TurnOut: New Decade, New Mission, Jack Beck Returns
Dear all,
Last year was a wild year for everyone, TurnOut included. After leaving the organization I founded in February, I have returned to TurnOut as Executive Director.
In 2025, we find ourselves in a very different world than we did in 2015 when TurnOut was launched. In response, we have made a number of significant changes to our work - including updating our mission statement (see below) - in order to do the work that is most urgent now.
We believe the work ahead is the most important work TurnOut will ever do, and I want to tell you why.
Why I Left
Queer and trans people have never been able to rely on mainstream support to meet our needs, and our communities have built a parallel infrastructure of grassroots organizations that ensures we have what we need to survive. I started TurnOut 10 years ago to channel people-power to support the community-based organizations queer and trans people depend on.
Over the course of a decade, even as we built an incredible network of thousands of volunteers supporting hundreds of organizations, I watched as TurnOut and our grassroots partners ran into the same set of structural challenges over and over again.
The groups doing the most impactful work for the most marginalized communities were often the most misunderstood and neglected by traditional funding institutions and wealthy donors. Without funding for development staff, these groups also lacked the capacity to build communities of low- and mid-level donors through traditional outreach. Only 3% of LGBTQ+ adults have ever donated to an LGBTQ+ nonprofit, and the primary reason is that they’ve never been asked.
This is where the nonprofit industrial complex breaks down - those with the most power and wealth decide what gets funded and what does not.
Locked out of traditional nonprofit funding, many groups chose to operate with no money at all - opting instead to run all-volunteer organizations. But the groups that chose this path were often stymied by their own challenges. Disorganization, infighting, and siloing were preventing the collaboration and resource sharing essential for this model to work.
I felt our work at TurnOut could not advance until we found ways to address these challenges, and running TurnOut took all of my time and energy leaving little room for anything else. So I made the decision to leave TurnOut and try to find a way forward.
Why I Returned
After I left, I worked with activists in many different movement spaces, from racial justice and immigration to climate change and workers’ rights. To my surprise, I found that they are all facing the same structural challenges we are in the queer and trans movement.
It was clear to me that we needed to be working together at scale, with an eye to addressing the specific structural challenges faced by small-scale grassroots organizations. TurnOut had already built an infrastructure designed for exactly that, so when the Executive Director job opened again in May, I jumped at the chance to return.
Since then, we have had many board and staff discussions about what our work will look like moving forward, informed by our 10 years of experience doing this work and lessons from organizers in other movement spaces. We are applying these lessons to the radically different landscape we face now in 2025 compared to the year of our founding – 2015 – the end of the Obama era.
This Moment
When Trump won his first election in 2016, many of us looked to traditional institutions to save us. As he promised chaos and carnage, many felt that such destruction would surely be stopped by Democrats as a unified opposing party, or by journalists exposing lies and corruption, or by institutes of justice armed with truckloads of evidence plain for everyone to see.
Now, nearly 10 years later, we have watched as each of these institutions has failed. Trump has sailed into office with a unified Republican congress and conservative majority Supreme Court, all while making open promises of fascist leadership. Meanwhile, Democrats respond by openly wondering if their path forward lies in abandoning trans people, immigrants, and many, many others in order to save their seats.
Ultra-wealthy donors and corporate interests continue to exert their influence on both parties, and the whims of billionaires increasingly shape our society. Money and power concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, more and more of us find ourselves on the outside, just as queer and trans people have.
In this current environment, solutions will not come from the establishment. We believe the lessons learned by those outside the system are the best blueprints we have for action.
Grassroots mutual aid organizations present the most powerful counterforce to systems hamstrung by money and power, including the nonprofit industrial complex. These organizations place solidarity over charity, centering agency and decision-making of marginalized communities instead of wealthy foundations, all while creating a social safety net that works to address the root causes of community harm.
With this in mind, we are charting a new path forward. We are leveraging TurnOut’s infrastructure to strengthen the entire grassroots mutual aid infrastructure supporting communities on the outside–not just queer and trans people but anyone organizing for their own liberation–making common cause with those treated as collateral damage in a system that wasn’t designed to work for us.
A New Path Forward
No one will save us but us. This is why we're shifting from volunteerism to a broader lens on liberation work: less emphasis on volunteering, more emphasis on mutual aid and structural change. We also believe this work cannot be done in the queer and trans movement alone, and that intersectional movements must work together to achieve a future that works for us all.
For these reasons, we have chosen to update our mission statement. Formerly “Mobilizing communities to power queer and trans movements,” our mission is now “Powering intersectional movements for mutual aid and liberation”.
What does working together look like? Here is what our new work will focus on moving forward:
Intersectionality: While TurnOut is rooted in queer and trans organizing, history, and culture, we are actively reaching out to other movement leaders to collaborate and share resources. This work focuses on building coalitions with organizations supporting immigrants, BIPOC communities, people in prisons, low-income communities, and others facing systemic neglect and abuse.
Infrastructure Development: We are actively working to build grassroots infrastructure to support mutual aid and movement building. We are a founding member of the new SF Street Fair Coalition, which works to support community-based street fairs as mechanisms of community support and grassroots fundraising. We are also launching a shared staffing pilot program, aiming to provide a structure for multiple organizations to share highly qualified staffers at a cost that grassroots groups can afford.
Community-based Fundraising: We are partnering with Donor Organizer Hub and the SF Street Fair Coalition to create new channels of unrestricted funding for the grassroots organizations supporting the most vulnerable people in our communities, working to get funding where it’s needed most without relying exclusively on institutional funders or wealthy donors. This work aims to build a new raft of support for the radical work our communities need.
Mutual Aid Training: We are partnering with a number of highly experienced mutual aid organizations to offer an ongoing series of trainings on how to design and implement successful mutual aid projects, whether they are run by volunteers or paid staff. These groups include abolitionist organizers, racial justice organizers, legal aid organizers, and folks working in many other movements. We are collaborating to create a series of trainings to upskill our communities in working together effectively and achieving our goals successfully.
We want to be clear that this new approach represents an expansion of our work, not a redirection. We will continue to offer our longstanding services, including our newsletter, board match, volunteer management support, and peer-to-peer support for isolated LGBTQ+ elders.
What’s Next
We have spent much of last year laying the foundation to hit the ground running when we launched this new phase. We are very excited to announce that we have created a new version of our website designed to support this expansion of our work, which is currently live here. You can read more about our new work and opportunities to get involved there.
As we embark on this new chapter, we want to emphasize that we are not going to do everything perfectly (as if we ever did before). A principle of mutual aid is working together and learning from each other. Each of us has a piece of the blueprint, and we are putting our knowledge and experience together to chart a course forward–a path that will lead us to the new world we need.
This will be a new process of ongoing iterative co-creation, and we enthusiastically invite anyone who feels compelled to reach out and jump in. The people outside the system are now our best hope - and that means you and me and everyone we know. We cannot afford not to work together.
I created TurnOut ten years ago because queer and trans people could not rely on mainstream institutions, and we had found a way to organize for our survival in a world that did not care whether we lived or died. Our communities learned to raise money, we learned to build structures of care, and we learned how to work together effectively to protect the people we love. We have done this before, and I know we can do it again.
Thank you so much for being a part of this work as it continues to evolve. We are looking forward to working with you on the important work ahead!
Kindest regards,
Jack and the Team at TurnOut
