Tim Sweeney served on both the steering committee and then board of directors for Freedom to Marry from 2002 to 2013 and worked for both the Haas Jr. Fund and the Gill Foundation. Sweeney was born in 1954 in Billings, Montana, and raised in the nearby town of Laurel. Sweeney attended college at the University Montana and while at college and immediately afterwards engaged in environmental activism. He moved to San Francisco in 1977 and in 1978 was asked to join the “No on Prop 6” campaign by San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. By the early 1980s he was living in New York City and over the next two decades took leadership roles in Lambda Legal and Education Fund, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and Empire State Pride Agenda. Between 2001 and 2007, Sweeney worked with the Haas Jr. Fund in San Francisco before moving to the Gill Foundation in Colorado. In this interview, Sweeney describes his decades working on behalf of LGBT health, law, and civil rights. He discusses the process of establishing Freedom to Marry and the roles that the organization played throughout its term. Sweeney also details the LGBT rights movement from the perspective of someone who spent a decade and a half working in key foundations that funded organizational activities.
Details
Title
Tim Sweeney on Foundations and the Freedom to Marry Movement
Note
Sweeney, Tim. "Tim Sweeney on Foundations and the Freedom to Marry Movement." Interview by Martin Meeker in 2015. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017. Interview date(s) 2015
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