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In the wake of president Trump’s dismantling of USAID funding, Kaleidoscope Trust CEO Alex Farrow sits down with Hadley Stewart to discuss what this means for LGBTQ+ people across the world.
When I sit down to speak with Alex Farrow last month, it’s perhaps unsurprising that he feels a weight of responsibility on his shoulders. As the chief executive of Kaleidoscope Trust, a UK-based charity that fights for LGBTQ+ rights across the world, he puts into perspective the herculean task that he and his twenty-strong team face: a third of all countries globally still criminalise consensual same-sex relationships.
Having been at the head of the organisation since June last year, it’s a particularly rainy day in west London that stands out for him. It was January and Farrow was taking a break from a meeting in a hotel in Battersea. He looked out through the pelting rain at the city, he recalls, when suddenly something dawned on him: “Like, holy shit, this is on me now.”
The day in question was memorable for all working in Farrow’s field. President Donald Trump had just signed an executive order that called for a 90-day pause on all US foreign development assistance programmes, including those supporting LGBTQ+ people across the world. Farrow, along with members of the Commonwealth Equality Network, an organisation that brings together the leading LGBTQ+ activists and leaders from across the Commonwealth, gathered in the hotel to make sense of what was happening.
Once the world’s largest agency for foreign aid, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established in the 1960s to provide humanitarian aid programmes on behalf of the US government. A decision that sparked widespread condemnation of the Trump administration, the executive order, signed by the president just hours after he took office for the second time, put thousands of employees on administrative leave and derailed life-saving programmes across the globe. USAID has since shuttered and merged with the US Department of State.
The immediate consequences for LGBTQ+ programmes across the world were devastating. “We needed to take a break from our session, because many of those attending had to make their staff redundant,” says Farrow, adding that many organisations were reduced to “only one person and a laptop” as a result of the executive order. Amongst a moment of trauma, as Farrow puts it, came the realisation that Kaleidoscope Trust needed to step up to meet the challenge facing its partners across the world.
Farrow and his colleagues got to work, lobbying governments here in the UK and abroad to help fill a gap left by the USAID freeze – $42.8bn in international assistance is estimated to have been affected. Kaleidoscope Trust sought to understand the impact that the funding freeze was having on LGBTQ+ organisations and projects by surveying 140 partners and members of The Commonwealth Equality Network. The data collected from this survey was presented to ministers, as a means of articulating the ramifications of USAID cuts on the global LGBTQ+ movement. “This felt like the single shot that we had to bring people into this cause and to our movement, because we needed them now. We didn’t have time to wait,” says Farrow. “I think I felt that responsibility on behalf of all the other activists that we are working alongside.”
Having secured emergency funding from the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, Kaleidoscope Trust distributed over £600,000 across 29 organisations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Europe in under six weeks, with particular consideration given to organisations that were the most affected or at highest risk of collapsing. I ask Farrow how his charity went about gaining the support of the UK government so quickly. “I think we’re very lucky that we have an LGBT team in the foreign office that has a multi-year budget, and so that already makes it easier,” he replies. “Then there’s spending a lot of time on WhatsApp, speaking to people all the time, contacting officials and ministers, and getting them to recognise that this was really urgent.”
Farrow’s tenacity for LGBTQ+ activism is something that he tells me is driven by a sense of injustice, yet it was a young Farrow’s dream of acting that would be his first love. “From as young as I can remember, I just wanted to be an actor,” he shares, reflecting that his dream was fueled by both a love of being on stage, coupled with a yearning to be at the centre of attention.
Having studied acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, a prestigious drama school in London, he recalls a growing desire to understand other people. “I think the thing that really drew me to acting was that I was fascinated by people,” he says. “I was fascinated by what made people tick, why they did things, what was underneath the surface and what motivated them.” Ultimately, there was a sense of putting himself into other people’s shoes and bringing that to life on stage.
Acting was his first love, however, Farrow tells me that it was always in competition with politics. “I don’t mean elected politics or party politics,” he clarifies. “But government and change, and how the world works.” This love of politics saw him move into activism. In 2008, he started out in climate activism, often around climate change and explaining to people why climate change mattered to them and the world at large. “We focused a lot on how to tell stories as a way of changing people’s perspectives,” explains Farrow, who would later pursue a masters degree in organisational psychology as a means of further feeding his appetite for understanding how people and organisations change.
As for the acting, I ask Farrow if he is still acting now. “Oh no, not at all!” he laughs, adding that he gets enough use of his performing skills when it comes to giving speeches through his activism work. “I had a pretty narrow acting window,” he adds through a smile. Yet despite the short-lived career as an actor, Farrow reflects on the ties between his two loves. “It makes absolute sense this connection between acting and activism and government, because it’s all about others: how do you change stuff? How do you get things to be better and different? What do people need along the way to get them there?”
Prior to his current role as CEO of Kaleidoscope Trust, Farrow spent seven years at NCVO, an umbrella body for charities, voluntary organisations and community groups in England; he held the position of director of influencing and engagement prior to his departure from the organisation. No stranger to the international scene, before joining NCVO, Farrow spent five years working across the UN system and international agencies, where he supported governments to develop youth policies.
When it comes to working for an organisation that is dedicated to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ people across the globe, Farrow seems driven by his personal experiences as a queer person. “It was this injustice of our existence that other people feel they have a right to deny or to criminalise us, gives me a real sense of injustice,” he replies when I ask what motivates him to work in LGBTQ+ activism.
Farrow acknowledges the privileges he has as a queer person living in the UK, “I get to experience this queer life that is full of joy and full of love and full of community.” He believes that this further motivates him to help others living in countries where laws do not protect their freedoms, or where laws actively seek to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. “I get to experience what so many people are robbed of,” he says. “And this is particularly true of trans siblings in the UK right now, but essentially all of the identities that come under our family of LGBTI+ identities globally. There are people whose lives are criminalised, and if they’re not, they face just enormous levels of harassment and persecution.”
Alongside his personal motivations for helping to improve the lives of fellow LGBTQ+ people, Farrow also brings up the significance of being a British person when working on LGBTQ+ rights in the Commonwealth. “There is this sense of undoing an awful colonial legacy that we as a country, and of course, I’m talking about governments many, many years ago, but that we exported to the world,” he says, pointing out that half of the countries in the world that criminalise homosexuality do so because of this colonial legacy. “And that legacy just endures,” he adds.
It is his belief that as a country, Britain and our government has a responsibility to help undo the influence of colonialism on global LGBTQ+ rights. “Now, of course, some countries have really taken those laws and run with them and have made them far worse,” reasons Farrow. “But the genesis of that homophobia or transphobia or biphobia stems from us as a nation, and I think there’s a responsibility on us to do something about that.”
Having been in post for over a year and a half now, Farrow admits that things are changing when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights, but not always for the better. “It has become clearer to me over the last year, that the situation around us has just become so much worse,” he laments. There is a responsibility, he tells me, for him as the leader of Kaleidoscope Trust to look at the situation around him with real, hard honesty. “Because for all organisations fighting for change, we are not where we wanted to be.”
Whilst Farrow makes it clear that his organisation doesn’t “have all the answers” when it comes to progressing LGBTQ+ rights, one initiative that he is particularly proud of is Kaleidoscope Trust’s Global LGBTI+ Rights Commission. The international initiative is aimed at confronting the rollbacks in LGBTI+ rights faced by the community across the world, by uniting experts, activists and community voices to both analyse current threats to the progression of these rights, as well as charting a path forward. Farrow announced the launch of the initiative at the charity’s annual Pride Parliamentary Reception, which brought together diplomats, MPs, activists, and allies earlier this year.
This is a start, I tell Farrow, yet when it comes to the president of the United States sharing his views on the LGBTQ+ community, how much of a threat is Trump to the work Farrow and his colleagues are doing for our global community? “An enormous threat,” he replies. In addition to the wide-reaching consequences of the president’s executive order on USAID, Farrow says that he has been struck by how “callous” and “cruel” decisions have been on some of the specific services that have been cut as a result. “Take PrEP,” he says, bringing up the HIV-prevention drug, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis. “Although there was a kind of emergency waiver, the decision from the US government to say that women and children can continue to receive PrEP, but not men who have sex with men. Even though, of course, PrEP is such a lifesaver for our community.” He argues that this decision was “targeted against our community.”
Farrow is also troubled about how the Trump administration is treating trans people. “There is this desire essentially to erase identities,” he says, highlighting the removal of trans identities from government websites, data and the anti-trans legislation that has become synonymous with the current White House administration. “It begins to say these people don’t exist,” argues Farrow.
Given this mistreatment and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community from the Trump administration, I say, how much power does president Trump have when it comes to influencing foreign governments on LGBTQ+ rights? “Rightly or wrongly, the strength of the US and the way in which they wielded so much international development power, meant that they could, through foreign aid and trade negotiations, try to enforce at least a basic standard of human rights in countries,” he says. Whilst Farrow agrees that is not always a positive mechanism to incentivise governments to change legislation, for the LGBTQ+ community, he believes it allows for “basic human rights” for our community.
That being said, under the current administration, he worries that Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric may “embolden” governments to halt progress when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. At worst, he says, it may result in a rolling back of rights that would encourage governments to “expand their scope to criminalise our identities.”
When it comes to the future of activism, the notion of sustainability is playing on Farrow’s mind. He is concerned for activists working tirelessly in places where their identities are under constant attack, notwithstanding the anti-LGBTQ+ political undercurrent that seems to be amplifying. Burnout is something that he tells me he has spent “quite a lot of time” thinking about. As someone who describes themselves as being in it for the long haul, Farrow says that it is important for him to try to take a weekend off, meditate or go to a friend’s party. “It’s so easy to feel this huge amount of urgency, but also guilt,” he admits. As for who helps him stay on track? “I’m very lucky that I’ve also been with my boyfriend for 14 years. He’s just very good at telling me to put my laptop away and to eat… He’s tremendous.”
Alex Farrow is the chief executive of Kaleidoscope Trust, a UK-based international charity fighting for a future where LGBTI+ people everywhere can live free, safe and equal lives. Photography by Teofil Rewer.
