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Tim Sweeney

Tim Sweeney joined the Gill Foundation as executive director in October 2007, bringing three decades of leadership experience in the movement to advance equality for all people regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression. 

Tim was an early leader in the struggle to confront the AIDS epidemic, a national and state political organizer, and a successful foundation executive.  He continues to be in the forefront of the most significant issues affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.

Tim most recently worked with a progressive family foundation and succeeded in building their efforts into one of the nation’s largest funders of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement. As program director of the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund’s equality and justice and nonprofit leadership and governance programs, as well as head of gay and lesbian programs, Tim helped the heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune advance equality.  He worked to build national efforts to support the rights of lesbian and gay couples to civil marriage and provided support for organizations implementing a California law that safeguards the rights of LGBT students.

What Tim calls his “crucible” came during the early years of the AIDS epidemic when discrimination was rampant, fear was pervasive, and services were almost non-existent.  Tim served for five years as executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, successfully suing landlords in the nation’s first successful HIV discrimination case. Under his leadership, Lambda also successfully fought health insurance discrimination against people presumed to be at risk for AIDS.

From 1986 to 1993, Tim served as deputy director and then executive director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, helping to build the largest community-based HIV/AIDS service, prevention, and advocacy organization in the world. Under Tim’s leadership, the organization formed a national coalition to press Washington to pass antidiscrimination legislation. Working with allies, they secured passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Ryan White Care Act.

From his college days in his home state of Montana, Tim has also shown a knack for political organizing at the state level. After his years of AIDS work, he decided to return to state organizing, serving as the deputy executive director for programs of the Empire State Pride Agenda and Foundation. His leadership helped assure passage of New York State’s anti-hate crimes law.  Tim also realized that issues such as youth suicide prevention and alcoholism treatment in the LGBT community were of widespread concern. By organizing a statewide coalition, he helped secure more than $5,000,000 in state funding for LGBT health and human service organizations.

In moving to the Denver-based Gill Foundation, Tim is returning to his western roots. After growing up in Billings, Montana, he attended the University of Montana in Missoula and earned a BA with honors in European history. After college, he headed to San Francisco and began his career of putting his organizing and leadership skills to work for advancing equality.