Jon Stryker (b. 1958)

Namesake of: Myanmar snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri)

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- Philanthropist, president and founder of the Arcus Foundation, which supports LGBT rights and ape conservation

- Heir to Stryker Corporation medical equipment company fortune

- In 2021 Jon and his husband, Slobodan Randjelović, gave $15 million to the ACLU Foundation to focus on LGBTQ and HIV issues.

In less than a decade, Jon Stryker has quietly emerged as one of the leading global funders of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights. In 2000, Stryker founded the Arcus Foundation (www.arcusfoundation.org), whose mission is to achieve social justice that is inclusive of sexual orientation, gender identity and race, and to ensure conservation and respect of the great apes. Since 2000, Arcus has awarded grants totaling more than $122 million in these two program areas.

Interview with Stryker: "...The other half of Arcus' work focuses on great ape preservation. Apes and conservation are lifelong interests of mine. Around the same time I was getting involved with LGBT funding, I learned about an organization based in Florida called Save the Chimps, which was trying to rescue a group of chimps that had been "decommissioned" by the United States Air Force and who were going to be turned over to biomedical research labs... As I learned more, I realized that all the great apes were facing similar problems -- particularly chimps and orangutans from the entertainment and biomedical industries. I also found that there is almost no funding whatsoever for chimp sanctuaries, places where these individuals can live in a natural habitat after a lifetime of being subjected to medical testing and abuse. From there, I decided that if we were going to work on apes in captivity, we should also focus on conservation and apes and the natural habitat. That's how our great apes program started.

It's about compassion. Great apes are under huge threat. They are becoming extinct in the wild, and they are being used in the biomedical and entertainment industry then just being thrown away. They are infected with diseases and then warehoused. We don't use the language of animal rights -- it's more of a compassion and conservation language. That's one common ground -- the compassion side. Another connection is justice. In our work for human rights, we are among those trying to expand traditional ideas of social justice to include sexuality and gender. In our great ape work, we often see a link between economic development for people and ape conservation -- social justice for people can truly enable conservation."