In a moment where we are seeing many funders retreat or redistribute funds away from social justice and where feminist movements continue to operate in precariousness, collaborations between funders that aim to bring accountability to the communities they serve by strengthening their practice remain important expressions of solidarity. 

The Emergence of a Collaboration

In 2022, seven women’s funds formed a collaboration on participatory grantmaking (PGM): Fondo Semillas (Mexico), Women’s Fund Armenia, MONES (Mongolia), Women’s Fund in Georgia, Women First International Fund, Women’s Fund Asia, and Women Win. Forming part of the Fenomenal Funds Collaboration Lab, this collective effort was supported by a multi-year grant that enabled the group to deepen their learning, strengthen their systems, and build community.

The seeds of this collaboration were planted some months prior in the emergence of a Community of Practice on Participatory Grantmaking sparked by a wider number of women’s funds and supported by the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds. The Fenomenal Funds Collaboration Lab then offered a space for interested women’s funds to access resources to deepen their collective practice. 

The collaboration supported the sharing of learning, exchange, and documentation of practices with other women’s funds and the broader philanthropic sector. For the participating funds, PGM serves as an important vehicle to strengthen relationships with current partners and work towards a more just distribution of resources and power. 

Women’s and Feminist Funds and Participatory Grantmaking 

Women’s and feminist funds have had a long history with PGM: Many women’s funds were founded by activists with lived experience in feminist organizing, and most work closely with advisors active in social movements who help shape their strategies and grantmaking decisions. Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres, founded in 2003, is one of the earliest PGM models, inviting applicants to engage in resource allocation initially via in-person processes in Nicaragua. It was followed by FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund, which the Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres model inspired. FRIDA adapted the first global multilingual participatory virtual voting model of its type. More recent examples include Mama Cash, which has been a fully participatory grantmaker since 2021, and Equality Fund, which has experimented with different models across their funding. Of the 48 members of the Prospera network, more than half are using PGM across their work.

For women’s and feminist funds, PGM aims to challenge the many contradictions implicit in philanthropy, working to distribute resources to movements as a political act. Philanthropy historically places emphasis on grant decisions being made by people who are either wealth holders or direct representatives of wealth holders. The solicitation of a grant traditionally involves a grant seeker being required to make a case for their work and use of funds that aligns with the interests and parameters of the wealth holder. PGM has emerged from a very different premise that is both practical and political. The assumption that wealth holders (or their representatives) should be empowered to make grant decisions is turned on its head, and the grant seekers are recognized as having the knowledge necessary to make sound decisions about where and how funding should be allocated. 

Women’s funds practice PGM as a tool for experimentation in grantmaking by provoking conversations, exploring different ways of decision-making, and grappling with power. On a broader level, PGM can support building muscle for democratic cooperation. It is particularly important to actively practice participation and power sharing when living under autocratic regimes and repressive societies where people are forced into closed, competing, noncollaborative modes. As such, an intentional PGM practice has the potential to build connective tissue among fragmented movements and interrelated social struggles by engaging activists in the joint decision-making processes.

Gohar from Women’s Fund Armenia noted that “participatory grantmaking is a cornerstone of feminist philanthropy and a tool to challenge mainstream and traditional grantmaking processes.” 

In the last few years, PGM has gained visibility in philanthropy, though arguably, the diverse models of women’s funds remain less visible and, in some cases, underrecognized. This collaboration aims to change that by documenting their practices, adaptability, and commitment to power sharing. 

What Has the Collaboration Looked Like?

Throughout the collaboration, the group met monthly for virtual learning sessions and in-person convenings twice, once in Tbilisi, Georgia, and another time in Bangkok, Thailand. These spaces enabled the group to explore different models, grapple with political, practical, and technical needs, and dive deep into the reality of practicing PGM at a moment of intersecting crises. 

Uditi from Women Win spoke of the critical “loop between learning within the fund and the collaborative. Bringing discussions from the collaborative back to colleagues in the fund has been valuable. Women Win is exploring what they can learn from other funds’ approaches and how they can improve their practices.”

The diversity of funds in the group—four national funds, one regional, and two multiregional/thematic-focused funds—enabled a range of models, constituencies, and experiences to be shared. The collaboration significantly impacted their own individual and organizational practices, strengthening understanding and implementation of PGM across different contexts and stages. Hearing from each other enabled them to fast-track their learning and test ideas from other contexts and models. 

As shared by Women’s Fund in Georgia, “The PGM collaboration was one of the biggest catalysts of internal change for WFG. The exchange and learning among participant organizations were very important, as they provided fresh perspectives and valuable insights. The funds engaged in productive discussions, offering advice and constructive feedback on each other’s work, which established a solid basis for WFG to advance the PGM process.”

Throughout the last few years, the collaborative’s facilitation was stewarded and supported by a Coordinator, Mercy Otekra. Reflecting on the value of the collaboration, Mercy shared: “It’s been empowering to witness the conversations around [how] participatory grantmaking and feminist philanthropy move from impact and outcomes to sustainability of movements in radical ways.”

The collaborative adopted a series of core principles of feminist philanthropy, including: 

• core funding and support, 
• a clear grantmaking process, 
• holistic resourcing beyond money, 
• intersectional funding,  
• and long-term, trust-based, flexible funding. 

Connected to these principles are several core learnings that have emerged from the collaboration; some of these include: 

• Communication is critical.

Grantees may see funders as all-powerful, inhibiting honest feedback. Creating safe spaces helps address this power dynamic and fosters mutual understanding. Clear boundaries, dates, and processes are crucial for trust building and reducing stress for staff about unrealistic expectations. 

• Accessibility and language justice matter.

Language justice is critical in application and review processes, advisory bodies, and relationships with grantees. However, with high application volumes and linguistic diversity, this remains a challenge. The level of accessibility determines which communities receive funding. Some funds are exploring AI-based platforms while remaining mindful of value misalignments, risks, and limitations.

• It’s important to go beyond the “depth versus scale” binary.

Determining how many grantee-partners a fund can support while responding to growing movement needs is a recurring dilemma. Are deep relationships possible at scale? What support beyond funding is needed in changing contexts? This raises key questions about long-term funding, the ending of some funding relationships and the beginning of new ones, and whether women’s funds are responding as an ecosystem, supporting grantees’ access to other funding sources. How can source funders better sustain this ecosystem approach? 

• PGM is a political process toward sharing power with communities. 

At the AWID Forum in December 2024, funds held discussions with advisors, grantees, and leadership to deepen the understanding of PGM, explore structural shifts, and strengthen shared decision-making. PGM is not just a grantmaking practice—it reconfigures traditional structures to be more open and collaborative. While difficult at times, sitting in discomfort, hearing critiques directly from partners, and engaging in collective spaces build trust and accountability in transformative ways. 

• Value collaboration instead of competition.

As civic spaces shrink and progressive movements face massive defunding, women’s funds remain committed to solidarity over competition. They explore noncompetitive grant renewal processes, long-term funding without creating gatekeepers, the filling of funding gaps, and meaningful due diligence. Philanthropy has historically fueled competition among movements, and limited funding makes this tension worse. A stronger commitment from donors is needed to sustain transformative PGM in the long term.

Takeaways for the Donor Community

This collaboration has brought together decades of experience, trial and error, reflection, and learning about PGM from the participating women’s funds and the movements they serve. Our learnings as facilitators and witnesses of this collaboration led us to a few simple and meaningful takeaways: 

• Participation Requires Resources. To maintain these critical efforts to be in meaningful dialogue with communities and movements and to compensate for the time and expertise of activists in PGM, donors must resource participatory practices in abundance. 
• Flexibility and Trust Are Fundamental. Every process and context are different, and they change over time. The more funders understand movements and their realities, the greater their trust in how grant funds are used. PGM has no fixed recipe; it evolves, as seen in the practitioners’ experiences.
• Participation Is a Lived Experience. Funders should engage in PGM on equal footing with movement partners to better understand power sharing and trust building. While it may be tempting to exclude large private funders from conversations on decolonizing philanthropy, their participation is crucial. By finding ways to better understand their crafts, they are able to experience shared decision-making and its impact on grassroots movements.
• Advisory Roles Make a Difference. The inclusion of community representatives has had a noticeable impact on grantmaking. However, participation depends on language justice and fair compensation, which funders must support. And we should be open to genuine conversations around gatekeeping and reinforcing power through structures. 
• Technology Needs Investment. Setting up and running participatory systems is costly. Funders should help develop dedicated PGM technology that does not generate risk that can be shared across organizations.

Back to the Root: Women and Feminist Funds and Accountability to Their Constituency 

With the increased adoption of participatory practices across broader philanthropy in the last decade, the risk of developing depoliticized and technocratic processes persists. A participatory process with no clear connection to the broader political vision for transformation will likely fall short of PGM’s potential to spur change through both processes and outcomes.

This collaboration offered a much-needed space for women’s funds to grapple in honest and vulnerable ways about their practice of PGM and the power that comes with resources, to share what is working and what is not, to experiment with different platforms and technology, to reflect on contradictions and shortfalls, and to advance their work together. Co-creating more meaningful spaces for collaboration will likely lead to more dynamic, honest, and effective practices.

In a time when feminist philanthropy is questionably in peril, with many funders pulling back from past commitments and defunding work, participatory processes can open much-needed dialogue and strengthen accountability between movements and funders. Women’s and feminist funds continue to be some of the original funders breaking ground in this space, creatively experimenting with new models to distribute power and democratize decisions. They still have much to bring to the broader philanthropic table.  

Shuchi Tripathi, Women’s Fund Asia put it succinctly: “Together, we can carve a path towards challenging traditional, top-down approaches and build a stronger case for feminist participatory grantmaking as a more just, equitable, and effective way of resourcing for long-term change. What makes participatory grantmaking unique for us as [a] feminist fund is our openness to mutual learning, our flexibility to adapt based on changing and emerging needs, and our clarity of purpose in facilitating the flow of funds where communities have a strong voice in deciding how resources are used.”