Borealis Philanthropy, the Font of Transgender Activism

Transgender activists are sexualizing children, and well-heeled mega-donors are bankrolling the project. Who will stop them?

If you haven’t heard of Borealis Philanthropy, you’re probably not a leftist mega-donor. Yet this little-known pass-through is one of the Left’s biggest channels for funding gay and transgender activism to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year, advancing the campaign to sexualize children.

Fringe No Longer

Borealis isn’t a foundation with an endowment. Instead, this Minnesota-based intermediary funnels grants from wealthy donors to far-left groups active in advocacy, pressure campaigns, and political organizing—$30 million in 2020 alone. It might be considered an extension of one of the Left’s oldest pass-through groups: NEO Philanthropy, where Borealis founder Margarita Shulman previously oversaw grants to immigration expansion groups. (Borealis is a substantial  donor to NEO, too.)

But if NEO mainly serves the center Left, Borealis caters to the far Left’s most fanatical, downright evil organizations pushing hypersexualized ideology in the name of “bodily sovereignty” and Marxist “collective liberation.” The group brags that it granted $36 million to “black-ed, trans and queer-led, disabled-led, and BIPOC-centered [black, indigenous, people of color] movements” in 2022 alone.

Like all things “intersectional,” these grants aren’t limited to sex. One Borealis grant recipient, Comfrey Films, “produces films by and far Black trans communities . . . [that display] gender euphoria, full embodiment, and world-building free from violence and policing” [emphasis added].

Other key Borealis grantees are Blueprint North Carolina, the “progressive” strategy hub for flipping the Tar Heel State blue; Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), long suspected of supporting violent Muslim movements and terror groups; and Alliance for Global Justice, a militant communist agitation organization aligned with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.

Borealis is a critical funder of the Movement for Black Lives, one of the top defund-the-police groups to emerge from Black Lives Matter. In 2021, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations passed $10 million through Borealis to the Movement for Black Lives to “build local Black community power” (code for getting out the vote). That’s on top of the $7 million Borealis pumped into it in 2020 from an unknown donor. It’s also worth pointing out that Borealis’ board includes a Movement for Black Lives senior official and self-described “Black liberationist,” Charles Long.

Radicalism on the Board

The rest of Borealis’ board reveals yet more extremism. Chairman Jennifer Ching leads the North Star Fund, which funds groups that aim to provide driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, push sex and gender fluidity in schools, and encourage transgenderism in the military. Garland Yates previously sat on the board for the ACORN voter registration spin-off Project Vote, which drove Democratic turnout in minority neighborhoods. Ebony Harper, another board member, is a Transgender Advisor for the state of California.

Alice Hom is a Soros Equality Fellow, paid by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations to pursue transgender “racial justice.” And ex-board member Tony Tapia once led grantmaking for the Gill Foundation, the largest funder to the campaign to legalize gay marriage.

Transgender Ideologues

Borealis runs the Fund for Trans Generations, a pooled fund “led by trans and nonbinary leaders of color” and bankrolled by many of the Left’s largest foundations, which use Borealis to pass through grants to far-left gay and transgender lobbying groups—some $10 million since 2016. Their objective is far from secret:

As a fund, one of our core values is to ‘trust trans leadership’ . . . . Funding trans futures requires larger monetary investments and a paradigm shift that centers trans communities of color needs, dreams, joy, and desires as part of our collective liberation [emphasis added]

In practice, that includes a “rapid response” grant program offered in February 2023 for “training to defeat anti-trans legislation [and] direct actions that confront transphobic legislation”—this from a tax-exempt foundation supposedly engaged in charity.

Another program aimed to funnel COVID-19 “response” grants to “trans-led organizations with a radical justice focus,” particular those run by “Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC),” for “organizing and advocacy.”

We’ve traced Borealis grants to far-left pressure groups such as Gender Justice League, Black Trans Nation, Third Wave Fund, Trans Faith, No Justice No Pride, Gender Benders, the Trans Queer Liberation Movement, and the Campaign for Southern Equality. (The names pretty much speak for themselves.)

We also know from a job description that Borealis runs its own organizing and advocacy campaigns: “Experience with and strong interest in trans-led, intersectional organizing and advocacy” is the second-highest qualification for a relatively junior program associate.

Big Money in Dark Shadows

So who’s paying for this madness? The usual suspects all bankroll Borealis: the Ford, Kellogg, Packard, MacArthur, Tides, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, as well as the Arabella “dark money” network, secretive Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

But there are two stand-outs among Borealis’ donors—the NoVo and Arcus Foundations, mainstays of the pro-abortion and gay advocacy camp.

NoVo is the personal philanthropy of Peter Buffett, son of investor Warren Buffett, who seeded the foundation in 2006 with a donation of $1 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock. NoVo is a prominent donor to Black Lives Matter, illegal immigration groups, and LGBT activists.

Arcus is controlled by Jon Stryker, heir to the Stryker medical device fortunate and brother to Patricia Stryker, herself a major Democratic Party donor who co-founded the influential Democracy Alliance. Arcus is perhaps the largest donor to gay and transgender causes worldwide, attempting to promote homosexuality in Latin America and Africa as well as in southern states.

In 2015, Arcus and NoVo ran a joint $20 million, five-year project (the “Global Trans Initiative”) to globalize transgender activism and normalize both sex-change operations as well as the sexualization of children. Mackenzie Scott, then married to Jeff Bezos, chipped in $2 million.

Mental Illness on Display

In this writer’s experience, most of the professional Left’s political campaigns come down to one of two things: Money or power (and often both). Transgender ideology is something altogether darker. It preys on our country’s broken, unstable, directionless youth, glorifying what men and women instinctively know to be shameful.

It finds its victims among the family-less who’ve been atomized by modern America’s hyper-individualism and self-centeredness, and offers them the illusion of “community,” as if anger and self-mutilation can fill the void left by absent or abusive parents.

The truth is much starker: Communities are built on families, which are established when God joins a man to his wife. There is no “community” built on sinful rebellion.

It’s also what inevitably draws ideologues to sexualize young children. Pedophilia is baked into this derangement and not a well-intentioned misadventure by transgender zealots. There’s simply no logic that says that a ten-year-old can “explore his sexuality,” but cannot have sex, too—no matter how much the Left pretends otherwise.

Until Americans reconcile with their God and cast off this satanism, there will be no peace in our land… or safety for our children.