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Kate Kendell; Tim Gill and Scott Miller (right)
Kendell, the former executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, recognizes that it's a crucial time for the LGBTQ+ movement.
Kate Kendell, the new CEO of the Gill Foundation, which is one of the most prominent funders of LGBTQ+ causes, says the time is right for her to get back into the fight for queer equality.
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The foundation’s appointment of Kendell, the former executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, was announced Tuesday. Since leaving NCLR, she has been chief of staff at the California Endowment, which focuses on expanding health care and making it more affordable.
“I left the National Center for Lesbian Rights in 2018 thinking the LGBTQ movement was in pretty good shape,” having had many wins, she tells The Advocate. “I have watched with growing dismay to see some of those hard-won gains pushed back on, undermined, or in peril.”
Brad Clark, who had been CEO of the Denver-based Gill Foundation for 10 years, called her in November and told her he intended to step down in the spring.
“It was time to get back into it,” she says of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. “I can’t think of a better place to do it than with the Gill Foundation. It is a time for an all-hands-on-deck moment.”
Technology entrepreneur Tim Gill, the creator of Quark page design software, set up the foundation in 1994. Since then, it has invested more than $446 million in programs and nonprofit organizations around the nation. Its focuses are LGBTQ+ equality and creating a vibrant and rich Colorado. Grant recipients have included NCLR, GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, GLAAD, the GenderCool Project, PFLAG, GLSEN, many state-level LGBTQ+ groups, and many that worked for marriage equality.
The foundation was launched the same year Kendell joined NCLR, initially as legal director. “The Gill Foundation has had the most impact on NCLR as an institution and my leadership as executive director,” she says. Now it “seems like a full circle moment where I get to give back to Tim Gill and the foundation,” including the entire board and staff, she says. Gill and his husband, Scott Miller, who just finished a stint as ambassador to Switzerland, are cochairs of the board.
In a press release, Gill and Miller said, “Kate brings with her not only a remarkable legacy of LGBTQ advocacy, but a deep belief in the dignity and potential of every American — values at the heart of everything we do at the Gill Foundation.”
They expressed gratitude to Clark for his contributions to the LGBTQ+ movement and said Kendell will work side by side with him to assure a seamless transition. “The fight ahead is full of challenges,” Clark said in the release, “but I have every confidence in Kate and in Tim and Scott’s continued leadership, as well as in the tireless work of our movement’s litigators, organizers, and agitators, and the courage of our community and allies to carry us forward to a better future.”
Kendell has known all the previous CEOs of the foundation. “I am standing on their shoulders,” she says. “I feel an obligation not only to the movement but to all of them, including Tim and Scott.”
Kendell’s activism has roots in her upbringing as a Mormon in Utah (she left the church long ago). “When I came out, I was definitely afraid that I was going to lose my family and my community,” says Kendell, who identifies as lesbian or queer. But her family, especially her mother, embraced her, and she found what she calls “a new, vibrant community.”
“Now I knew anything was possible,” she says.
Kendell had always wanted to be a lawyer, so she went to law school, worked for a law firm for a time, and then joined the American Civil Liberties Union’s Utah affiliate as its first staff attorney.
“I never looked back,” she says, noting that working for civil rights has given her “the greatest possible career I could imagine.”
Something she appreciates about the Gill Foundation, she says, is that it works on shared strategies with the organizations it funds, important “in a time when every movement feels fractured.”
As CEO, she plans to a multipronged effort to promote the causes it supports, and the details will be worked out with the board and staff after she comes on board May 7. With transgender Americans particularly under attack, defending their rights is especially urgent, Kendell says. Gill has long worked to protect trans people’s health care, their right to serve in the military, and more. “This is all under threat and will be one of the key priorities going forward,” she says.
She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and once she joins Gill, she plans to split her time between there and Denver, along with trips around the nation to engage with people in the movement.
Family is important to her. She is in a relationship after having been married for over two decades, and she has two daughters and a son — Emily, 44; Julian, 28; and Ariana, 23. She was getting ready to make dinner for a couple of her offspring when she spoke with The Advocate Monday.
She applied for the CEO role largely because of her devout Mormon mother, who died long ago, Kendell says. “Her love for me transcended what I had been taught by my religion,” she says. Her mother could see the humanity in everyone, even those she had major differences with, something that’s often difficult today.
“I hope to honor my mom to bridge the divide,” Kendell says, “while unapologetically and relentlessly protecting the most vulnerable in our community.”
