For the past 30 years, the staff at Keshet, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting LGBTQ Jews, has gotten used to receiving emergency calls from LGBTQ people around the country asking for assistance, whether it be in finding LGBTQ-inclusive Jewish communities and congregations, helping Jewish family members come out or reinterpreting challenging tractates of Jewish texts. 

About a year ago, however, families began calling about one topic in particular, the calls increasingly becoming more frequent and more frantic. 

“Even a year ago, before it was on a federal level, there were significantly escalating attacks against LGBTQ people in certain states — attacks that were particularly targeting trans kids and their access to health care,” Idit Klein, Keshet’s president and CEO, told eJP. “We at Keshet started hearing cases of families with trans kids that were seeking to relocate.”

Klein reached out to David Rosenn, a friend and the president of the Hebrew Free Loan Society in New York, to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a no-interest loan program to help families move. It was an unlikely partnership — the pair of organizations had never worked together before, and didn’t have much natural overlap in terms of organizational mission or work. 

The idea to work together was just hypothetical at first – a conversation with no concrete plans in place. Then in January 2025, President Donald Trump moved back into the White House.

On March 12, less than two months after Inauguration Day, Keshet and HFLS officially announced “Move to Thrive,” an interest-free loan of up to $10,000 for a trans person or a family with trans kids anywhere in the country that needs to relocate due to discrimination or lack of health-care access.

“From Inauguration Day on, we have received so many calls and emails and texts from trans people and from people with trans kids who suddenly feared not being able to access the health care that they know they need for themselves or their kids to stay alive. There were lots of panicked calls, particularly from parents,” Klein said. “David and I reconvened and quickly agreed, ‘We have to make this happen.’”

“In addition to really wanting to make sure that people have the financial resources to do this if they want to, we also wanted to signal that the Jewish community sees what’s going on, cares about this issue and wants to make concrete resources available to people,” Rosenn told eJP. 

They quickly got in touch with Jeff Schoenfeld to see if he could help raise seed capital for the program. Schoenfeld, a federation lay leader with decades of experience on the fundraising side of the Jewish nonprofit world, had also co-founded a group called the “Jewish LGBTQ Donor Network” in 2021. The network consists of about 80 members specifically interested in donating to causes at the “intersection of Jewish and LGBTQ,” as Schoenfeld described it to eJP. 

“The first phone call they made was to me, because they both knew about the network, and they thought, ‘what a logical funding partner for us for this initiative,’” said Schoenfeld. “It really validated why this concept of a donor network of folks who are specifically interested in that intersection of Jewish and LGBTQ needs to exist.”

In less than a month, Schoenfeld’s network raised $60,000 for the seed capital for the initiative, what he said was the shortest timeline he’s encountered so far in raising money through the network. Of that amount, $50,000 was designated for loan capital and $10,000 to offset administrative costs, split between Keshet and HFLS. The money will be used to help five initial applicants move and it will be used to demonstrate to other funders that the program is viable, Schoenfeld said. Rosenn added that they have a goal of raising another $250,000-$450,000 in loan capital, allowing the program to offer 30-50 loans of $10,000 each.

“I’m really proud of how quickly we were able to turn this around,” Schoenfeld said. “This is permanent capital for the Hebrew Free Loan Society in a loan fund specifically to help trans families. And as loans are repaid, new loans will be made. It’s permanent capital. It should be the gift that keeps on giving.”

In the two weeks after the announcement, the program has received nearly 200 inquiries from 38 different states as of Tuesday, Klein shared, noting that applicants do not need to be Jewish to qualify for a loan. The states with the highest number of applicants are Texas, Ohio, Indiana and Florida.

“The applicants have really been a mix of families with kids who are moving so that their kids can live safely and with access to the health care they need and that they have had access to and don’t want to be at risk of suddenly being cut off, and adults who are looking around and recognizing, ’it is not viable for me to continue to live here,’” Klein said. “Some have described it as a life preserver being tossed to them from the Jewish community.”

The way the program works is that Keshet will receive the initial inquiry from the person or family seeking to move states. After some basic preliminary vetting, Keshet will then refer that person to HFLS, where they will be able to apply for a loan up to $10,000 if they meet certain criteria, such as their ability to pay it back in a reasonable timeline – though at no interest. Once that loan is repaid, the program will then lend out that same money to the next family on the waiting list. 

“We want to see people using the money for some move-related expenses. So that could be a wide variety of things. It could be a plane ticket. It could be first month’s rent in the place that you’re moving to. It could be the cost of moving your stuff from one place to another. Any of those things would qualify,” Rosenn explained. “We are hoping it will be enough to make the difference for somebody to feel secure that the move is not going to create problems for them financially.”

Rosenn also noted another significant aspect of the program, which is that HFLS rarely, if ever, loans to beneficiaries outside New York State. Feeling the cause was too urgent and important, Rosenn proposed the board make an exception, and extend the loan to anyone in the country. 

“It’s not obvious that we would do this sort of thing, and it was therefore important to me that we figured out quickly how to make this loan program a reality,” he said. “This is an opportunity for Jewish organizations that have different areas of expertise and different reach to work together to send that message out that this is who the Jewish community is and this is what we do in response to challenges in our society. It’s a really important part of our work.”

“Who would expect Keshet and the Hebrew Free Loan Society to be doing something together, and who would expect the Hebrew Free Loan Society to be offering this fund for LGBTQ individuals and families?” Klein said. “For people to see that this legacy institution that has been around for over 100 years standing up and saying, ‘we’re going to take care of you, because that’s what the Jewish community does,’ is profoundly heartening at a time in which people really need that.”