Stella Maxwell Philanthropy: The Model's Charitable Endeavors

Stella Maxwell has built her public advocacy almost entirely around LGBTQ+ youth support, with a secondary thread of sustainability work and a smaller mental-health portfolio running underneath. The discipline is unusual at her career tier. Most senior Angels have spread their causes more widely; Maxwell has concentrated, and that concentration is part of why the work has stayed credible.

This is a working profile of what she does and which organisations she works with.

The It Gets Better Project

The longest-running of Maxwell's partnerships is with the It Gets Better Project, the LGBTQ+ youth-support nonprofit that Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller founded in September 2010 in response to a wave of bullying-related suicides among gay teenagers in the United States. The organisation now runs in nineteen countries and has built one of the largest libraries of LGBTQ+ adult video testimony in existence, with over 70,000 user-submitted videos as of 2024.

Maxwell came out publicly as bisexual in 2015 around the time of her first Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, and her work with It Gets Better began the following year. She has appeared in their video campaigns, anchored fundraising events, and used her interview rotation to push the organisation's profile through fashion press that would not otherwise carry it. The work has been quiet rather than performative, which has helped its credibility.

The Trevor Project

The Trevor Project is the second pillar of her LGBTQ+ work. Founded in 1998 by James Lecesne, Peggy Rajski, and Randy Stone after the Academy Award-winning short film Trevor, the organisation now operates the largest LGBTQ+ youth crisis-intervention service in the United States. The TrevorLifeline phone service, the TrevorText messaging service, and the TrevorChat platform together handle hundreds of thousands of contacts per year, with TrevorSpace running as an affiliated online community for queer youth.

Maxwell has attended TrevorLIVE, the organisation's annual fundraising gala, in multiple years, and her broader campaign-and-press work has consistently directed traffic toward Trevor's crisis services. The combination of It Gets Better's longer-form support content and Trevor's crisis-intervention infrastructure is a sensible split, and her work threading both has been one of the more practical examples of celebrity LGBTQ+ advocacy.

Belfast Pride and the Northern Ireland connection

Maxwell was born in Brussels in May 1990 to Northern Irish parents and raised in Wellington, New Zealand and Belfast through her childhood and teenage years. She holds both British and New Zealand citizenship, and Belfast has remained her family base. Her work with Belfast Pride and the broader Northern Ireland LGBTQ+ community-rights infrastructure has been a regional version of the same advocacy work she does internationally with It Gets Better and the Trevor Project.

Northern Ireland has had a more complicated political relationship with LGBTQ+ rights than the rest of the United Kingdom, with same-sex marriage only becoming legal there in January 2020 after a Westminster intervention. Maxwell's Belfast Pride attendance and her support of the local community-rights organisations has continued through both the pre-2020 period when the legal framework was hostile and the post-2020 period when it was not. Belfast Pride itself draws around 60,000 attendees in a typical year, which is substantial relative to the city's population.

For the wider working profile, our Stella Maxwell signature runway era profile covers the parallel modeling career that the advocacy work sits alongside.

The Kristen Stewart years and queer visibility

Maxwell was in a public relationship with actress Kristen Stewart from late 2016 to late 2019, which was one of the more visible queer celebrity relationships of the late 2010s. The press coverage that the relationship attracted, and Stewart's own subsequent work on queer cinema including the 2020 holiday film Happiest Season and her 2024 directorial project, sat alongside Maxwell's organisational advocacy without overlapping with it directly.

The visibility itself was the work. Both women refused the standard celebrity tactic of treating their relationship as a private matter requiring no comment, and the coverage that resulted, particularly in markets where queer visibility was still contested, was useful to the broader campaigns that her organisational partners were running. The relationship ended in 2019, but the visibility piece of her public profile has remained.

Mental health and the secondary cause portfolio

Maxwell has supported mental-health work through partnerships with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the Mental Health America network at various points across the past decade. The work has not been at the scale of her LGBTQ+ commitments, but it sits naturally alongside them given the overlap between LGBTQ+ youth mental health and the broader mental-health crisis lines that the Trevor Project covers from the queer-specific end.

The sustainability thread of her public work has run through brand collaborations more than direct organisational support: Reformation, Stella McCartney, and Vestiaire Collective have all been part of her wardrobe and campaign rotation, and the public-engagement framework around those brands has overlapped with her broader advocacy positioning.

What the work tells you about her cohort

Among the 2015 Angel cohort, Maxwell's philanthropy is the most concentrated single-cause portfolio. Josephine Skriver has built her advocacy around the Family Equality Council and broader LGBTQ+ family-rights work, anchored by her own two queer parents. Behati Prinsloo has worked on Namibian conservation through the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Elsa Hosk has worked on sustainability and women's rights. Maxwell's near-total focus on LGBTQ+ youth support is the cleanest single-thread version of cohort advocacy on offer.

For the parallel advocacy work, our Josephine Skriver fashion campaigns profile, Behati Prinsloo philanthropy profile, and Elsa Hosk career and activism profile cover the comparable approaches across the same Angels class.

The shorter version is that Maxwell's advocacy work has the discipline her modeling career has occasionally been criticised for lacking. The concentration on LGBTQ+ youth support, anchored across It Gets Better, the Trevor Project, and Belfast Pride, has lasted a decade and has stayed credible because it has not tried to expand into causes she has no personal stake in. That alone places it among the more durable advocacy portfolios at her tier of the industry.