Through a mechanism set up by the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds to closely work with 44 autonomous women’s funds members of the network, Fenomenal Funds initiated its Collaboration Grants: an innovative stream of participatory grantmaking. This was intended to support women’s funds globally to engage in collaborations to “co-create shared resources and strategies” that challenge and reimagine practices, systems, and approaches that limit the flow of resources to feminist movements.” As part of the facilitation team, I had the chance to engage with and enable women’s funds to connaect with these grants. Here are some of my personal reflections. 

A big, bold move in participatory grantmaking

While participatory grantmaking has been practiced by some donors for a period of time now, this initiative is bold and radical. It attempts to turn grantmaking on its head from the conventional hierarchical approach of grantees submitting applications for donors’ sole consideration and approval into an engaged participatory process between the donor and the grant applicants. In this new modality of participatory grantmaking, Fenomenal Funds—through a consortium of funders—provides resources and facilitates women’s funds to design and carry out their collaborative plan together. 

The participation of the grant applicants is democratized at the very beginning by involving the women’s funds in the design of their own collaboration to which Fenomenal Funds commits to support from the start. “Once the initial idea meets the criteria set for the Collaboration Grants, Fenomenal Funds invests resources for the women’s funds to develop their intended collaboration plan,“ Zanele Sibanda, former Fenomenal Funds Director explains. “A review process is still in place, not to reject applications, [but] rather as a process for women’s funds to benefit from the perspectives of their peers and consider refining their collaboration plans based on the comments they receive,” she adds.

Unconventionally, Fenomenal Funds invests resources not at the tail end of the grantmaking process upon approval of grant applications, as is usually practiced among donors, but rather from inception. The organization gives full support to the grant applicants as they engage in a collective process of developing their application for collaboration. Fenomenal Funds assumes the risk upfront, making its commitment by rolling out resources as the women’s funds come together to discover and define possible collaborations with each other. I have been among a pool of facilitators involved throughout this process and helped build these collaborations over the course of a few months. 

Challenges of building communities online

The participatory grantmaking process of the Collaboration Grants consists of a series of sessions organized around three stages: 

1) Discover is the stage where women’s funds explore different topics, connect with each other, and coalesce to form a specific collaboration around a shared interest or topic. 

2) Define, at this stage, is where women’s funds collectively develop their grant application, outlining a clear plan for an 18–24 month collaboration. 

3) Refine is the last stage where women’s funds fine-tune their collaboration plans, having benefited from a review of peers who serve on the Advisory Committee. 

Among other factors, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic predetermined the conduct of all sessions to be completely virtual. While the women’s funds were spared from the expenses of face-to-face consultations, going through these different stages was still resource intensive. For the collaborations I facilitated, women’s funds representatives had to attend about four sessions of 2.5 hours each for the Discover Phase as well as more than eight sessions for the Define Phase. In between, participants also organized their own self-facilitated sessions. This was especially important since it took more virtual sessions than we had planned to get them to agree on their proposed budget for their grant applications.

There were also many hours spent on preparation and coordination with the Fenomenal Funds team and governance bodies as well as a series of ongoing evaluation and reflection sessions with the team and facilitators. Throughout these phases, a pool of interpreters and translators were contracted to facilitate participation across different languages. A team of documenters and graphic recorders were also on hand to support the facilitators. The coordination among these different consultants and service providers also took considerable time and effort; sometimes we had to try different configurations before we could get the best fit of support for the participants.

I thought through the methodologies and developed detailed plans for the sessions I facilitated, which I shared with the documenters, interpreters, and participants. Despite all the planning, as seasoned facilitators will know, the rule of thumb is to stay flexible and continually adjust each session plan to the exigencies unfolding in real time. I was intent on limiting each session to 2.5 hours since I sensed, from previous experiences of conducting online gatherings, that participants lose interest after over two hours of intense participation.

Because of severe time constraints, our virtual interactions were inevitably formal. Stumped by spontaneity, they lack the full flavor of face-to-face encounters. As a facilitator well versed in convening face-to-face gatherings, I know it’s the informals—the throw-away comments, the wit and humor, the inconsequential exchanges among the participants—that I missed. I realized as Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, notes, that it’s this lack of formality in our exchanges in between formal sessions that allow us to let our guards down and relax into each other’s company. It’s the actual ambiguity of these exchanges, which deepen our interactions with one another and nurture relationships of trust with each other. 

Our sense of belonging was altered as I felt the lack of depth in our online exchanges. It is this intermingling of our thoughts and experiences as we come together physically that provide us with common reference points from which to bond with each other. Migrating all our interactions digitally during these collaborative processes at the time of the pandemic has deprived us of our shared platform of forging collective understanding and meaning. The completely virtual processes have muted the intersecting threads of bonding out of a shared, lived experience that creates community. 

Practicing reflectivity and feminism, shifting power relations

Earlier in the Discover Phase, as participants tried to balance their already heavy workload to the demands of this undertaking, it was difficult to establish consistency in their participation. Some would join late, while others would miss sessions. But over time, the participants came through with their growing commitment towards their collaborations. This became evident especially during the discussions around the budget. They self-organized extra sessions among themselves, as it was excruciatingly difficult to come to a consensus and complete these complex tasks online. Participants astutely observed that underlying the process of completing the budget and the entire grants application were painstaking efforts “of actually working through our differences in cultures, languages, contexts, and transforming such diversity into our strength.” 

From what I had learned in my course on reflective social practice, I tried to introduce the participants into the art of observation and the discipline of reflexivity. I coached them into the practice of active listening, urging them to engage all their senses—not just their hearing, as we carefully navigated to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding in our encounters online. They deepened their capacity for self-reflection and learned to cultivate their own voices before they got lost in simply acquiescing to the thoughts and opinions of others during plenaries. One participant summarizes our reflection session at the end of the Define Phase: “We learned to slow down, to make sure unheard voices are articulated in our processes of seeking consent collectively.”

At the start of this initiative, I shared the apprehension of the Fenomenal Funds team about how power imbalances might play out among the participants, and that there could be many. However, it surprised me that even if our online exchanges precluded deeper interactions with each other, the participants acquired sensitivity to each other’s needs and began growing empathy for each other. Through the guidance of the interpreters, they learned to practice “language inclusivity”: instead of simply relying on the interpreters and translators, they took the initiative to translate their own communications for others who do not speak their language. They took time to pause as we waited for interpretation to finish across multiple languages during the discussions. And when my impatience got the better of me, they reminded me to practice what I preach, and listen attentively to all voices, even the unexpressed and confused, until we could all hear each other with clarity and agree wholeheartedly. 

Among the women’s funds I facilitated, one collaboration aspired to innovate on feminist monitoring, evaluation, and learning jointly with their grantee partners, and another is intent on developing more equitable narratives on resource mobilization to democratize the flow of resources to feminist movements in their respective countries. “We are practicing our feminism,” the participants affirm. For them, shifting power relations is crucial, not only in the processes of creating the collaborations but also embodied in their collaborative aspirations.