The Jewish LGBTQ Donor Network announced on March 28 the hiring of Shira Frank — an LGBTQ woman with strong Washington, D.C. area ties, significant fundraising experience and longstanding involvement in the LGBTQ community in D.C. — to be its new executive director as the Network looks to grow in scale.
Frank joins the Network — the largest singular mission to funnel fundraising and innovation into Jewish and LGBTQ spaces in the world — as she picks back up on LGBTQ involvement that was heavily important to her early 20s life in D.C.
“What we hope the Network can do is really till the soil and enable the garden to really grow,” Frank said. “We can evolve this landscape [Jewish LGBTQ spaces]. We can fund and fuel a lot more projects.”
The Network has worked to accomplish this goal of pushing more funding into these communities since it was founded in 2021 by a group of like-minded people. The founders were looking to explore the possibilities within philanthropic efforts in the Jewish LGBTQ community to provide a higher quality of life for LGBTQ Jews.
The Network launched its first series of pilot grants to Jewish LGBTQ causes in 2023, and its membership recently doubled, giving the organization a firm opportunity to push expansion, as it hopes to bridge the Jewish LGBTQ community across the world by connecting donors, providing education and other resources for LGBTQ Jews across various communities.
And Frank ended up being a perfect fit for the role, having raised more than $30 million while working for multiple companies over the past 20 years.
Frank also has plenty of experience in the Jewish community, having worked for Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School in D.C. for more than three years and J Street for seven years, where she worked on massive fundraising projects for both organizations.
“Shira’s tenacity, creativity, devotion and fundraising prowess are unrivaled. Her decades of experience within and outside the Jewish community, coupled with her strategic collaborations with academic, corporate and government partners, make her an ideal candidate to work with our network of diverse donors,” said Stuart Kurlander, co-founder of the Jewish LGBTQ Donor Network. (Kurlander is a member of the owners’ group of Mid-Atlantic Media, publisher of Washington Jewish Week.)
A return to the Jewish LGBTQ community is something that signals a full-circle moment for Frank, who was able to rekindle that passion in her life for Jewish LGBTQ spaces and activities, and is now able to have a large impact on improving the experiences of LGBTQ Jews around the world and in the D.C. community.
“When I was in my early 20s and in D.C., I was really involved in Jewish LGBTQ stuff as a volunteer, not professionally. And then I stopped being involved in Jewish gay things until now, about 10 years later,” Frank said.
Frank added that working in this space is important, because the LGBTQ Jewish community gets little to no philanthropic financial investments, which she says partially stems from the fact that they’re a “minority group within a minority group.”
Frank cited a study that found that only .1% of philanthropic dollars in the U.S. go to LGBTQ causes and said that it serves as an “insane disparity” from the total LGBTQ population in the U.S., not to mention the Jewish subset of that group.
And part of the way that Frank and the Network are trying to bridge the gap is by getting LGBTQ Jews involved in both areas of their identity and giving them an avenue to support and “find a gay way to be involved.”
“[It’s important to be] reconnecting, really harnessing the power of both cultures and communities, both Jewish and LGBTQ, and acknowledging that it’s huge,” Frank said.
Frank is also excited to be a part of the Network’s efforts to promote LGBTQ Jewish leaders and give them the tools they need to continue providing safe communities and create and fund programs — like some of the programs that Frank joined in D.C. that she says changed her life.
And this is a goal that Frank feels confident about being able to accomplish in her new role, as she says that there is a strong identity and spirit among LGBTQ Jews that pushes them to greater heights and lets them overcome adversity.
“I’ve hung out with people of all identities, but there is something unique that I’ve discovered in LGBTQ Jews, which is a certain tenacity, a certain generosity and a certain willingness to defy rules,” Frank said. “But not in a regular burn-the-house-down kind of way, but understanding how to run like water over rocks. We have some tools that we’ve kind of had to learn to survive.”
