What are Women’s Funds?
The past decade has seen the creation of a number of Women’s Funds created to address the need for ongoing support to women’s movements in their respective regions and communities. Women’s funds first and foremost raise the resources needed to sustain the work — but recognize that supporting organizations means more than dollars.
Funds from Hong Kong to Brazil, Mongolia to Mexico connect grassroots organizations working on similar issues, creating a stronger network of activists!
Beyond Financial Support, Women’s Funds:
- Participate in community, national, and/or international leadership;
- Collaborate efforts or networks;
- Serve as staff, board members, or advisors to other organizations, public commissions, or taskforces;
- Conduct research on the status of women and girls;
- Provide leadership on key community issues.
A Different Kind of Philanthropy:
- They have re-imagined philanthropy as a collaborative relationship of trusted equals, organized around core shared values;
- Involve donors at every giving level;
- Promote diversity in their staffing and decision-making structures;
- Are local grantmakers set up to mobilize human, financial and material resources for the communities they serve;
- Offer funders (such as yourself) an insight into complex grantmaking contexts, providing viable opportunities garnered from years of experience;
- Bring networks, experience, clarity, credibility and sustainability to the grantmaking experience.
Features and Characteristics of Women’s Funds:
- Grantmaking institutions established by women who are passionately committed to mobilizing resources to sustain women’s activism.
- Bring a refreshing value system to the field of philanthropy which promotes social justice, non-discrimination, and accountability;
- Create opportunities, provide access to resources and build the leadership capacities of women;
- Invest in the building of women’s movements, and in supporting all aspects of institutional and organizational development.
- Shape funding priorities by their grantee constituencies.
- Focus on grantmaking program/issues which women in their communities determined is a priority;
- Are closely linked to the communities they serve;
- Made up of board and staff members that include activists, donors, policy makers, academics, financial management experts, fundraisers, development practitioners and opinion leaders;
- Usually established as Public Foundations. This means that they have to look to the public for support;
- Very few Women’s Funds have endowments which would make them permanently sustainable;
- Those who do have endowments do not have the capital that can make them totally independent of additional sources of funding.
Excerpts taken from “Financing for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women”: The Critical Role of Autonomous Women’s Funds in Strengthening women’s movments, Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi
