to make payroll in recent months.
The center and partner organization GLO Harrisburg are heavily reliant on federal grants, Barnes said, something she’s been trying to pivot away from since she took the job last year. But at the same time, corporate and individual donors are also pulling back, she said, both due to general economic uncertainty and to fear of political blowback for supporting organizations that serve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Resources offered by Barnes’ center include a food bank, sexual health education and resources, and an array of social programs for similarly aged participants, from teen groups to an “aging with pride” group for older adults. While she tries to find more money, Barnes and her board of directors put the center’s housing program on hold for the rest of the year.
“It feels more important now than even a year, or two years ago, that the LGBT center exist, and we are at definite peril,” Barnes said, and added that the center may not financially survive another year.
To cut costs, Barnes’ organization merged spaces with GLO Harrisburg in September. GLO offers services focused on teen and young adult LGBTQ+ people of color, especially transgender people. In losing its own space, GLO no longer offers showers for the housing insecure, though Barnes is working to add a shower to the LGBT Center’s building.
Despite the cost cutting, the organizations are running at a deficit, Barnes said. GLO reapplied for a $300,000 grant through the Office on Violence Against Women, part of the Department of Justice, but were notified they were not selected at the end of President Joe Biden’s term.
The center lost another $30,000 grant from the Family Health Council of Central PA, part of a federal network that provides funding for family planning and sexual health. The money was meant to support sexual health education in schools, but Barnes said no school in the current political environment was interested in having an LGBTQ+ center teach lessons that mentioned sexually transmitted infections and how to prevent them. Without meeting the grant requirements, it was not renewed, Barnes said.
Trump’s impact on funding
The day Donald Trump was sworn in as president a second time, he signed 26 executive orders. One of those was “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” in which he directed the executive branch to no longer fund organizations that “promote gender ideology.”
The next day, he signed another executive order directed at stripping federal funding from “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, again with language targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and especially transgender people and the organizations that serve them.
“Gender ideology extremism” and “biological truth,” terms used in Trump’s orders, represent a rhetorical strategy to dismiss transgender people as followers of a lifestyle or a chosen politics rather than expressing what medical and psychological associations say is an inherent identity. For that reason, nonpartisan, fact-based organizations like the Associated Press recommend against discussing transgender identity as an ideology, and research groups like the Williams Institute at UCLA describe the executive orders as part of ongoing attempts during Trump’s administrations to redefine and narrow the meaning of “sex.”
Citing President Donald Trump’s executive orders, Barnes said her center was preparing to lose another federal grant through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
But last week, Barnes learned SAMHSA renewed a $250,000 per year program to reduce substance misuse along with HIV and viral hepatitis transmission. It is part of a years-long grant scheduled to end in 2027.
As part of the annual grant renewal request, grantwriters asked Barnes to remove all references to LGBTQ+ people or services, she said. The programs are now described as serving “individuals,” without ever mentioning their sexual or gender identity. The funding was secured as a “passthrough” grant, which first goes to UPMC and then is redistributed to local partners like GLO.
“Our doors are open to everyone, but the fact that we couldn’t say that we were specifically here to serve the most vulnerable and marginalized under the LGBTQ rainbow feels really, really gross,” Barnes said.
The grant will help keep GLO’s services running, Barnes said, but the center still isn’t breaking even. Instead, the center is operating grant-to-grant and donation-to-donation to pay bills and keep staff, she said.
SAMHSA did not answer WITF’s questions about whether it adopted a general policy to block grants distributed to LGBTQ+ centers. The federal government shutdown began before the agency could respond to follow-up inquiries.
“If it was already this difficult in year one of this administration, what is the year two, three, four going to look like,” Barnes said.
Other LGBTQ+ Centers sue to keep funding, and free speech
The Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown joined a lawsuit in February to challenge sections of the executive orders cutting funding for gender and diversity programs. A federal judge in California granted Bradbury-Sullivan and its fellow plaintiffs a preliminary injunction in June, finding they were likely to win an argument that the orders violated the Constitution under “the First Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and the Separation of Powers.”
In his ruling, federal district court Judge Jon Steven Tigar wrote Trump’s executive orders force LGBTQ+ centers to choose between their “constitutional rights and their continued existence,” and said Trump’s “funding provisions reflect an effort to censor constitutionally protected speech and services promoting DEI and recognizing the existence of transgender individuals.”
The win restored or preserved $6.2 million in funding to the nine plaintiff organizations while the case is appealed and possibly until it concludes. The Trump administration appealed the injunction, but it remains in place as the case proceeds. Krista Brown-Ly, executive director for the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, said she could not comment on the ongoing litigation.
For their part, government lawyers argued the president “is permitted to have policy positions” and to “align government funding and enforcement strategies with those policy priorities to the extent permitted by law.” They also said Tigar made several errors in his ruling, including overstepping his authority.
Fewer donations, and hoping for state support
Financial struggles are part of a national trend for LGBTQ+ centers and for nonprofits as a whole, according to Denise Spivak, who leads CenterLink, which networks services and support for LGBTQ+ centers. She said the “convergence of funding disruptions” is more than a funding issue.
“Our LGBTQ+ communities are under an unprecedented attack by local, state, and federal legislators, and funding is just one way that they are lodging this hateful assault,” she wrote in an email. “LGBTQ+ centers provide essential services that safeguard basic human rights and empower people to live authentically. When funding disappears, access to life-changing—and sometimes life-saving—support vanishes as well.”
Spivak said LGBTQ+ centers nationwide are rethinking funding models. In Harrisburg, Barnes said there has been dropoff in both corporate gifts and individual donors, making a shift from relying on federal dollars more difficult.
The Hershey Company cut funding for the LGBT Center of Central PA from $15,000 to $2,500 without giving a reason and hasn’t responded to outreach from the center, Barnes said. Hershey did not reply to questions for this story.
UPMC has continued to support the center, Barnes said, and added the situation is complicated. The Women’s Law Project filed a complaint against the hospital chain with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission for its decision to end gender-affirming care to patients under 19. Barnes said Capital Blue Cross, Highmark and Malvern Behavioral Health have all also kept up support.
Barnes and other LGBTQ+ center leaders are hoping the state can help. Together, they lobbied state legislators to expand the money available that centers can apply for, such as funding public health or housing projects that serve LGBTQ+ people. Pennsylvania’s legislature is three months past the July 1 deadline to pass a budget, keeping Barnes waiting and hoping.
The state has helped LGBTQ+ centers in the past. In 2024, Pennsylvania provided at least $174,000 to four centers to help improve security. This year, the state’s Department of Homeland Security and state police teamed up with the federal Department of Homeland Security to offer three security training sessions for Pride event organizers.
But even if state funds help, states cannot fill the nonprofit budget gap left by federal funding pullbacks, said Sarah Saadian, who leads public policy and campaigns at the National Council of Nonprofits.
According to a budget tracker created by the Democratic staffs of the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the Trump administration has frozen, cancelled, or is fighting to block the release of $410 billion in funds across all sectors. Saadian said nonprofits frequently contract with the federal government or receive pass-through funding that first goes to states or large coordinating agencies.
“That puts enormous strain on state budgets, right, to pick up where the federal government has stepped out,” Saadian said.
Model dependent
Not every LGBTQ+ center is in a bad way. York’s Rainbow Rose center rents space in a church rather than having their own space, doesn’t provide direct services like housing programs or showers, and partners with local businesses for hosting events.
“Every center and every county needs something different,” said Christina Wingert, who leads Rainbow Rose.
Part of the reason their pared-back approach works in York, Wingert said, is they are able to refer people to other services that provide housing or run food banks open to LGBTQ+ people. Wingert said her center has a resource guide of vetted organizations that treat LGBTQ+ people with respect.
That’s not always the case in Harrisburg, Barnes said. The reason her center provides direct services is that some other social support groups in the area are religious or otherwise unwelcoming to LGBTQ+ people, Barnes said.
LGBTQ+ centers are streamlining their financial models and experimenting with new fundraising strategies, said Jason Landau Goodman, board president of the Pennsylvania Youth Congress Foundation, an advocacy organization that networks with LGBTQ+ centers across the state.
“LGBTQ communities have persisted through incredibly challenging times before in our nation and we will push through this moment,” Landau Goodman said.
But for now, the times are tough, he said. Then, he added, “We are tougher.”
