The National Equality Action Team (NEAT) builds on 20 years of grassroots work to empower lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people and their allies to take collective action across issues for Justice. We partner with issue leaders to educate the community beyond matters that only affect LGBTQ+ people (like non-discrimination), to include issues that also affect them (like reproductive rights), often disproportionately. We create and support opportunities to take action on these issues so that through NEAT, people and organizations everywhere are working together to call from home, knock on doors, receive training, and share experiences without traditional resource or geography limitations. At NEAT, we empower everyday LGBTQ+ people, their allies and community partners to make extraordinary change for Justice. And with your help, we're just getting started.
History of NEAT
In fall 2012, Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA) brought together 20 local, regional, and national organizations to support marriage campaigns in Maryland, Washington, Maine and Minnesota. Because of the success of this effort and the positive feedback from the local campaign partners, the coalition was rebranded as the National Equality Action Team (NEAT) and expanded to 50+ organizations that continued to host phone banks (in person and remote) and canvass weekends. When NEAT completed its last marriage action in 2014, the group had participated in 13 successful marriage campaigns (see Our Previous Campaigns) and added over 100,000 phone calls and thousands of door knocks to the totals of local campaigns.
In 2015, NEAT supported the effort to pass the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), its first non-marriage campaign. In 2016, as part of MEUSA ending operations, the NEAT program was transferred to Freedom for All Americans (FFAA) to join the effort to secure comprehensive LGBTQ+ non-discrimination protections nationwide. During that year NEAT continued to grow and began to focus on a wider ranger of issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community. In 2017 after tremendous success, NEAT became an independent organization dedicated to harnessing the unique power of LGBTQ+ people and their allies to take collective action for
Justice.