CLGS

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) opened its doors in September 2000 with a generous start-up grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. Since then, the Center has increased its staff significantly, secured further fiscal resources and broadened the scope of its work from the relatively local to the truly national. By leveraging key resources and enlisting invaluable supporters, CLGS has already made an impact well beyond its actual size!

CLGS facilitates pioneering religious scholarship and innovative religious education for the sake of reclaiming religion itself, in all its various forms and expressions, as a voice for LGBT social justice. More than this, CLGS facilitates and promotes an understanding of the critical connections between LGBT religious issues and all the many other communities and groups on the social margins of American society. Working at the intersection of religion and sexuality demands a new vision of social justice as a seamless garment, a weaving together of the concerns that reach beyond "just" LGBT issues and into the realm of economics, race and ethnicity, culture, and gender. But CLGS cannot achieve this vision on its own. The Center needs your help.

Apart from the base support provided by Pacific School of Religion, CLGS currently relies almost entirely on foundation grants for operational funding. While the Center also enjoys a growing base of individual donors, and can expect to rely increasingly on those donors for support, both foundation funding and annual giving from individual donors can vary dramatically from year to year. Each year the Center must approach foundations and individual donors anew, and their ability to give depends on many diverse economic and societal factors. Fully endowing the Center will stabilize our funding base and ensure long-term sustainability for the Center's mission.

CLGS invites you to imagine a new kind of American dream and a renewed vision of religion's place in full human flourishing. Imagine clergy and religious leaders of all kinds, all across this country, rising up and with a single voice insisting on an end to discrimination of any kind and the full inclusion of LGBT people in every facet of our common life. Imagine the reintegration of spirituality and religious community into the lives of LGBT people and imagine how this reclamation would reshape the fabric of American public discourse and create spiritually vital families and communities committed to the work of equality, of civil rights, and of social justice for all.

CLGS invites you to do more than imagine all these things; it invites you to make a commitment to these visions by making a generous gift to the CLGS Endowment Fund. Your contribution can be directed toward the general operations of the Center, either through an unrestricted gift, or by endowing particular facets of the ongoing operations of the Center. Named endowment funds are also possible.

Please contact us today with your questions about the CLGS Endowment, or you can make a gift right away through the secure online system, or if you prefer, you can mail a check to us at:

CLGS
Pacific School of Religion
1798 Scenic Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94709