Fenomenal Funds supports the resilience of women’s funds in the Prospera International Network. The Collaboration Grants foster collective resilience by deepening connections among women’s funds, enabling them to reimagine and realign their knowledge, systems, and practices with feminist principles. We started with 13 Collaboration Groups and now have 15. Here, we highlight the groups, their focus areas, and what we love about their work.
Four collaboratives focus on Collective Care, exploring different aspects of care as part of their political identity. Another group works on Financial Resources, developing innovative practices for mobilizing and managing funds central to resourcing movements. A pair of women’s funds focuses on Transformative Organizational Development, examining feminist policies and practices in leadership, human resource management, and pay.
A group of four feminist funds is evolving their Systems and Practices, aligning participatory grantmaking, feminist MEL, and feminist fund databases with their mission. Narrative Change work is central for two collaboratives that recognize the need to build narrative power to advance gender justice. Learn more in 2024 as we share the rich work of these collaboration groups.
The Urgent Action Fund Sisterhood has been a pioneer and leader in the collective care space. As rapid response funders supporting women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders, their starting point is that collective care and protection are inseparable.
Feminist activists work to overcome oppressive systems and structures. Supporting their struggle requires more than just resourcing their work; it requires support for their collective wellbeing and healing from the trauma inflicted in their fight for liberation.
This collaborative group is united by the goal of integrating the politics of care into their organizational policies and practices. Their motivation stems from addressing staff burnout, the need for care and protection for activists, and coping with ongoing crises. Among the five participating funds, some have started institutionalizing collective care, while others are still defining its meaning.
The Leading from the South Consortium (LFS) is a feminist resource alliance supporting activism led by women, girls, and trans-led organizations in the Global South. The four regional funds in this collaboration share a commitment to collective care.
Feminist financial resilience involves sustaining, adapting, and growing organizations to advance their missions using a feminist lens. This collaboration supports Women Fund Tanzania and Women Fund Z in building knowledge, skills, tools, resources, and connections for long-term financial resilience.
This collaboration aims to bridge this gap by fostering shared learning and advocating for better resourcing of feminist PGM.
Three funds in Asia are teaming up to explore raising funds at regional, national, and community levels. This is particularly challenging amidst rising authoritarianism and a growing anti-gender movement, which shapes narratives around gender roles. Overcoming these narratives is crucial for attracting supporters and converting them into donors.
This collaboration of six funds aims to address the lack of mechanisms for building sustainable funding ecosystems among women’s funds. The goal is to strengthen their growth strategies through mentoring, learning spaces, and meaningful engagement within the WF community.
As women’s and feminist funds grow, their need for systematic data collection and management increases, outgrowing tools like Excel. Salesforce offers potential but requires effort, time, and a cultural shift within organizations. This collaboration aims to provide technical and peer support for implementing Salesforce in grantmaking processes.
As women’s funds grow, they need better methods for data collection and management beyond what Excel offers. Salesforce can improve data management and processes but requires significant effort, time, and commitment.
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) is vital for learning from our work and informing advocacy. However, in the sector, MEL is often burdensome and extractive, offering little in return. This collaboration allows women’s funds to develop FMEL tools reflective of a gender-transformative agenda. Many funds lack resources to build FMEL systems alone and need support to build grantee partners’ capacities in participatory FMEL.
Many women’s funds using a feminist lens are grappling with what transformative feminist leadership means. They are reflecting on internal coordination and organizing, leadership, growth, and systems. They are also linking feminist leadership to anti-racism and decolonization, committing to address these through systems, policies and processes.
This group recognizes the inherited colonial and financial practices in the philanthropic sector that perpetuate disparities and oppressions. They decided to flip the paradigm on what it means to create change.
Eight women's and feminist funds in Latin America and the Caribbean, are working together to mobilize resources and amplify the collective power of women, feminists, LGBTQI+ organizations, and movements in the region.
On the Right Track (OTRT) is a living alliance that unites feminist funds and organizations from Latin America and Europe working for democracy and human rights.
