Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is an architect, activist, billionaire philanthropist and a leading funder of national and international LGBT organizations. Today's Out Spotlight is Jon Stryker.


Jon Lloyd Stryker was born in 1958, and raised along with his two sisters in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is the grandson of Homer Hartmen Stryker, founder of the medical supply company Stryker Corporation. His father, Lee died in an airplane crash in 1976. Stryker is an heir to the Stryker fortune and a major shareholder in Stryker Corporation, ahospital and surgical equipment manufacturer. In 2010, his net worth was estimated at $1.2 billion.

Stryker received his Bachelor's of Arts/Science from Kalamazoo College in 1982. He later served on the college's Board of Trustees and was recipient of their 2010 Distinguished Service Award. He received his Master of Architecture from University of California at Berkeley.


In 2000, as he was coming out, he founded and solely funded the Arcus Foundation, the largest grantmaker for LGBT issues. The foundation’s mission also includes conservation of the great apes.

In addition to the foundation, Stryker has personally donated more than $247 million to LGBT causes and great ape conservation. He is also a founding board member of the Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya, Save the Chimps in Fort Pierce, Florida and the Greenleaf Trust in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Stryker is also a Platinum Council (US $50,000 and over annual contributions) donor to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund.

In 2010, the newly-discovered Myanmar Snub-nosed Monkey was named Rhinopithecus strykeri in his honor; the Arcus Foundation had supported the primate research teams who discovered the colobine, already known and hunted for food by natives in Northern Myanmar on the Maw River, during the course of a survey of Hoolock Gibbons.

In 2009, Kalamazoo College received a $200,000 planning grant from  Arcus Foundation to prepare for the establishment of a social justice leadership center.In January 2012, the College announced that they had received a $23 Million Grant from the Arcus Foundation to fund the now functioning Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. Visual artist Nan Goldin's work in Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography has been supported by the purchase and exhibition of silver dye bleach prints "through the generosity of" Stryker.

In August 2006, he formed the political action committee Coalition for Progress to fund election campaigns for Michigan Senate and Michigan House of Representatives district candidates, particularly from the Democratic Party. Stryker personally contributed $4.7 million while sister Pat contributed $500,000 by November 2006. In the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial election, Jennifer Granholm was re-elected as Governor of Michigan over Republican opponent Dick DeVos, the subject of advertising paid for by the Coalition In early August 2012, Stryker donated $325,000 to the group, Freedom to Marry Minnesota, which is working to defeat a referendum that would place a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in Minnesota.

Since 2004, he has been a Global Philanthropists Circle Member. In 2008, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force awarded Stryker the Creating Change Award.

 In 2011, he was listed among The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s top 50 donors. The following year, Forbes named him one of the “400 Richest People in America.”

 Stryker is divorced and has two children.

I don't like the term "reframing." I see LGBT rights as part of the spectrum of human rights -- the freedom to define your relationships, the freedom to define yourself and how you present yourself to the world. I think those are basic freedoms. When I talk to people about these issues, they often don't realize what the day-to-day reality is like for gay men and lesbians in many parts of the world. People don't realize that there is just one country in Africa where homosexuality is protected by the constitution. They don't know that there are seven countries in the world where homosexuality is punishable by death. When people hear those facts, it becomes much easier to see the connections between human rights and LGBT rights.

 “It’s about supporting people who are trying to live in peace as openly gay or lesbian or transgender people.”