Andrea Gillespie

Andrea Marie Gillespie (born 1945 in Massachusetts) is a founder of a philanthropic collective "100 Lesbians and Our Friends" with Dr. Diane A. Sabin. Raised in Massachusetts in a traditional Irish Catholic home, she became a nurse in 1962 at the height of the Vietnam War. She served in the U.S. Army nurses corps in Vietnam before returning home and moving to the West Coast. She was an activist in the lesbian feminist movement beginning in the 1970s and later become active in lesbian philanthropy. She worked with the San Francisco based "A Fund of Our Own" before it became a fund of "Horizons Foundation".

She retired from the Kaiser medical system after more than twenty years as a nurse anesthetist.

She founded "100 Lesbians and Our Friends" with Diane A. Sabin, a philanthropic collective in the mid-1990s. The group held regular meetings modeled after the pot-luck and CR groups of the 1970s, designed to re-educate women about the power of philanthropic giving. Believing that girls are mis-educated about their relationship to money from early youth, Gillespie urged them to rethink how they used their economic power and how they might support each other. She coined the name of the group from her frustration that: "It's easier to raise $1000 from 100 lesbians than $100 from a thousand lesbians."

The group raised over $200,000 specifically for lesbian organizations and projects in two years before disbanding. This followed becoming the target of disgruntled articles in a local free newspaper, the Bay Area Reporter, expressing the feeling of some transgendered people that they were marginalized.

She is a member of the advisory council of the Lesbian Health & Research Center at UCSF [http://www.lesbianhealthinfo.org/] and an activist in the San Diego area.