By Shama Dossa, Erix Cortés and Diana Medina González originally published on  Alliance, May 27, 2025

What happens when feminist funds rooted in the Global South come together—not just to exchange knowledge, but to radically reimagine how it is created, valued, and used for accountability and learning? 

We dream of eliminating reporting structures to funders and instead building relationships of mutual trust. At the 2025 EDGE Funders Conference in Bogotá, Fenomenal Funds, Urgent Action Fund Latin America and the Caribbean, and Fondo Semillas co-hosted a session to explore just that.

Titled ‘Cross-pollinating Knowledge: A Decolonial Feminist Practice in Philanthropy,’ the session invited funders and movement allies into a multilingual, participatory space of reflection, dreaming, and co-creation. Together, we challenged extractive models of monitoring and evaluation and reclaimed Feminist Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (FMEAL) as a liberatory, relational practice.

This article emerges from that gathering and the journeys that led us there. It asks: What does it mean to shift power through learning? How do we center care, complexity, and relationships over compliance? How can accountability serve liberation—not bureaucracy, white saviorism, surveillance or control?

A journey of becoming: Feminist learning and power literacy in practice

In the spirit of cross-pollination, what follows is both a critique and an offering: a critique of dominant philanthropic knowledge systems and an invitation to co-create alternatives rooted in feminist values, Southern knowledges, and the political practice of care. These are our reflections—as Learning and Impact strategists and facilitators at Fenomenal Funds, Fondo Semillas, and UAF-LAC—on the winding, emergent paths we are walking to embody feminist MEAL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning) in practice.

We begin by sharing how each of our institutions is navigating this journey, before turning to the collective insights that emerged from our time together at the EDGE Funders Conference.

1. Fenomenal Funds: Power literacy and collective meaning-making

At Fenomenal Funds, our feminist learning journey has been anything but linear. As a collaborative that brings together women’s funds and four private philanthropic foundations, we knew early on that conventional approaches wouldn’t serve us. So we formed the Learning & Evaluation Working Group (L&EWG), a space of shared governance and co-learning, where we’ve been meeting monthly—often without ever having met in person.

Over time, this group became a container of trust, care, and experimentation. We asked ourselves difficult, generative questions: How do we learn from contradiction? How do we practice oversight without replicating the very power dynamics we hope to dismantle?

One moment that stands out was when we set out to find a learning partner. We intentionally moved away from rigid procurement models. Instead, we co-designed an inclusive, feminist-aligned process—offering stipends, coaching to shortlisted candidates, and extending timelines to support Global South consultants. The emphasis wasn’t on perfection but on alignment with feminist values. In that moment, care became not just a principle but a methodology.

Participants questioned the metrics of impact imposed by funders and the evaluation community. As one participant noted, ‘In some communities, continuing to survive is a result in itself.’

Looking back, we see how this work helped us shift from simply guiding learning to co-creating meaning. Our L&EWG space allowed us to sit with discomfort, experiment boldly, and grow into our feminist values—together. To learn more about how we integrated learning in grantmaking and our journey read this co-written blog.

2. UAF-LAC: Feminist learning and knowledge-sharing with care at the centre

At UAF-LAC, we support feminist activists and movements across Latin America and the Caribbean who are resisting violence, defending their territories, and advancing gender and environmental justice. This deep commitment to grassroots resistance and healing has shaped how we approach MEAL. For us, feminist evaluation and learning is not a checklist—it’s a process of becoming. Together as a team, we’ve asked: What changes when we center lived experience? When we treat ‘unlearning’ as just as valuable as ‘learning’? When do we see evaluation as a tool for collective liberation, not as surveillance? 

At UAFLAC our MEAL practices focus on sharing and holding space, narratives that capture the ebbs and flows of resistance and regeneration, always placing Care at the Center of our work. This means letting go of linearity, which is a foreign concept in most global south cultures. Our decolonial approach really highlights this, and centers the voices, the timings, the flows of the movements that nurture transformation.

Change is complex and nuanced, and the documentation and knowledge-sharing practices need to be flexible and malleable because of that. We continue to question traditional hierarchies of knowledge and cultivate an evaluative culture rooted in care, solidarity, and justice—the same values that guide our grantmaking. As part of our global work at the Urgent Action Sisterhood, we do feminist MEAL in a transformative way. We place well-being on top of everything, centre harm reduction and have care, flexibility and trust as our baseline.

3. Fondo Semillas: Systematising feminist values for movement support

When we at Fondo Semillas set out to build our FMEAL system back in 2019, it started as a project with clear deliverables: create a feminist database, build something other funds could use too. But what emerged went far beyond a system.

We drew on tools like the Change Matrix and worked with intention to design a framework that honored trust, flexibility, and context. Over time, the FMEAL system became something more dynamic—a mechanism not only for understanding impact, but for learning in relationship with movements and making better strategic decisions.

It has helped us adapt to change, respond more efficiently, and even anticipate questions from philanthropy before they arise. Yes, the system has epistemological grounding in feminist values, but its power also lies in the everyday ways it supports us—offering clarity, building trust, and reflecting the values we already held.

Cross-pollinating knowledge: Insights from the session

Rooted in our lived and institutional experiences, the Cross-Pollinating Knowledge session in Bogotá became a collective space to reimagine accountability, evaluation, and learning as liberatory practices. Using the metaphor of a tree—roots, trunk, bloom—participants mapped out what it means to transform FMEAL.

Roots: Grounding in context and complexity

Participants underscored that traditional evaluation frameworks often ignore the lived realities of political struggle and community care. Questions emerged:
‘How do we quantify how mothers look for their forcefully disappeared children?’
‘What does reporting the number of abortions really mean?’
‘How do we support and protect Women Human Rights Defenders and still meet donor metrics?’

Not everything can—or should—be measured. But it can be deeply understood.

True feminist FMEAL, participants said, must reflect complexity—not flatten it. As one shared, ‘The dream resides in a strong root—a tool for liberation from traditional oppressive structures.’ Grounded accountability is mutual, relational, and allows space for care and nuance between donors and movements.

Trunk: Structures for learning and transformation

Conversations then turned to intermediaries—often feminist funds—as translators between grassroots realities and donor expectations. Participants questioned the metrics of impact imposed by funders and the evaluation community. As one participant noted, ‘In some communities, continuing to survive is a result in itself.’

Participants highlighted tools like community endorsement systems, and posed powerful questions: How can funders be accountable to movements? What does it mean for movements to evaluate funders? Can MEAL help transform realities, not just track them?

Bloom: Dreaming into being a liberatory future

Finally, participants envisioned FMEAL as a space for collective liberation—where imagination and justice drive practice. ‘MEAL is traditionally a mechanism designed to protect wealth. What we need is nurturing connection—that’s the transformational work.’ Another participant raised the possibility of ‘What if we didn’t have to report, and funders trusted grantees?’

Key dreams included:

• Abolishing extractive reporting.
• Rebuilding evaluation frameworks from the ground up.
• Using FMEAL to accompany organisations through crisis.
• Supporting funders—especially in the Global North—in practicing feminist accountability.

Participants called for a shift from inclusion to reparation, from oversight to solidarity. They asked as they dreamed: ‘How might we seed power, not just share it?’

From reflection to practice: Key takeaways for funders and movement partners

These are not just abstract ideals—they are actionable shifts. Below are shared principles and provocations emerging from the session:

1. From surveillance to solidarity

For funders: Step back from extractive reporting cycles. Center trust, not control.
For movements: Assert your role as knowledge-holders. Claim evaluation as a tool of self-definition.

‘Movements are the rightful owners of learning. Funders must follow, not just fund.’

2. Center the ‘A’ and ‘L’ in FMEAL

For funders: Be accountable to those you serve. Let learning reshape your strategy.
For movements: Use FMEAL to make your organising sharper, not just funder-compliant.

Accountability is not upward; it is mutual, rooted in relationship.

3. Embrace vulnerability

For funders: Create space for honesty by removing fear of funding consequences.
For movements: Share learnings—including failures—with courage. Vulnerability builds power.

Trust isn’t measured in metrics; it’s felt in how we show up for each other.

4. Use participatory methods to shift power

For funders: Involve grantees in designing what gets measured. Elevate qualitative, narrative, and collective knowledge.
For movements: Insist on tools that reflect your lived realities and priorities.

Power is not just a concept to track—it’s a dynamic to transform.

5. Let go of ‘success’ fixation : Deep social transformation takes time

For funders: Welcome complexity. Let go of binary indicators. Let be OK to make mistakes.
For movements: Make space for collective sensemaking, iteration, and pause.

Not everything can—or should—be measured. But it can be deeply understood.

6. Commit as whole organisations

For funders: FMEAL must be embedded in your institution’s culture, not siloed in a team or a consultant.
For movements: Infuse learning into your organising culture—across roles, languages, and access needs.

FMEAL is not a report; it’s a rhythm of being in a just relationship.

7. Rooted practices, expansive dreams 

For everyone: There is no universal model, but there are shared values—care, justice, context, and curiosity.

Start from where you are. Let the dream guide the method.

A living culture of cross-pollinated knowledge

Accountability in philanthropy today must be reclaimed as a political and relational act. It requires letting go of extractive, compliance-driven models and embracing feminist MEAL as a form of power literacy—an intentional practice of decolonizing knowledge, centering care, and honoring movements’ autonomy.

FMEAL is not a report. It is a rhythm—a feminist rhythm—of being in a just relationship.

To funders: Let your power be a platform for listening, not oversight. Use your position to shield risk, seed experimentation, and steward transformation.
To movements: Protect your stories, define your metrics, and demand partnerships that affirm your complexity and wisdom.

Feminist MEAL is an invitation to be accountable in ways that are liberatory—not punitive. It is a practice of collective becoming.

Possibility, when rooted in justice, always blooms.

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all participants who attended our co-facilitated session at EDGE Funders Alliance Conference in Bogotá. 

Shama Dossa (PhD) (Fenomenal Funds) is a feminist researcher, learning strategist, and activist with over two decades of experience in decolonial research, community-led systems change, and movement-aligned multicountry evaluations.

Erix Cortés (they/them) (UAF-LAC)  is a queer, trans non-binary feminist and anti-racist philanthropic advocate from Colombia. They focus on infusing philanthropy with a decolonial, transfeminist and regenerative flavour.

Diana Medina González (PhD) (Fondo Semillas) is a feminist researcher, learning strategist, and advocate based in Mexico. Her work focuses on strengthening grassroots feminist movements through participatory, care-centered, and politically grounded planning, monitoring, evaluation, analysis, and learning practices. 

This article is originally published on  Alliance, May 27, 2025