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In his first months in office, Trump unleashed a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives, including outlawing federally funded gender-affirming care and overseeing the National Park Service’s removal of trans and queer references from the Stonewall National Monuments website. The hostility of the Trump administration toward the queer communityand in particular, transgender individualshas created a fear felt both by LGBTQ+ individuals and the organizations that serve them. But that doesn’t mean complacency or resignation. Its frightening to all of us, Morgan Gwenwald, a photographer and coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, says. All the more reason to be visible, all the more reason to go out and support whoever and whatever needs support. Fast Company asked leaders at three New York City-based LGBTQ+ community spacesthe American LGBTQ+ Museum, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and the NYC LGBT Community Centerto share how these groups are responding to a challenging political moment through legal action, grassroots fundraising, and making the histories of queer people more visible. Ben Garcia, executive director of the American LGBTQ+ Museum Leaders at the American LGBTQ+ Museum, which is slated to open in October 2027 in a wing of the New York Historical Society, have spent the past four years fundraising in an increasingly hostile environment. These executive orders have made a lot of corporate philanthropy just take a beat, says the museums executive director, Ben Garcia, referring to Trumps directive terminating federal funding for DEI programming. Garcia had initially anticipated that about 10% of the museums budget would come from corporate partners. Now, he expects that no more than 3% of it will. Garcia has worked in museums for 25 years. Accepting this role was an opportunity to really think about a group of ancestors who died in many instances because of their identities as queer people [and] because of the ways in which governments didn’t tend to their needs, he says, referring to the AIDS epidemic. Under the Trump administration, that conviction takes on a renewed significance, he says, given efforts to ban gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people. The federal government is turning away from their care, their health, their survival, their safety, in ways that echo back to the 1980s, Garcia says. Despite financial uncertainties and an opening date that has been postponed more than oncethe museum was originally supposed to open in 2024Garcias team has raised $170 million through a combination of philanthropic, city, state, and federal donations (received prior to President Trumps inauguration). Staff are campaigning to bring in another $30 million to build out the space, design programming, and fund traveling exhibitions theyve been producing since 2021. Additionally, they plan to increase the number of archival works housed at the museum, including photographs of Pride protests and parades, clothing worn by drag and ballroom performers, and the stoles of queer religious leaderssome of whom were defrocked for their sexual orientation, Garcia notes. The museum began exploring this plan when the Trump administration started to defund and erase information from public archives, says Garcia. We will be collecting a lot more [than we had thought] and making sure that the physical evidencethe receipts for our historyare preserved in organizations that are private nonprofits [and] queer run,” Garcia says. “Right now, that’s the only place that we would be recommending someone keep their stuff.” Morgan Gwenwald, photographer and coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives At the Lesbian Herstory Archives, operations have never been confined by government funding or institutional bureaucracy. We don’t have to worry about, What will our board think if we take a banner out to this really rowdy protest or something? We are the board, says Gwenwald, who has been volunteering with the organization since 1979. We have freedom that way, but we have to be very dependent [on] our community because of that. Throughout the Park Slope, Brooklyn-based organizations 51-year historyor herstory, as members semi-jokingly call itthe LHA has relied solely on grassroots funding to chronicle the lived experiences of lesbians. Materials that the LHA accepts are intentionally broad as well: If you identify as a lesbian and youve made or owned something (including artwork, writing, or possessions), it has a home there. You can go back and look at, What was that likebeing terrified to go into a gay bar and circling the block in your car before you’ve got enough courage to go in? That’s there in the archives,” Gwenwald says. “It’s in someone’s diary. Those true stories and oral histories are really important because it’s the real thing. Gwenwald says the archives also serve as a reminder to young people that the queer community has been “pushed back into similar places” before, and what past acts of resistance have looked like. We work really hard to acknowledge the people who’ve come before, and what they’ve done, [and to] name their names, she says. You have to understand their stories as they were and understand that that is connected to where we are now. Carla Smith, CEO of The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center We were born during the HIV/AIDS epidemic . . . so [this moment] almost feels like were coming full circle to a certain degree, says Carla Smith, CEO of the NYC LGBT Community Center, which offers services including HIV/AIDS care, substance use treatment, records keeping, youth groups, and cultural programming. Smith, whose tenure began in February 2024, is the center’s third CEO since its opening in 1983, and is overseeing the organization through an unprecedented moment: The center is one of nine LGBTQ+ groups currently suing the federal government. Filed by Lambda Legal, the lawsuit challenges three of the Trump administrations executive orders, which assert the validity of only two genders and disregard the existence of transgender, nonbinary, and other genderqueer individuals. The suit also comes in response to funding cuts these organizations faced after their work was flagged as equity related, according to a Lambda Legal press release. We believe it was our responsibility to make sure that we took a stand against what we feel is an injustice,” Smith says, noting that the center has been active in protesting ther attempts to erase transgender and queer individuals from LGBTQ+ history, including from the Stonewall National Monument’s website. Smith says that the center is facing close to $3 million in federal budget cuts, which represents about 12% of its annual budget. The organization is working with longtime donors to explore potential scenarios and form contingency plans. Decreasing offerings, Smith says, is simply not an option. These are lifesaving services, she says. The alternative is death.
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Morgan Lombardi, Keurigs senior director of product management, believes pod coffee makers have become too big, too mechanical, and maybe even a little bit ugly. Weve seen that coffee makers, including our own, have started to feel more and more like a machine, she says. They are also getting increasingly bigger while kitchens are getting progressively smaller. Which is why Keurig is introducing the K-Mini Mate, a 4-inch-wide brewer that costs $79.99 and launches exclusively at Target starting June 29.After seven years watching consumer behavior at Keurig, Lombardi tells me she observed that people were starting to view their morning brew routine as an obligation rather than a moment of pleasure. Her team discovered that consumers wanted their morning coffee ritual to feel like this wonderful little momentrather than a mechanical click-CLACK! chore. The coffee maker needed to be gentler to the eye and to the touch, and it also needed to be much smaller. Both were hard challenges, she says, because the current puncturing mechanisms for Keurigs brewers are too unwieldy to allow for a subtler, smaller design.[Photo: Keurig]The space problem drives everythingKitchen real estate drives modern appliance design decisions. Nobodys kitchen is getting any bigger, Lombardi explains. Yet, coffee makers remain essential equipment to turn on human brains in the morning, and they need to be there 24/7not taken out of a cabinet. They require permanent positioning, she says, creating a design constraint that forces manufacturers to think smaller.The most significant technical challenge to achieve the smaller footprint involved redesigning what Keurig calls the puncture mechanism. Standard Keurig brewers use a mechanical crunching motion to pierce K-Cup pods; a big handle pushes down to move the array of needles that open holes in that pod. If you have ever used a Keurig machine, it feels a little like pushing down the handle to turn off the Death Star. The standard Keurig mechanism feels like you are crunching something inside, Lombardi says.[Photo: Keurig]To enable the smaller brewer size, the puncturing mechanism needed to be much shorter: The space between the brewer mechanism and the bottom of the brewer needed to be able to fit a travel mug [around 7 inches], she says.[Photo: Keurig]They managed to reengineer the mechanism and change its position, which allowed them to get rid of the crunching handle and turn it into a flat surface that matches the cylindrical shape of its front. The new mechanism doesnt give you the same hard resistance as the previous one, which allowed Keurig to use soft-spring open and closing. She thinks that this alone creates a feeling thats more human, making the act of making coffee more like a soft handshake and less like destroying coffee pods inside a plastic crunching machine.[Photo: Keurig]A new design languageThe resulting machine is much more attractive. The design language features softer radius curves compared with Keurigs standard angular aesthetic. The brewer uses rubberized touchpoints alongside ABS plastic construction to make it feel softer to the touch, too. A small rubberized tab on the top helps you to take the water deposit out, requiring just a finger to easily remove the top. The water reservoir also sits flat on counters without tipping over, like a water jar.[Photos: Keurig]The resultavailable in black, red, and greenis a machine that brews up to 12 ounces of coffee and is about 33% smaller than Keurigs previous smallest model. One that, perhaps more importantly, doesnt look like your great aunts brewer from yesteryear, but like a modern piece of design.The companys research revealed that younger consumers entering the coffee-maker market prioritize simplicity and visual appeal over advanced features. Generation Z buyers need coffee makers for college or first apartments, but they dont have strong preferences about brewing functionality.[Photo: Keurig]According to Lombardi, consumer response has been great during testing. From initial foam prototypes through in-home use studies, people fell in love with this productand theyre saying, you know, its small. I havent seen anything like this. Its just really cute. When can I have it?She also tells me that the K-Mini Mate represents the first product in what will become Keurigs new visual brand language across its entire lineup. Keurig updates its visual brand language every five years to match shifting consumer preferences, she points out. Future models will incorporate similar aesthetic principles while adding features like larger water tanks. So, thats definitely good news for Keurig fans everywhere.
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How often do you leave work thinking, Wow, that was fun! Once a week? Once a month? Never? If you arent having funreal funit may be time to rethink your work life, says Bree Groff, author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). The idea that work needed to be fun didnt hit home for Groff until her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2022. She took a leave of absence from her job at a New York-based transformation consulting firm to care for her and her father, who had Alzheimers disease. After her mother passed away, she went back to work part time with a new perspective. One of the things that became obvious while taking care of my parents is that at some point, well run out of Mondays, she says. They aren’t a renewable resource. So, what are we doing to our lives when we’re wishing away five out of seven days of every week? A common attitude is that work is called work for a reason; its something to get through to get a paycheck. The flip side is: Love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life. This phrase suggests that the solution to work being drudgery is that it should be your passion and your identity. That notion also didn’t sit right with Groff. Many of the leaders shed worked with were pouring themselves into their work, but they were also sacrificing their health, sleep, and relationships, hoping for a reward that would come someday in the future. It seemed to me that the answer was somewhere in the middle, Groff says. Every day that I spend at work comes out of the finite bank of days that I have on the planet. What would it take to have fun today? If youre not having fun, Groff offers two places to start. Micro Acts of Mischief Too often, people feel they need to be their most buttoned-up, professional, palatable versions of themselves at work. But once we put on a business mask, we stifle all of our vitality, play, and joy, Groff says. Instead, introduce micro acts of mischief into the day. These are moments of diversion to the work culture or routine. If you have to adhere to a dress code, for example, wear some ridiculous socks. Or add a joke or ridiculous font to a presentation deck. Or literally mix things up, she suggests. One day we rearranged the office furniture, pulling comfy chairs over, so we could all hang out a little bit better, Groff says. The facilities team wasnt pleased with us, but it felt a little mischievous, sneaky, and fun in a way that made our team chuckle. Micro Acts of Connections You can also cultivate fun through micro acts of connections, including camaraderie and self-expression. Groff recommends sending a coworker a direct message or email, expressing appreciation for something they did. You can also ask a colleague to grab coffee. Make it light, she says. The idea is to gain a sense of the people you’re working with, knowing a little bit about their lives outside of work. Where do they live? Do they have a pet? Its getting to know them as a human and not just about the work at hand. Also, look for places to show your personality by putting your own stamp on your work. This isn’t just for creative marketing professionals, Groff says. A barista at a coffee shop can make latte art. Or a project manager can make a brilliant project timeline. How can you put your stamp on your work? Connection and self-expression humanize the workplace, Groff says. We should like the people that we’re spending our days with. Sometimes, we’re spending more time with our colleagues than our families or significant others.” Are We Having Fun Yet? Groff says you can usually tell if you’re having fun, and you can always tell if you’re not. It’s almost childlike in its sensibility. I define fun as a sense of play, experimentation, and vitality. My metric for the day is: How many minutes have I spent laughing? Dont confuse fun-looking workplaces with fun work, Groff adds. Theres a difference between thinking of fun as icing on the work cake, or fun as being the cake itself, she says. If we look at fun as the icing, thats where Ping-Pong tables or happy hour get a bad rap. You cannot fill your days with Ping-Pong and happy hour, or nothing gets done. Id also argue that is a superficial sliver of fun. Having fun at work is using your skills in a way that makes you feel good because you contributed and made an impact on customers, clients, or other parts of the organization. While there is a business argument for having more fun at work, such as increased productivity and performance, the existential argument is much stronger. If I’m a manager, I don’t want to end my career thinking, I really extracted every last hour from that employee or I made them perform better for the business, Groff says. I want to make sure that these humans have made good use of their days on the planet. That they’ve gotten to contribute joyfully and profoundly.
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