Our Power Together Artwork
Within our bodies live stories, dreams, and promises.
Our eyes manifest, our hands weave healing within our soul and land.
Unshakable in our belief, echoing with every heartbeat.
“ ‘Abante Babae’ (translation: Onward, Women) a phrase often used as a slogan during Women’s Month in the Philippines.”
“I wanted to represent intersectional feminism with three fierce and proud people, eyes turned to the future. They are reunited by an abstract form which evokes strength, heat and movement. We are a fierce, resilient and proud movement, eyes turned to the future, for a greater tomorrow.
Diversity is our strength, empathy is our shield, and equality is our goal.”
“Our Power Together embodies the beauty of collaboration, where human rights and gender equality flourish hand in hand. Inspired by the impactful work of Gender Funders CoLab, this illustration aims to encapsulate the ethos of the work being done and the pivotal role of collaboration in advancing human rights and promoting gender equality globally highlighting the diverse ways in which collaboration manifests to drive meaningful change.”
“I was inspired to create an illustration that highlighted the components of togetherness. How it is an individual, communal, spiritual and ecological symbiosis that thrives when all those aspects are flowing in harmony, thus allowing for the greatest power for change to emerge.”
“This illustration wishes to celebrate the power of transnational feminist movements that advocate through an intersectional lens to amplify the voices of marginalized communities and challenge systemic injustices. By depicting characters united in solidarity, it aims to convey the strength found in collective action towards social change, and to inspire viewers to join the ongoing struggle for equality and justice across borders.”
“In this artwork, I was trying to create a safe space, a safe working environment, and show how comfortable it is to work together. The distance between each person, that space between their stuff and themselves is to show that there is enough space for each woman at work and in this world.”
“Beyond illustrating women standing in solidarity and resistance, it also portrays the often-overlooked aspect of our collective grief experienced within systems designed against us. Amidst war and turmoil, the disproportionate impact on women is unmistakable. It’s a call to reject the normalization of our pain, urging us to validate and reclaim space for our fears, losses, and struggles. While hopefully finding room to continue our wavering resistance amidst adversity.”
“This piece is inspired by the women in my life who are the backbone of every liberation movement and who put into practice the world we want to create. When women come together, build together, uplift one another, and care for one another in community, that is true power.”
Building A Room (Our Power Together)
Somewhere in the world a woman is standing at her kitchen window reminding herself that what was planted in the earth can still one day bloom.
Perhaps she prays for rain, for peace, for the unseen grace of open air and light. It is easy to run out of words when you have spent a lifetime building small rooms in the space between the fire and the flood, each brick you lay down named for a person you never found a home in.
Somewhere in the world, a woman is building a room just big enough to hold her own heart.
Perhaps she fills the shelves with books, with poems, with letters to goddesses, to sisters, to strangers, to other selves.
To be able to come home to yourself, to all the selves you ever were and the selves you might still become is no small thing.
To plant a garden in a season of change and to believe that it may still bloom is no small thing.
Somewhere in the world, a woman is standing at her kitchen window, or sitting in her car, or waiting for the rain, or reading this poem.
Perhaps she has built herself a home, in the exact dimensions of her own heart.
And perhaps if we build, if we grow, if we reach, there will be shelter enough, home enough, power enough, together.
“This illustration celebrates the power and diversity of women and queer individuals, each contributing their strengths to a collective solidarity.
The backdrop is adorned with symbolic fruits and icons of feminism, emphasizing the global solidarity that encourages a shared humanitarian and hopeful worldview.
Together, we use the power within and with each other to challenge and overcome patriarchy.”
Laura Vergara, Colombia, Abya Yala
Within our bodies live stories, dreams, and promises. Our eyes manifest, our
hands weave healing within our soul and land.
Our Power Together Artwork
As part of our 10th Anniversary celebration, Gender Funders CoLab commissioned 10 artists from Malawi to Lebanon to Palestine for our anniversary theme: Our Power Together.
Within these pages you’ll find striking imagery from hand rendered illustrations to mixed media pieces, a beautiful commissioned poem, and the artists in their own words on their inspiration for their artwork.
Thank you to all of the artists who contributed their incredible talent to this report.
Cover Artwork: Lambi Chibambo
Building A Room (Our Power Together)
Somewhere in the world
a woman is standing at her kitchen window
reminding herself that
what was planted in the earth
can still one day bloom.
Perhaps she prays for rain,
for peace, for the unseen grace
of open air and light.
It is easy to run out of words
when you have spent a lifetime
building small rooms in the space between
the fire and the flood,
each brick you lay down
named for a person
you never found a home in.
Somewhere in the world,
a woman is building a room
just big enough to hold her own heart.
Perhaps she fills the shelves with
books, with poems, with letters
to goddesses, to sisters, to strangers,
to other selves.
To be able to come home to yourself,
to all the selves you ever were
and the selves you might still become
is no small thing.
To plant a garden in a season of change
and to believe that it may still
bloom is no small thing.
Somewhere in the world, a woman is standing
at her kitchen window, or sitting in her car,
or waiting for the rain, or reading this poem.
Perhaps she has built herself a home,
in the exact dimensions of her own heart.
And perhaps if we build, if we grow, if we reach,
there will be shelter enough, home enough
power enough, together.
A decade ago, a group of private foundation staff and leaders felt a keen need to coordinate and collaborate more closely to strengthen their work to advance gender justice. At the time, there simply were no spaces for private philanthropy to experiment and develop values-aligned practices for resourcing gender equality by funding feminist movements. These funders were already engaged in supporting gender justice work, and they knew that gender justice movements offer innovative and groundbreaking responses to the world’s most urgent challenges. They also knew that these movements are critically under-funded. They believed that building an intentional community of funders to learn, collaborate, and advocate together could contribute to leveraging more and better resources for gender justice movements around the world.
In 2014, they founded Gender Funders CoLab (initially known as Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights, or PAWHR), a funders’ network for sharing knowledge and practice and coordinating advocacy efforts in order to achieve greater collective impact. Since the beginning, CoLab has been committed to listening deeply to the field and being accountable to gender justice movements’ priorities. Regular consultations with feminist movements have shaped CoLab’s mission to leverage more and better resources for feminist and gender justice movements, especially in the Global South and East.
Leveraging more and better funding for gender justice movements
Over the course of a decade, CoLab has contributed significantly to bringing more and better money to gender justice movements globally. Advocacy with bilaterals – funders that have historically demonstrated reluctance to fund feminist movements directly – has been one important and successful area of engagement. In 2015, CoLab members coordinated their efforts to influence the Dutch government, contributing to the creation of the Leading from the South Fund; this fund is led by four Global South feminist funds, which initially received €42 million in 2017, and then €80 million in renewal funding in 2020. A few years later, in 2018, CoLab partnered in the Equality Fund consortium and contributed to its successful bid to secure $300 million CAD from the Canadian government in 2019 – the single largest investment ever by a government in global feminist movements.
Supporting collaborative resource mobilization efforts by feminist consortia – often seeking funding from bilateral and multilateral donors – is another important area of endeavor. In 2017, CoLab created a pooled fund to support Strategic Collaborations to Leverage Resources. Since 2017, the pooled fund has leveraged more than $132.6 million USD.
CoLab also played a role in creating the architecture of the Alliance for Feminist Movements, a multi-stakeholder initiative which emerged from the UN’s Generation Equality Forum. Launched in 2021, the purpose of the Alliance is to expand funding for feminist leadership and movements by bringing together a range of stakeholders, including governments, private philanthropy, women’s funds, and feminist civil society.
CoLab members have also unlocked new funding by supporting each other in internal leveraging efforts. One example is the feminist funder collaborative Fenomenal Funds. Four CoLab members – some with longer histories of support to women’s funds, and some newer to the work – collectively contributed $29 million to create Fenomenal Funds which made $22 million in grants to build the resilience of women’s funds. CoLab members also fund gender justice movements directly through their own programs. From 2014 through 2023, CoLab members moved at least $2.2 billion USD to women’s rights and gender equality work. Many of CoLab’s members say that the network’s existence has supported them to work within their institutions to maintain and increase funding levels in support of feminist and gender justice movements.
Finally, CoLab’s decade of groundbreaking work has been a catalyst for the emergence of other networks and platforms in the gender justice funding ecosystem. These new entities are deploying, and leveraging from others, far larger amounts of money than before. CoLab members are seated at almost every gender equity philanthropic table. Collectively, CoLab members have the power to shape the priorities and practices of these tables by directing them to move more and better money to feminist movements, especially those in the Global South and East.
Becoming a trusted resource for experimentation and innovation on gender equality
Since its inception, CoLab has offered members a vibrant space of solidarity, sharing, and peer support. Indeed, CoLab has become the go-to space for private philanthropy to experiment and innovate in their work for gender equality and also to learn how to practice values-aligned philanthropy.
Over the years, an array of learning initiatives – focused on values-aligned grantmaking and thematic areas such as racial justice, Indigenous rights, disability rights, and intersectionality – have contributed to building members’ knowledge, skills, and grantcraft. The network has worked closely with women’s funds and Prospera, the International Network of Women’s Funds — CoLab’s closest partners in the gender justice funding ecosystem — to deepen learning, sharpen analysis, and align and strengthen advocacy strategies. As an expression of its commitment to better quality funding and to working in partnership, CoLab collaborated with women’s funds to develop common application and report forms. This effort has streamlined administrative requirements, freed up women’s funds to devote greater resources to supporting feminist movements, and built mutual trust and accountability. CoLab exercises non-financial influence through increasing the use of its member-tested tools and processes in ways that are increasing the ease of directing funding toward feminist movement organizing.
Our path forward
There is much to celebrate in the network’s first decade, and, indeed, CoLab’s tenth anniversary is a chance to amplify the network’s achievements and vision. However, CoLab also recognizes that this is a critical period of rising authoritarianism, attacks on human rights, grievous threats to the health of people and planet, and increasing backlash and repression against women, trans, gender expansive, and intersex human rights defenders around the world. Feminist movements in the Global South and East remain dramatically under-resourced.
In short, there is much urgent work to do. To meet this moment, CoLab completed a new strategy to strengthen and deepen partnerships with gender justice movements around the world. The refreshed strategy holds fast to CoLab’s core focus on delivering more and better resources to feminist movements on the ground. The pooled fund will be re-oriented to prioritize funding to Global South and East organizations and movements. CoLab will expand and deepen the work to activate funders to support gender justice movements, particularly in under-resourced regions of the world, and to shift philanthropic practices. In facing the challenges ahead, CoLab members will continue to work together collectively, welcoming values-aligned donors to join the community and build our power together.
Keely Tongate, Annie Hillar
Co-Directors, Gender Funders CoLab
July 2024
Within our bodies live stories, dreams, and promises.
Our eyes manifest, our hands weave healing within our soul and land.
Unshakable in our belief, echoing with every heartbeat.
Gender Funders CoLab: A Timeline
2013
A group of foundations active in funding women’s rights and gender justice movements commissions a scoping study to explore the need for a new gender-focused funders’ network.
The study concludes that a network would be a timely and needed response to the lack of a gender-focused funder space. The foundations vote to create and resource a new funders’ group: Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights – PAWHR (renamed Gender Funders CoLab as of 2021).
2014
The nine original PAWHR/now CoLab members are: Channel Foundation, Ford Foundation, Foundation for a Just Society, NoVo Foundation, Oak Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Wallace Global Fund, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
The network establishes a steering committee and hires a Coordinator, the secretariat’s first staff member. Biannual membership meetings begin.
2015
The network initiates its first strategic planning process and completes its first mapping of member grantmaking. As part of the planning, the network seeks input from members’ grantees, and gender justice movements more broadly, about what is most important for the new network to achieve. The answer is clear: more and better resources for feminist movements, which has continued to guide CoLab’s vision.
Members begin to share strategies in monthly calls and coordinate funding for the 2016 AWID Forum.
CoLab sends an advocacy letter to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs raising concerns about its funding decisions, which favored Northern-based INGOs, in the FLOW 2 process. Individual CoLab members also contact the Dutch Ministry raising concerns about the lack of representation of feminist and Global South-based and -led organizations among those chosen to receive funding.
2016
CoLab continues advocacy with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, encouraging the government to fund constituency-led and Global South-based feminist organizations in order to address the roots of social injustice and create change that is deep and lasting.
CoLab finalizes its first strategic plan and shares it at the AWID Forum in Brazil; the network also co-organizes with Prospera, the International Network of Women’s Funds, a Day for Donors at the Forum.
The network brings particular focus to creating space for sharing information about funding trends, especially as they affect women’s funds, and for building and strengthening relationships with women’s funds directly.
2017
CoLab’s advocacy contributes to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ decision to fund the Leading from the South Fund, a €42 million fund managed by four Global South women’s funds (Africa Women’s Development Fund, Women’s Fund Asia, Fondo de Mujeres del Sur, AYNI Fund/International Indigenous Women’s Forum), recognizing the four funds as leaders in the field with expertise and the capacity to manage significant bilateral funding. (Funding for Leading from the South Fund is renewed for five years in 2020 with a commitment of €80 million.)
Members agree to fund an accompaniment initiative to support and strengthen the new Leading from the South Fund.
Two new members join the network: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The network launches the Strategic Collaborations for Leveraging Resources pooled fund.
2018
The network hires a second staff member and adopts a Co-Director model in the secretariat. CoLab undertakes a branding process and refreshes the strategic plan.
Members coordinate funding for MATCH International’s incubation of the Equality Fund and participate in the launch of the Equality Fund initiative to secure funding from the Canadian government.
The network begins to develop the common application and report forms for women’s funds as an initiative to make “better” money available.
2019
In a significant advocacy victory, the Equality Fund, of which CoLab is a consortium partner, wins the bid from the Canadian government, receiving a commitment of $300 million CAD.
David & Lucile Packard Foundation joins CoLab.
CoLab releases its first report: Movement Building and Philanthropy: Learning from Grantees’ Priorities and Recommendations for Funders. Drawing on survey results from 70 groups and funds supported by CoLab members, the report aims to spark dialogue on how foundations can responsibly, effectively, and meaningfully support movement building.
CoLab creates a “gender lens investing” series to support members in exploring mission-aligned, gender lens investments as another way to expand resources for gender justice movements.
2020
As a result of internal strategy changes, the NoVo Foundation leaves CoLab. The network coordinates advocacy efforts and engages with the Buffets around this decision. CoLab members also raise additional funding to support grantees that are affected by this shift in the funding ecosystem.
The COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on CoLab members’ priorities, programming, and travel. Many of the network’s planned activities in 2020 are postponed. CoLab participates in calls with other donor networks to discuss responses to the crisis. The Pooled Fund repurposed to meet the moment and address multiple pandemics, distributing $350,000 USD in grants.
CoLab co-hosts a funder briefing with peer networks to elevate Black Lives Matter and to call on funders to increase funding for Black-led social justice organizing. The network also contributes to strengthening collective analysis by supporting an online conversation with Black feminist activists to discuss the intersections between gender justice and racial justice, and how funders can support this movement moment.
The network begins a two-year pilot of the common application and report forms for women’s funds as an initiative to deliver “better” money.
2021
The network officially changes its name to Gender Funders CoLab. “CoLab” signals the objective of collaboration and also of functioning as a laboratory for learning and experimentation. “Gender funders” recognizes a shift in the field away from the binaries of women’s rights to a more expansive gender justice focus which explicitly names trans, gender-expansive, non-binary, and intersex people, all of whom are affected by discrimination and oppression rooted in patriarchal norms and values.
CoLab participates in co-organizing “Shimmering Solidarity: Global Rights Summit,” an online event over the course of three months, including over 50 sessions. Shimmering Solidarity focuses on grantmaker responses to the “anti-gender” movement and related global anti-rights agendas and offers an opportunity to build shared analysis and strategize towards multi-sectoral progressive philanthropic responses.
CoLab joins a multi-stakeholder planning group of private philanthropy, women’s funds, bilateral funders, and feminist civil society organizations to design and build the Alliance for Feminist Movements.
Members coordinate their crisis response funding in Afghanistan.
2022
CoLab completes a five-year programmatic retrospective; this deep learning process lifts up the importance for members of maintaining the relational community culture of the network, while also creating new programming that responds to CoLab’s role in the field.
Members coordinate their crisis response funding in Ukraine.
Alliance magazine posts a blog by CoLab member Katrin Wilde, Executive Director of the Channel Foundation, and Annie Hillar, Co-Director of Gender Funders CoLab, entitled What philanthropy can learn from social movements if we really listen.
2023
CoLab completes a strategy re-fresh that reiterates CoLab’s central purpose and commitment: ensuring that more and better funding reaches feminist and gender justice movements, especially in the Global South and East. This includes a re-orienting of the pooled fund to prioritize Global South and East organizations and movements.
CoLab offers a “Community Building Initiative: Conversations on Financial Resilience,” a three-part series designed collaboratively by women’s funds and private foundations to learn together about different types of long-term support that funders can offer beyond direct grants, such as funding for endowments, property purchases, and investments.
CoLab publishes the report A Feminist Approach to Common Applications & Reports: Lessons from the Gender Funders CoLab to share findings from the assessment of the common application and report forms, as well as the paper Mapping of the Historical and Emerging Field of Support and Organizing for Funding Feminist Movements in the Global South.
2024
Gender Funders CoLab celebrates its tenth anniversary!
At CSW in New York, CoLab hosts Our Power Together: an evening of Conversation & Celebration with a panel of feminists in philanthropy featuring Althea D. Anderson from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Cynthia Eyakuze from the Equality Fund, and Sarah Mukasa from the Pan-African Feminist Philanthropy Initiative, and moderated by journalist Nima Elbagir, to share insights and experiences related to philanthropy, pan-African feminism, gender justice, and much more.
In December, CoLab is planning its first in-person gathering since 2019 in Bangkok, after the AWID Forum. CoLab plans to reflect on and celebrate the network’s first decade and to look ahead as a community of gender justice funders committed to serving feminist movements around the world, particularly in the Global East and South.
“This illustration celebrates the power and diversity of women and queer
individuals,
each contributing their strengths to a collective solidarity.
The backdrop is adorned with symbolic fruits and icons of feminism, emphasizing
the
global solidarity that encourages a shared humanitarian and hopeful
worldview.
Together, we use the power within and with each other to challenge and overcome
patriarchy.”
Core Values
Gender Funders CoLab’s work is guided by eight core values:
In principle, we believe that these eight values can be expressed in seven core funding principles to which Gender Funders CoLab members aspire:
Accountability
We take seriously our responsibility to work as allies with grantees; to
share
information, to integrate grantees’ feedback and strengthen mechanisms of
support; and, to support each other and hold each other accountable to our
values as Gender Funders CoLab members.
Collaboration
We prioritize collaboration, recognizing that shared learning and strategy
development strengthens our individual and collective efforts.
Courage
We encourage one another to be ambitious, creative, and take risks.
Gender Justice & Equality
We encourage one another to be ambitious, creative, and take risks.
Humility
We recognize the power imbalances inherent in philanthropy and strive to
listen
and be responsive to the field we seek to serve.
Learning Culture
We seek to foster a culture of learning where there are no wrong answers and
where debate and productive disagreement are welcome.
Integrity
We aspire to the highest levels of transparency, trust, and mutual
accountability – with each other, and with our grantees.
Trust
We aspire to the highest levels of transparency, trust, and mutual
accountability – with each other, and with our grantees.
Funding Principles
How Members Fund
Core/general operating support funding
Core resources facilitate agility in the face of changing contexts and responsiveness to the lived realities faced by activists. They also provide stability so that an organization has resources for some of its essential infrastructure costs, including staff salaries and office expenses.
Multi-year funding
Multi-year resources often enable an organization to carry out movement building activities that have a longer horizon. Multi-year funding also reduces the administrative burden of applying for funding on a year-to-year basis from the same source.
Streamlined administrative requirements
Reduced administrative burdens free up an organization to focus on movement building activities and create systems that can facilitate women with different abilities to apply for funding, while promoting language diversity and access. For example, Gender Funders CoLab members can adopt the common application and report forms, or support the development of shared indicators. Members can accept other members’ narrative proposals and reports.
Funding that strengthens feminist organizations and movements
Dedicated capacity building support (in addition to core support) helps ensure long-term stability for grantee partners. This funding should be offered based on dialogue with grantee partners about their greatest needs.
What Members Fund
Funding women’s rights and gender justice organizations and movements
Robust feminist movements require the strength and sustainability of feminist organizations, and investment in women’s, girls’, and trans people’s leadership. Gender Funders CoLab members fund organizations that use a feminist analysis in their core activities and as a key strategy to achieving social change objectives. Gender Funders CoLab members also prioritize funding to communities most impacted by discrimination and oppression, and to Global South- and East-based organizations and movements.
Funding that reflects issues prioritized by women’s rights and gender justice organizations and movements
Grantmaking that is responsive to movement priorities helps achieve collective impact. Gender Funders CoLab members will participate in convenings and seek out learnings and information from grantees to ensure grantmaking strategies are informed by and accountable to movement priorities.
How Members Influence
More and better funding
In order to further strengthen, grow, and have long-term impact, we must work to increase the overall level of funding available for women, girls, and trans people. Members will seek to influence other donors (e.g. private and corporate foundations, bilaterals, individual donors) to provide more and better funding for women’s rights and gender justice organizations and movements.
As applicable, members will influence other portfolios within their own institutions and seek to increase funding for feminist organizations and movements within otherwise issue-based silos, such as funding for environmental justice, economic justice, labor rights, and LGBTQI rights.
“Beyond illustrating women standing in solidarity and resistance, it also portrays the often-overlooked aspect of our collective grief experienced within systems designed against us. Amidst war and turmoil, the disproportionate impact on women is unmistakable. It’s a call to reject the normalization of our pain, urging us to validate and reclaim space for our fears, losses, and struggles. While hopefully finding room to continue our wavering resistance amidst adversity.”
Introducing Gender Funders CoLab
Gender Funders CoLab mobilizes funders to share knowledge, deepen networks, and expand resources for gender justice movements. Together, the network supports a better-connected and better-resourced ecosystem of organizations dedicated to securing women’s human rights and gender justice.
Ten private foundations currently comprise the membership of Gender Funders CoLab: Channel Foundation, Ford Foundation, Foundation for a Justice Society, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Oak Foundation, Open Society Foundations, the David & Lucille Packard Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
In this section of the report, four of the members – Monica Aleman of Ford Foundation, Maitri Morarji of Foundation for a Just Society, Katharina Samara-Wickrama of Oak Foundation, and Manisha Mehta of Wellspring Philanthropic Fund – reflect on CoLab’s genesis and some of the key achievements and impact of the first ten years.
“I was inspired to create an illustration that highlighted the components of togetherness. How it is an individual, communal, spiritual and ecological symbiosis that thrives when all those aspects are flowing in harmony, thus allowing for the greatest power for change to emerge.”
Creating a learning space
When Gender Funders CoLab was taking shape, the intention was to create a space to facilitate learning for funders that were committed to resourcing feminist movements, says Mónica Aleman, the Ford Foundation’s International Program Director for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice. Feminist organizations have particular ways of operating, of developing programming coherency, and of approaching governance, according to Mónica. A group of funders that was already engaged in the field felt a need to learn together about opportunities, challenges, and good practices to effectively move money to feminist movements. The creation of CoLab responded to this need.
Building trust and learning together
“Over the years, CoLab has been really effective at creating a community of trust among funders working on gender justice. In this space, we feel a real sense of sisterhood. We have strengthened our relationships and learned together. This work has resulted in a high level of coordination among funders supporting the feminist movement,” says Mónica. “Previously, there was no space for learning about how money moves. In CoLab spaces, I’ve learned about donor-advised funds, impact investing, financial flows – all really useful in my work.”
Calls for “more and better funding”
CoLab’s advocacy voice has evolved over the years, and advocacy for resourcing has become another important area of work, says Mónica. “CoLab’s clear calls to action for more resourcing have been intentional and have led to key successes, like the Leading from the South Fund, the Equality Fund, and Fenomenal Funds. These initiatives have given us opportunities to co-create a vision and a set of strategies. I’d say that our collaborative work has led to more than half a billion dollars in new funding.”
“It’s powerful to show up together as a group,” she says. “When we go in as a group of ten or so foundations to speak with the Dutch government, or the Canadians, or the French, to say together ‘we want to understand how you are moving your development assistance budget,’ that is more powerful than if one of us goes in individually.”
Bringing greater focus to the Global South
“When Ford joined CoLab, we wanted to be sure that our global teams, and not just our US team, were involved. The focus on the Global South is important, and understanding intersectionality is an area where CoLab has grown. It’s important to continue to deepen this work and to prioritize funding for Afrodescendant people, or Indigenous people, or people with disabilities. Working with an intersectional lens allows groups to access funding beyond the gender portfolios and bring new resources to the table.”
Supporting internal advocacy
CoLab has also supported its members in their internal advocacy. Mónica: “I have used the example of other CoLab members to help me send a clear message to our leadership that other institutions are really committed to this work, and that Ford needs to sustain our program, to do better, and not to fall behind. It
also helps to ‘de-risk’ the investment because we are not doing it alone, especially in areas where it’s harder to show impact. Institutional philanthropy is operating from a place of fear right now. In such a moment, we must create space to come together; otherwise, we will lose ground in resourcing feminist movements. CoLab has modeled this way of working in community.
“This piece is inspired by the women in my life who are the backbone of every liberation movement and who put into practice the world we want to create. When women come together, build together, uplift one another, and care for one another in community, that is true power.”
Strengthening the work through connection
“Within Gender Funders CoLab, we have created a space for collaborating and leveraging within the gender justice funding ecosystem,” says Maitri Morarji, Vice President of Programs and Strategy at Foundation for a Just Society. “That was our goal when we first came together. Ten years ago, many of us funding women’s rights in private foundations knew we could strengthen our work if we connected with each other. We wanted to understand what our peers were doing and to support each other in advocacy within our own institutions.” During its first decade, CoLab has built an important space for private foundation staff to create community, leverage resources, and raise a collective advocacy voice, according to Maitri.
Building community
“Community-building, as a phrase, may not adequately capture how critical this piece is,” she notes. The work of building community goes beyond nurturing personal relationships. CoLab has created a space for members to share with each other how their own institutions work, how they implement their grantmaking values, and what and how they each fund. “This space for learning and collaboration sparks all kinds of ideas. We share our experiences with grantcraft and exchange tactical tools and know-how. We also get insights into how to complement what other funders are doing. The community has been an incredible catalyst.”
She notes that CoLab has also been a valuable space for professional development. Individuals in the network can think about shaping a career in the gender funding ecosystem, keeping experience and talent within the system and benefitting the gender justice organizations and movements that CoLab members support.
Leveraging new resources
Leveraging new resources for the field is another area of focus for CoLab. “Our work in CoLab has contributed to creating more modalities to get resources out, and that’s important,” reflects Maitri. “CoLab has helped members push broader gender justice agendas within their organizations. Fenomenal Funds, a funder collaborative created in 2020 to strengthen the resilience of women’s funds, is an example. Several members within the network were already providing funding and technical support to women’s funds, and that brought others to the table. In the end, CoLab members contributed $29 million USD to Fenomenal Funds, and $22 million went directly to women’s funds in grants and accompaniment. It is an important new resource for providing capacity support to women’s funds, and it shows the power of working together and raising a collective voice.”
“Another example of impact was our work to lobby the Dutch government after its FLOW 2 grants were announced. We realized that women-led, feminist, and Global Southled organizations had been passed over, and we quickly mobilized a coordinated, collective reaction that was responsive to what movements needed. Our advocacy contributed to the creation of the Leading from the South Fund, a fund managed by four women’s funds based in the Global South. To date, Leading from the South has been funded since 2017 with €122 million in resources. Again, that is the impact of a collective voice.”
It is a collective voice that needs to be raised. Maitri: “We see incredible backlash around the world. Gender funders are pulling out of the sector or shifting focus. Clearly, the leveraging and advocacy piece of this work remains critical. CoLab has a powerful voice, and we need to use it, especially now.”
“This illustration wishes to celebrate the power of transnational feminist movements that advocate through an intersectional lens to amplify the voices of marginalized communities and challenge systemic injustices. By depicting characters united in solidarity, it aims to convey the strength found in collective action towards social change, and to inspire viewers to join the ongoing struggle for equality and justice across borders.”
“We needed a network”
“Before CoLab existed, several of us met for lunch and conversations on the fringes of what was then the International Human Rights Funders Group. We started discussing how we missed an analysis of gender in that space,” recalls Katharina Samara-Wickrama, Director of Oak Foundation’s Issues Affecting Women program, thinking back to CoLab’s early days. “So, we commissioned a scoping study. The results suggested that a gender funders’ group would be useful, and we decided to formalize and resource it. We had different opinions about whether to emphasize learning, collaboration, or action, but we all agreed that we needed a network.”
Katharina believes that CoLab’s presence has changed conversations within philanthropy. “I think CoLab has contributed to bringing greater attention to gender. If you look at HRFN today, it’s like a big feminist fest!”
“Resource advocacy brought CoLab into its own”
Within a couple of years of its founding, peer learning, collaborative experimentation, and advocacy were all on the agenda, but resource advocacy was an area of particular focus – and impact. “That’s where I feel CoLab really came into its own,” says Katharina. “Around 2015, we worked together to influence the Dutch government in its second FLOW (Funding Leadership Opportunities for Women 2016-2020) process. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had decided to fund mostly big INGOs, rather than frontline groups – a departure from their previous practice. All the members of CoLab picked up our phones to call the Dutch government. They heard us, and that process of reflection led them to create the Leading from the South Fund, a resource alliance of Global South-based women’s funds.”
This advocacy success set the stage for CoLab’s work with the Canadians in resourcing the Equality Fund. “We realized that, collectively, we represented a lot of money – at least $300 million annually in gender-focused grantmaking and billions in our endowments, and that was persuasive. The Equality Fund was a seriously big moment. During that process, we were well coordinated, and I realized that collectively we had resources, people, and expertise that we didn’t have individually. This was the kind of advocacy we were created to do. Both Leading from the South and the Equality Fund are important examples of our impact. They both leveraged more and better quality funding for feminist movements.”
“You realize you are not alone”
In addition to advocacy in the field, CoLab’s work to create a collaborative, learning space has supported its members within their own organizations. “CoLab offers an important element of solidarity. You realize that you are not alone and that you can leverage someone else’s experience. It has been so valuable to reach out to peers at other foundations to discuss how they have dealt with a particular challenge. That’s a hard thing to measure, but it’s real. Membership in CoLab has also been helpful, for example, in positioning proposals to provide seed funding for initiatives like the Nebula Fund or the Narrative Hive. Funders like to know that other donors are involved.”
“Peer-to-peer learning has shifted how we work”
Membership in a peer space also influences grantmaking. “We’ve met new partners through CoLab learning events – groups that we might not otherwise have found. We’ve also learned about important issues in philanthropy, like working with Indigenous groups. Almost all of our work now is with people in the global majority, people who have traditionally been pushed out of the conversation. The development of our work has been significantly influenced by CoLab’s peer learning.”
“In this artwork, I was trying to create a safe space, a safe working environment, and show how comfortable it is to work together. The distance between each person, that space between their stuff and themselves is to show that there is enough space for each woman at work and in this world.”
“We needed a space to think together”
“Ten years ago, there was no affinity group or space where women’s rights funders – what we now call gender justice funders – could come together to build alignment or think together about how to advance this work and contribute to the field. We also wanted a place to think together about funding for the work because, obviously, the funding needs to be far more robust,” says Manisha Mehta, Program Director of Wellspring Philanthropic Fund’s Women’s Rights Program. “Before Gender Funders CoLab, our relationships with each other tended to be bilateral, almost ad hoc. CoLab has been a significant relationship-building space. It feels very different now when I reach out to a peer foundation to strategize.”
Relationship-building to strengthen the field
When she thinks about successes, Manisha again emphasizes CoLab’s collaborative and relationship-building work: “It has been a great space for talking, learning, sharing, and workshopping. We’ve been able to support peers who are champions within their organizations, and we’ve seen this translate into effective strategies to advance gender justice. Because of support that they have received from others within CoLab, members have been able to effectively advocate for support to movements, for intersectional work, for feminist approaches, etcetera. I think that matters.”
She continues: “We are a group of eight to ten foundations, and of course we don’t all have exactly the same feminist orientation or understanding of ‘gender justice.’ But we have been able, slowly, to build an understanding of what a feminist approach looks like, what funding to feminist movements can look like. Spending time with CoLab colleagues has helped me to think about the best way to support movements, to be more creative when it comes to the how. It has also helped me think about influencing other donors and think about which arguments to use. It has influenced my work in so many ways.”
Strategizing together to unlock resources
CoLab’s objective of unlocking resources for women’s rights and feminist movements is another area of important success. “We’ve raised awareness about the need for increased resourcing. Although there is still a huge unmet need, we are seeing more money going to feminist organizations, which I think is an important achievement.” CoLab’s advocacy in support of the creation of the Equality Fund and the Alliance for Feminist Movements, as well as advocacy with the Dutch government that led to the creation of the Leading from the South Fund, are other examples of leveraging that came to mind for Manisha.
“Better” funding has also been an area of attention. “We have also talked a lot about how we can align as donors to reduce the burdens for the groups we support. The common application form for women’s funds or our pooled fund for leveraging resources may seem like smaller achievements, but those initiatives have had a huge impact.”
A collective voice in the field
Finally, Manisha points to CoLab’s important function as a collective voice. “When Novo left the field, for instance, CoLab spearheaded a sort of collective response from private philanthropy. Basically CoLab said, ‘ok, we understand that foundations may decide to change directions, but there are ethical and responsible ways to make a change, and these are ways we hope you will consider.’ I think that was constructive. It’s not something that we could easily do individually, but CoLab is positioned to step into that space and say something on behalf of us collectively, and that has an amplifying effect.”
“I wanted to represent intersectional feminism with three fierce and proud people, eyes turned to the future. They are reunited by an abstract form which evokes strength, heat and movement. We are a fierce, resilient and proud movement, eyes turned to the future, for a greater tomorrow. Diversity is our strength, empathy is our shield, and equality is our goal.”
“ ‘Abante Babae’ (translation: Onward, Women) a phrase often used as a slogan during Women’s Month in the Philippines.”
In 2019, the Equality Fund secured $300 million CAD from the Canadian government to fund feminist movements globally. The story of the Equality Fund’s success is a story of feminist grit and vision, and like all meaningful victories, it is a collective story. In its proposal, the Equality Fund consortium had to demonstrate its ability to absorb and steward significant resources and also to raise additional investment. Gender Funders CoLab, one of the consortium partners, played a central role in establishing the proposal’s credibility and seriousness.
Canada’s decision to create a fund for women’s movements
In 2018, the Canadian government announced a call for proposals to receive and manage funding of up to $300 million CAD to support women’s movements globally. After an intensive year-long application and review process, Canada’s Minister for International Development and Women and Gender Equality, announced in 2019 that the Equality Fund – a consortium of partners incubated by Canada’s MATCH International Women’s Fund – would receive the full $300 million. This funding was the largest single investment ever made by a government in global feminist movements.
CoLab’s role in the genesis of the Equality Fund
In the years before the Canadian government moved to create a dedicated fund to support women’s rights movements, they developed a feminist foreign policy. This policy recognized that advancing women’s rights requires investments in women’s movements, which are key drivers in securing gender equality. Justin Trudeau, the Liberal prime minister elected in 2015, had proclaimed himself a feminist, and the MATCH International Women’s Fund had been invited to advise the government in developing its Feminist International Assistance Policy. Gender Funders CoLab members recognized this as an important political window to secure significant resourcing for feminist movements.
Many CoLab members, like Foundation for a Just Society, Oak Foundation, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Ford Foundation, were already funding MATCH, and they began traveling to Ottawa for meetings with the government to shine a light on the importance of funding feminist movements through movement-anchored women’s funds like MATCH.
In 2018, CoLab provided two pooled fund advocacy grants to support MATCH’s influencing work. Jess Tomlin, the Equality Fund’s Co-CEO (at the time, CEO of MATCH) recalls the significance of this early support. “CoLab’s grants funded a white paper that got us in to brief the Minister’s team and helped to influence the Feminist International Assistance Policy. Those grants also funded two staff positions and allowed us to convene about 50 actors from the Global South in Ottawa to open up new conversations with the government. The bureaucrats got to hear from people like Theo Sowa and Lydia Alpizar, and you don’t walk away from those conversations unchanged. CoLab’s initial support gave us policy muscle and helped us crack open a window. We built a relationship rooted in credibility and progressive advice, and became an informal sounding board for the creation of feminist policy and funding decisions.”
Bringing credibility to the Equality Fund’s proposal
When the government issued a call for proposals, the MATCH Fund created a consortium that demonstrated its ability to responsibly absorb, invest, and steward the funding, as well as its capacity to raise additional philanthropic and investment capital. The Equality Fund assembled a consortium of Canadian and international partners from the philanthropic community, private sector, government, and civil society, including Gender Funders CoLab.
“CoLab was an incredibly important contributor to our consortium,” says Jess. “Prestigious American foundations brought cachet. It got the government’s attention that we had relationships with important philanthropic leaders. Our proposal included CoLab’s commitment to contribute a collective total of $25 million USD should the Equality Fund be awarded the grant from the Government of Canada, and that was incredibly important leverage. In a very competitive process, which included UN agencies, CoLab brought credibility to our proposal. For the government, the idea of organizations that were not governments putting money on the table was novel and very persuasive. In the ever- shrinking landscape of Official Development Assistance, with ongoing political pressure to repatriate funds for domestic efforts, new global partnerships and new forms of capital were a welcome addition.”
When the day arrived for the Equality Fund to present its bid to the Canadian government, CoLab’s Co-Director Keely Tongate was on hand as part of the Equality Fund’s team. Jess recalls a key moment in the conversation: “During the presentation, an assistant deputy minister looked at Keely and said, ‘we’re keen to work with Gender Funders CoLab no matter who wins the bid; can we assume you are interested in partnering with the Government of Canada?’ And Keely, without missing a beat, replied: ‘Absolutely not. What is new, novel, and required here is that the Equality Fund come to life. CoLab will put all of our power and resources into making that happen, but if the Equality Fund is not selected, CoLab does not wish at this moment to partner with the Government of Canada.’ That exchange shows how CoLab used its power with conviction. That moment shifted the dynamic.”
“CoLab members are committed resource activists”
Jess concludes: “CoLab stood behind us every step of the way. Everyone was ‘all in’; they had skin in the game. In their hearts, the members of CoLab are committed resource activists. To have found partners whose sole objective was to unlock strategic new resources for feminist movements was unbelievably powerful and strategic. CoLab members, like Ford, Foundation for a Just Society, Oak, and Wellspring, and CoLab’s staff – they used their power very strategically. With all of their heft, they shored us up and gave us strength. It’s one thing to facilitate a grant, and it’s a whole other thing to get behind something so wholeheartedly, to actively fundraise for it, to lend your social and political capital and join forces to create a stronger advocacy posture. CoLab did all of these things to help bring the Equality Fund over the line, and into life.”
“I wanted to represent intersectional feminism with three fierce and proud people, eyes turned to the future. They are reunited by an abstract form which evokes strength, heat and movement. We are a fierce, resilient and proud movement, eyes turned to the future, for a greater tomorrow.
Diversity is our strength, empathy is our shield, and equality is our goal.”
Gender Funders CoLab is committed to taking direction from the gender justice movements it supports. In order to make good on this commitment, CoLab conducted a survey among movement partners to collect feedback on its future strategic direction. In response, movement partners identified reducing the administrative burden of the grant application and reporting cycle as a priority. CoLab recognized the importance of this request and began developing common application and report forms that grantees could use with multiple funders. For CoLab, “better” funding refers to aligning funding processes with feminist values, transforming power dynamics between funders and grantees, and coordinating funding flows to reduce grantees’ administrative burdens.
Collecting input from the field
In 2017, CoLab invited 150 current grantees that it considered movement building organizations to participate in a survey about their needs, priorities, and recommendations to funders. The survey generated 73 responses from 29 countries and included data on barriers and opportunities to fund feminist and gender justice movements.
One request was that funders consider ways to reduce administrative burdens in the application and reporting cycle. In response, CoLab decided to create common application and report forms for women’s funds. In keeping with one of CoLab’s funding principles to “streamline administrative requirements,” the aim of the common forms was to enable grantees of multiple CoLab members to prepare a single set of documents for multiple funders. The goal was to free organizations to focus on movement building rather than activities that drain energy, time, and resources away from core work.
Participatory design and piloting of the common forms
CoLab committed to co-designing the forms with grantees in a participatory process. They formed an advisory group composed of representatives of women’s funds and their funders. The advisory group’s task was to create forms that met funders’ due diligence requirements, asked questions that women’s funds thought were interesting and valuable to reflect on, and were simple and easy for everyone to use.
After several rounds of drafting, gathering input, and revising, CoLab piloted the common forms from 2020-2022. During the pilot, eight CoLab members offered the common application and report forms, and 27 women’s funds used the new common forms. In 2022, CoLab commissioned an assessment to explore the experience of using the forms and to generate recommendations for their ongoing, continuous improvement.
Lessons from the common application and report forms initiative
The assessment yielded three key learnings.
First, the common application and report forms saved time. The women’s funds using the forms reported spending less time on grant applications and reports, freeing them up to spend more time supporting gender justice movements.
Second, the common forms yielded higher-quality proposals and reports. Both women’s funds and their funders said that the common forms generated more useful information. Because the questions in the forms supported meaningful reflection by women’s funds, both funders and grantees benefitted.
Finally, the participatory development process and the feminist lens shaping the form’s questions were critical to the forms’ success. The participatory design process led to more relevant, meaningful questions, which in turn led to higher-quality and more relevant insights.
Challenges and next steps
The assessment also surfaced challenges and opportunities. For instance, CoLab members reported taking risks within their institutions in advocating the use of common forms and encountering hurdles in integrating the common forms in their online grants management systems. On the other hand, the assessment identified ways to further streamline application and reporting processes, including expanding the use of the common forms by intermediary funds and collaborating with Prospera to align the common forms with the development of common indicators among women’s funds. Additionally, giving women’s funds more control by allowing them to report on their own fiscal or programmatic years (instead of a funder’s “grant period”) would save additional time and further strengthen reporting.
Both CoLab members and women’s funds see the common application and report forms as an important step in a longer journey to align funders’ practices with feminist values. While the introduction of common forms may appear to be a technical fix, aligning CoLab members’ grantmaking and reducing administrative barriers were key priorities expressed by members’ own grantees. Both funders and grantees reported significant benefits in using the forms. Finally, CoLab has received enthusiastic reactions from peer funders wishing to learn from this experience. As part of its 2024-2026 strategy refresh, CoLab seeks to expand use of the common application and report forms within the donor community.
“Our Power Together embodies the beauty of collaboration, where human rights and gender equality flourish hand in hand. Inspired by the impactful work of Gender Funders CoLab, this illustration aims to encapsulate the ethos of the work being done and the pivotal role of collaboration in advancing human rights and promoting gender equality globally highlighting the diverse ways in which collaboration manifests to drive meaningful change.”
The Strategic Collaborations to Leverage Resources pooled fund has contributed to leveraging roughly $354 million to date for feminist movements globally. Responding to a need identified by feminist and gender justice organizations, the pooled fund supports collaborative fundraising, usually in response to significant bilateral and multilateral funding opportunities.
Responding to the field
A central goal of Gender Funders CoLab is to unlock resources for gender justice movements around the world. In doing this work, CoLab is committed to following the leadership and meeting the needs of gender justice movements. In 2017, several of CoLab’s members noticed a pattern in their work: their grantee-partners were requesting funding to support them in applying for large multi-year grants from bilateral donors.
Starting about a decade ago, feminist organizations, especially regionally- and internationally-focused organizations and women’s funds, began to see significant opportunities in bilateral funding frameworks. Governments make grants of significant size, but their funding frameworks are often structured to favor applications from INGOs or large in-country organizations; their threshold criteria and other requirements often disadvantage and discourage applications from organizations based in the Global South or East.
Creating collaborative funding proposals is complex work, usually requiring resources for travel, in-person planning meetings, and the development of shared theories of change and monitoring, learning, and evaluation (MEL) frameworks. Government applications also frequently require the support of consultants with technical expertise in responding to government tenders. This is particularly the case for organizations based in the Global South and East that historically have competed on an uneven playing field with Northern-based international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) to access bilateral funding instruments. CoLab members realized there was a gap in the funding ecosystem, and they moved to respond to what was missing.
Leveraging, collaborating, experimenting
CoLab members and staff realized that this was an opportunity not only to respond to the needs of the field, but also to learn and experiment together to create a more robust funding ecosystem. In 2017, CoLab agreed to create the Strategic Collaborations to Leverage Resources pooled fund. “Seeing what is not there – what is missing but needed – and then thinking through how to respond to the gap is what a good funder does,” says Katrin Wilde, Executive Director of the Channel Foundation and a member of the pooled fund’s advisory committee. “The idea was to get critical funding to organizations in the sector in a speedy fashion at the exact moment they needed it in order to be able to access major funding opportunities.”
Setting up the pooled fund
In setting up the pooled fund, it was important to CoLab’s members that the fund’s practices reflected all seven of CoLab’s core funding principles, including offering unrestricted support, multi-year funding, and streamlined administrative requirements. Scale was also a key goal, so CoLab established a million-dollar threshold. Consortia would need to be applying for at least one million dollars to qualify for a pooled fund grant. The members also desired to get resources to organizations in the Global South and East so that they could compete in a system that is structured to privilege Northern-based INGOs. To ensure that funding was reaching the Global South and East and that feminists from these regions were involved in decision-making, consortia were required to include at least one partner based in the Global South or East.
CoLab also wanted to model “better” funding. To that end, the application and reporting processes were kept light (e.g., forms are brief and available in three languages), and applications would be accepted on a rolling basis. CoLab staff would review requests, solicit endorsements, and make recommendations. Final grant decisions would be made by an advisory committee composed of CoLab members. To keep due diligence tasks light, eligibility was limited to current and recent partners of CoLab members.
These were the criteria, but CoLab wanted to stay responsive. In some cases, the criteria have been applied flexibly, as long as the key aims of meeting the field’s needs and leveraging significant resources are met.
Success rate
To date, pooled fund grants have leveraged roughly $354 million USD. Of the 29 grants given from 2018 through 2023 (approximately $2.245 million USD in total), twelve grants, or more than one-third, have contributed to successful applications.
CoLab’s single largest leveraging success is its contribution to the success of the Equality Fund. The pooled fund provided two grants, totaling $400,000 USD, to MATCH International in 2018 and 2019 which contributed to the process by which the Equality Fund was chosen to receive $300 million CAD. The other 27 pooled fund grants have contributed to leveraging $132.6 million USD.
The future
“Leveraging resources is our sweet spot,” says CoLab Co-Director Keely Tongate. “The pooled fund is a beautiful example of living our values, modeling how to do grantmaking, and leveraging significant resources for the field. It is also a tangible values-based collaboration for our members – a way of working together that is at once low-risk and high-yield.’
CoLab recognizes that the fund has not succeeded in reaching all of its objectives. Most of the grantees so far that have benefitted from grants are organizations working globally that are based in North America and Europe, although a few pooled fund grantees are regional actors in Africa (1), Asia and the Pacific (2), Eastern Europe (2), and Latin America (2).
Understanding and addressing application barriers for potential partners in under-resourced regions is a priority. In 2024, CoLab is reviewing the fund’s criteria with the intention of transforming the pooled fund to explicitly focus on facilitating funding for groups in the Global South and East. CoLab will be speaking with feminist groups throughout the world to understand the obstacles they encounter in applying and how revised criteria could make the pooled fund even more responsive to the field.
“‘Abante Babae’ (translation: Onward, Women) a phrase often used as a slogan during Women’s Month in the Philippines.”
Gender Funders CoLab created the Strategic Collaborations to Leverage Resources pooled fund in 2017 in response to a need articulated by gender justice movements. The fund provides grants of up to $100,000 USD to support collaborative fundraising by feminist organizations. The pooled fund grants are a strategy to unlock significant new resources, usually from bilateral and multilateral donors, for gender justice and feminist movements.
The following four stories – from Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development, Bulgarian Fund for Women, Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA), and the four Urgent Action Sister Funds – illustrate the various ways in which pooled fund grants have supported feminist consortia to leverage significant funding. In these stories, representatives of the consortia reflect on the critical role that support for collaborative resource mobilization is playing in bringing new funding to the field and how the grants from CoLab have supported them to advance their work.
These four stories reflect the experiences of consortia and organizations based principally in the Global South and East, and, as such, illustrate CoLab’s commitment to supporting feminist movements in these under-resourced regions of the world. These four consortia received $467,000 in grants from the pooled fund and secured approximately $66 million as a result.
These newly leveraged resources are supporting them to advance women’s labor rights, fight gender-based violence, build the capacities of grassroots LGBTQI rights groups, support activism at the intersection of gender justice and climate justice, and support women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders in situations of crisis and conflict.
CoLab pooled fund grants have also been instrumental in supporting organizations to raise their visibility and establish expertise and credibility with new funders, particularly government and multilateral donors, bringing important new resources to the field.
Bulgarian Fund for Women (BFW), a national women’s fund established in 2004, had been raising money, building their infrastructure, and funding local feminist groups for many years, when they decided in 2022 to take the big step of applying for European Commission funding. EC proposal writing is demanding and intense, and it took four staff members working 24/7 for three months to complete the application. “We saw a chance,” says BFW’s Co-Director Nadejda Dermendjieva, “and we decided to go for it. We applied to a program focused on EU values to work on the value of ‘gender equality.’ In our proposal, we didn’t compromise our values. We said that we are a feminist fund, and that we would be re-granting to feminist grassroots groups and providing core support. We got the grant.”
The EC funding was €2.8 million over three years, and the conditions of the grant required recipients to contribute ten percent from their own resources. That’s when Nadejda contacted Gender Funders CoLab about a pooled fund grant. “At that point, we were approved to receive the funding, but we needed to raise our ten percent contribution. We had some reserve funds and other donor support, but we needed more. CoLab agreed that our situation matched its resource mobilization goals, even though we had already technically secured the funding. Their $100,000 grant absolutely made the difference for us.”
CoLab’s application process was straight-forward and didn’t require heavy administrative lifting. Nadejda recalls: “I wrote a short description of the situation. We had a phone call with CoLab to discuss our needs, and then they reviewed our request and approved the grant. I was really impressed by their quick response – it took them less than two months!”
BFW has already used part of the EC funding to provide core support to about 25 grassroots groups in Bulgaria: feminist groups, LGBT groups, women’s shelters, and groups working to end gender-based violence. There will be two more rounds of regranting. “Our first application to the European Commission led to another success. Last year, the EC put out a call that was even better for us. It was focused on gender-based violence. We applied and received another €2.5 million.”
BFW has seen donor interest in Eastern Europe rise and fall. In recent years, with the backlash against the Istanbul Convention, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, donor interest in the region has increased. “However, we have also seen donors, like OSF, leaving Europe. We know that European Commission funding will be fundamental for women’s funds as a source of big money in the future. This means that a network like CoLab which focuses on leveraging plays a critical role.”
At the moment, BFW is applying again to the EC program through which they initially received funding. “This time we’re applying for €5.5 million, which will mean a lot of fundraising for our own contribution, but it’s worth it. I am really proud that we opened the door with the EC. We’ve been able to bring over €5 million to Bulgaria, and now other women’s funds are applying to the Commission, too. We are so grateful to CoLab. The pooled fund model of making relatively modest grants to leverage significant funding is brilliant.”
Around the world, community-based women’s rights and environmental justice groups are creating initiatives to advance gender and climate justice and drive climate solutions. Fortunately, governments and philanthropic actors increasingly recognize the intersection of gender equality and climate justice. A prominent voice in establishing the importance of funding at this intersection is GAGGA – the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action.
A consortium of feminist organizations, GAGGA is led by Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres (FCAM), a women’s fund based in Central America, in collaboration with Mama Cash and Both ENDS, partners based in the Netherlands. According to Claudia Samcam, FCAM’s Development and Alliances Coordinator, “having FCAM lead GAGGA brings a perspective that is informed by our closeness and proximity to the movements we support. The fact that GAGGA’s lead partner is based in one of GAGGA’s regions supports the work. We share the context in which our grantee-partners work. We know their challenges first-hand, but also the sources of their resilience. Global South-based organizations have unique insights and abilities to create locally-driven change and to receive the funding to support it, but due to history and structural inequality, we have been excluded from decision-making spaces and access to funding. GAGGA is changing that.”
In the years 2016-2022, GAGGA provided €31.37 million in 3,225 grants to community-based women’s rights and environmental justice organizations and funds globally (financial data for 2023 is being finalized as of this writing). In collaboration with Global Greengrants Fund and WEDO, GAGGA is now working to mobilize $100 million USD for grassroots gender-just climate action through the new Roots Rising campaign. This work is particularly urgent given the lived experience and unique insights of frontline activists and the fact that environmental justice organizations led by women, girls, and trans and intersex people remain dramatically underfunded.
GAGGA was initially funded in 2016 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, and the funding relationship was renewed for five years in 2021. Two years later, in 2023, GAGGA succeeded in securing bilateral funding from Global Affairs Canada (GAC). Pooled fund grants from Gender Funders CoLab supported the renewal application to the Dutch government as well as the application to GAC. The first CoLab grant of $100,000 supported GAGGA to secure a five-year renewal of €35.5 million from the Dutch government; the second $50,000 CoLab grant supported GAGGA to secure $11 million (CAD) for three years from GAC.
“CoLab grants provided critical support for proposal development,” says Iulia Pascu, Officer for Philanthropic Partnerships at Mama Cash. “These applications to bilateral funders are complex and take a lot of time and resources. CoLab’s funding helped us to build our internal capacities and raise our visibility as experts in funding at the intersection of gender and climate justice.”
This partnership was GAC’s first experience funding a program like GAGGA; for GAGGA, it was the second collaboration with a bilateral donor. GAGGA and GAC needed to learn to speak each other’s languages. Iulia: “GAC approached us and was excited to support us, but they needed to understand exactly what we do. We used part of CoLab’s grant to hire a technical consultant who was very knowledgeable about GAC’s adaptation and mitigation indicators. That was key because we needed to show that GAGGA is both an adaptation and mitigation program.”
The GAC process has also resulted in broad knowledge gains for GAGGA, another important result of the CoLab grant. Applying to a climate finance program built GAGGA’s technical knowledge and also strengthened their negotiation skills. According to Iulia: “We learned how to explain the work of women’s and environmental funds, and how to make the argument that it is important for us to absorb financial and administrative burdens on behalf of local grassroots partners. We are now in conversations with other governments, and we have expertise to draw on to make sure we align expectations and deliver strong results. We know what to expect in terms of questions about risk, and we are now able to demonstrate the value and impact of GAGGA for funders interested in funding at the intersection of gender and environmental justice. The support from CoLab supported us to strengthen GAGGA to channel climate finance to feminist movements at scale.”
Feminist activists worldwide are facing increasing threats and repression from both state and non-state actors opposed to their change agendas. The Urgent Action Sister Funds are a consortium of rapid response grantmakers that provide fast, flexible resources to these activists, supporting them to respond to unexpected risks and opportunities and to protect and care for themselves and one another.
The four independent Urgent Action Sister Funds – Urgent Action Fund-Africa, Urgent Action Fund Latin America & the Caribbean, Urgent Action Fund Asia & Pacific, and Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism – have always collaborated, but several years ago they saw an opportunity to increase their strategic impact by working in a more structured way together.
“The Sister Funds have a common DNA of rapid response grantmaking, and starting around 2010, we were all bringing focus to collective care and holistic security. We knew that we had a lot of capacity, power, and relationships in our regions, and we started thinking about how we could leverage our regional expertise at a global level – and what that would mean,” says Celia Turner, the Sister Funds’ Partnerships Managing Officer.
In 2018, the Sister Funds had an opportunity to apply as a consortium for funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). They began building a relationship with Sida – traveling to Sweden for meetings, getting a foot in the door, but this effort required resources. A $75,000 grant from CoLab’s pooled fund supported them to take their efforts to the next level. Celia: “CoLab’s grant supported us to come together to do the planning necessary to engage in a complex application process. We were able to develop more robust internal policies – such as around risk and procurement – the types of things that governments go through with a fine-toothed comb.”
The Urgent Action Sister Funds succeeded in securing a Sida grant for 75 million Swedish krona (about $7.75 million in 2019). Around the same time, they secured a BUILD institutional-strengthening grant from the Ford Foundation, a Gender Funders Co-Lab member. Together these two grants catalyzed the Urgent Action Sister Funds’ next phase of growth. While Ford’s support ensured the Urgent Action Sister Funds could focus on building their shared Sisterhood architecture to work together more effectively and increase their shared impact, the Sida funding supported them to strengthen their collective Theory of Change and feminist Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning methodology, ensuring they had the tools in place to illustrate the impact of their Sisterhood model. The Sister Funds are now finalizing a second agreement with Sida for 175 million Swedish krona.
The development that both Ford and Sida enabled allowed the Urgent Action Sister Funds to build the systems, processes, and tools to pursue other bilateral donors. Additionally, the work supported by Sida visibly positioned the Sister Funds as experts in supporting women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders in situations of crisis and conflict. The Sister Funds are now in conversation with the Canadian government as it develops a renewed Women’s Voice and Leadership (WVL) framework. In this second iteration of the WVL program, Canada is expanding its support to crisis- and conflict-affected contexts, incorporating strategic advice from the Urgent Action Funds. In 2023, a second CoLab grant of $50,000 supported the Sister Funds to develop a funding request to the WVL program. Celia: “The pooled fund has been truly impactful. Collaboration is so powerful, but it also takes a lot of time and effort, and there is just not much funding available to support joint fundraising.”
Adelaide Mazwarira, Partnerships Managing Officer at Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism, summarized the power of the pooled fund this way: “The pooled fund recognizes the power of working together, of building collective power to create change. It’s about becoming greater than the sum of your parts. That’s what the pooled fund supports.”
Complex proposal processes are a challenging aspect of fundraising from government donors. Bilateral funding frameworks use very technical application processes which tend to favor large international organizations based in donor countries that have experience in accessing government funding. How do smaller, Global South-based organizations get a foot in the door?
Back in 2020, a feminist consortium, including African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), and Women Engage for a Common Future (WECF), identified the Dutch government’s SDG-5 Fund as a potential source of funding for the work they were doing to strengthen local, regional, and global feminist movements. They decided that the support of a consultant who knew the ins and outs of the Dutch government’s process would improve their chances of securing funding.
That’s when Misun Woo, APWLD’s regional coordinator, recalled a conversation with her program officer at Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. She remembered hearing that Gender Funders CoLab had a pooled fund to support collaborative fundraising. “We needed resources to bring the members of our consortium together to do strategic planning and develop shared advocacy messaging. It blew my mind that there were resources like this available. Really, it was indescribable. We applied and received a grant of $92,010 from CoLab to support our application.”
Misun continues: “We used the grant to convene the consortium partners in Kenya to engage in a strategic planning exercise. The grant allowed us to actually see each other face-to-face, to have critical conversations about our work, to assess whether the partnership made sense. That was invaluable.” Resources from CoLab’s grant also supported hiring a consultant to assist with weaving the proposal together. After successfully passing through the first stage of the process, the consortium used funding from CoLab’s grant to hire consultants familiar with the Dutch government’s process, especially around logframe and budget templates, to support the development of a full proposal.
“Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances forced our lead partner to withdraw,” recalls Misun. “I informed CoLab that our consortium had to dissolve and that we had unspent grant money. CoLab was understanding and flexible. They trusted us and said to keep the money if we were able to spend it. Our consortium then became aware of a relevant EU opportunity, and so we used the remaining funds to apply to the EU. Our consortium WomenPower2030 has two new members: Women Environmental Programme (WEP) and Foundation for Studies and Research on Women (FEIM), making it a powerful global feminist consortium of five organizations. We succeeded in securing a four-year grant of €5 million that will support work in structurally interconnected thematic areas such as women’s labor rights, gender-based violence, women’s political leadership, and climate/environmental justice. Our consortium’s program will build the organizing and advocacy capacity of women’s rights groups, produce feminist knowledge and resources, and monitor progress toward the SDGs. We will also be able to collaboratively participate in two or three advocacy spaces where we can elevate our regional analyses to the global level, including the Beijing+30 and the fourth Financing for Development conference.”
She appreciates the power of these resources, but Misun is also critical of how EU and bilateral funding processes obstruct Global South participation. “The threshold application criteria and the need to hire well-connected, expensive consultants who know the bilateral and multilateral systems is a deeply colonial model. The consultant’s fee is frequently equal to the annual salary of one of our staff members. Often, the criteria require that the lead organization is ‘international’ or registered in the donor country, which makes Global South organizations ineligible to lead consortia.”
Misun is starting to see efforts by private philanthropy and some bilaterals, like the Dutch government, to engage more equitably and directly with partners from the Global South, but funding is still not structured justly, and there is a long way to go. Indeed, even CoLab’s pooled fund provides grants that are too large for many Global South-based groups to absorb. Misun: “In the future, I hope that the support we received is also directly available to smaller groups.”
“In this artwork, I was trying to create a safe space, a safe working environment, and show how comfortable it is to work together. The distance between each person, that space between their stuff and themselves is to show that there is enough space for each woman at work and in this world.”