The Human Rights Campaign headquarters on the corner of 17th Street and Rhode Island Avenue in downtown Washington is something of a beacon. As the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, with a glowing Equality logo near the roof and a similarly styled flag flying above, there’s no building that more clearly announces its presence as a safe space. is unique in Washington, DC.
If you think of this mid-century office tower as a factory, the workers on its assembly line churn out legislative action, policy advocacy, community advocacy, and all the other activities you might associate with an iconic human rights organization. It is produced in However, these products are not just domestic products. HRC also has a thriving export business.
“HRC invests in a global alumni network of more than 200 LGBTQ+ leaders from more than 100 countries, convening spaces for global learning and strategy sharing, as well as sustained advocacy. “We are building deeper partnerships with alumni around the world for work opportunities, leveraging HRC’s connections with the U.S. government, multilateral institutions, and the private sector,” the promotional guidance reads. However, this is only a small part of HRC’s global efforts.
Just ask Andrea Gillespie, HRC’s Associate Director of Global Advocacy. She can easily dive into global grants, the LGBTQ rights symposiums she has attended as a representative for HRC, and the U.S. organizations she has worked with to guide America’s LGBTQ-related actions abroad. . And she has an impressive resume that shows she’s up to the task. Being named Out in National Security and New America’s Out Leader for 2023 isn’t too shabby. Then there’s the nod as an American Foreign Policy Next Generation Fellow. He is also a Penn Kemble Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. As with HRC’s global work, this is just the tip of the iceberg of Gillespie’s accolades.
So where did Gillespie get her start in international activism? Did she grow up in the shadow of the United Nations? Do you want to follow your parents’ career and spend your youth jet-setting around the globe?
“When friends come to my hometown, they say, ‘Do you live in a cornfield?'” Gillespie says. “Yes, it’s actually the Ohio Turnpike and the Cornfields. My graduating class was 112 and my high school was less than 500. Huron, Ohio. Have you ever heard of Cedar Point? I I grew up 15 minutes away from the best amusement park in the world, so I would die on that hill.”
Humble beginnings, to be sure. When it came to international travel, it was either a road trip to Canada or a Caribbean cruise with my grandparents. For adolescent Andrea, traveling might more likely mean getting into a car and visiting a presidential mansion or a Civil War battlefield somewhere in the Midwest. They were her father’s favorite.
Still, Gillespie was able to make the most of the opportunity in front of him. She expressed her athleticism in soccer and competitive dancing, but it was her mind that received the most intense training.
“I was a huge nerd,” Gillespie recalls with a self-deprecating sigh. “I loved reading. I still joke with my brother, ‘Yes, my name is still on the 8th grade Student of the Year’ plaque in middle school!” I graduated from high school as valedictorian. I took every honors class and every community college class I could take in high school. ”
Childhood “nerds” often grow into influential people as adults, so it’s no wonder Gillespie launched a highly successful career. But her presence on the global stage in LGBTQ advocacy is, in some ways, surprising. Rather, she says, it’s a career she’s “obsessed with.”
After studying Arabic along with political science, Near Eastern studies, and gender studies at the University of Michigan, she decided to study abroad in Egypt. However, hints of an impending coup caused her to reconsider her plans and head to Türkiye instead. She says that’s a good thing, because her college classmates who chose Egypt had to evacuate.
“One class really changed the trajectory of my life, and it was a class on immigration taught by a Turkish professor who worked with refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey,” she says. The professor told how he accepted his class. This tour takes you through Istanbul, a district where many immigrants live.
“At that moment, I knew I loved storytelling. Much human rights work relies on storytelling and connecting individuals to truly humanize the challenges that people around the world are experiencing. It’s about enabling connections.”
From there, she says, immigration and refugee issues became her new focus, to coaching and tutoring a group of refugee boys playing soccer in Lansing, Michigan. It was a lot of fun, but grad school was over and she needed a job. .
“If you had asked me five years ago if I would be a global LGBTQ advocate, I would have said ‘no.’ What are you talking about?” Gillespie insists. “But when I graduated from graduate school in 2018, President Trump was in power and had obviously completely destroyed the refugee resettlement program, so there weren’t a lot of jobs in refugee policy. But… I found an organization called American Jewish World Service and ended up working there as an advocacy coordinator.
“This was my first attempt to work on something broader than just refugee rights and refugee resettlement. I had been with AJWS for about three years; That’s where I fell in love with working on LGBTQ rights. They have a great partnership network of LGBTQ organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean, East and West Africa, and Southeast Asia.
“I traveled to Kenya with AJWS in 2020 to meet with Kenyan LGBTQ civil society leaders and discuss strategies for reuniting following the court’s disappointing decision on decriminalization. A wonderful journey That really solidified my desire to work in this field.”
Now, Gillespie, who identifies as bisexual, has never been more deeply entrenched in the world’s fight for LGBTQ equality. She explains that HRC’s role in that fight is two-fold.
First, she is the HRC’s point of contact and foreign policy lead, working regularly with members of Congress, Foreign Service officials, and the White House. Second, she runs HRC’s Global Alumni Network/Global Partnerships Program. This is an aspect of her work in which she works directly with advocacy colleagues around the world. A quick peek at HRC’s site reveals influences from Argentina to Zambia. That’s just in the latest subsidy cycle.
Gillespie has to spend a lot of time looking at all corners of the world, but in just a few months he will be focusing on what’s happening right here at home.
“WorldPride will be a great opportunity for us to reconnect with our alumni partners and new partners around the world.The challenges we see here in the United States are being experienced by others around the world. We will achieve that goal in 2026 by connecting our challenges and finding common ground between them and a common strategy to dismantle the system of anti-gender movements. “We are winning the battle against recession,” she says.
“In the long run, we will win because we demand that human rights be respected and protected. And I cannot stress this enough, if we work together and Because the advocates who are part of the global alumni network are amazing. They’re leading some of the world’s toughest challenges right now. They’re facing oppressive governments. They are facing hatred and violence in their communities, but they are not backing down.”
Indeed, it is a notable solace for advocates around the world that one of their strongest allies is doing everything in their power to further the fight, based out of the HRC Building in downtown Washington, D.C. It should be.
This profile is part of an exclusive metro weekly A series for WorldPride 2025 highlighting the global reach of DC-based organizations, activists, artists, and more.
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Source: Metro Weekly – www.metroweekly.com
