In a free-market economy, collaboration and financial success do not always go hand in hand. But in this remarkable Fenomenal Funds project, Women’s Fund Z and Women’s Fund Tanzania Trust (WFT Trust) have demonstrated that investing in collaborative financial learning adds up. 

In this blog, we will explore the value of collaboration for financial resilience and share some of the emerging insights into how women’s funds can strengthen their feminist financial resilience(1).

The Value of Investing in Collaborative Financial Learning

The heart of this project’s “value-add” was the opportunity for the organizations to learn with and from each other. Candid sharing of their financial frameworks and practices—and their aspirations for how they would strengthen them—was critical. It required each organization to pause and self-evaluate its own financial strengths and weaknesses, which they recognized as a rare opportunity in the fast-paced, grantee-partner-focused world of women’s funds. But it also presented a fundamental feminist challenge to the neo-liberal focus on “commercially sensitive information”—which often relates to the financial details of an organization’s work. Through the sharing of their financial practices, the participants set aside the competitive mindset. In doing so, the collaboration afforded the project partners a comparative context and co-thinking environment that they used to

1. expand their conceptualization of financial resilience;
2. provide a sounding board for each other on what they could aspire to;
3. deepen their insights into their own organizational practices as they explained them to each other; and
4. double the inspiration for the transformation of their practices.

A critical part of the collaboration was the constructive dynamic that evolved, with the partners reflecting, “This is the best relationship we’ve built with anyone.” Importantly, WFT Trust and Women’s Fund Z were able to leverage their differences effectively. WFT Trust is older and more established than Women’s Fund Z. The partners drew on these distinctions in agreeing to establish a mentoring dynamic between them.

Strengthening Financial Resilience: Some Thoughts on Organizational Practice

At the organizational level, seven key insights emerged to strengthen financial resilience:

1. Ground any work in an expanded understanding of financial resilience that incorporates both financial and organizational frameworks and practices.
2. Value knowledge generation on local parameters to evolve a practice of financial resilience that is responsive to local markets and context.
3. Embrace a whole-of-organization approach to work on financial resilience by
   1. exploring what it means at both the governance and operational levels;
   2. building internal capacity by sharing in-depth knowledge about the financial strategy and practices of the organization (while the “big picture” can also help people contextualize their day-to-day contributions to the financial resilience of the organization); and
   3. integrating finance responsibilities in all roles (not just the finance team) and ensuring clarity on those roles and responsibilities (this will likely involve human resources considerations as well as ensuring the organization has the bandwidth for a culture change process).
4. Invest in the right tools to enable transparency on the financial resilience of the organization—partners particularly mentioned the efficacy of dashboards in tracking the organization’s financial health and enabling newcomers to easily learn about the financials.
5. Invest in training and support to enable team members to be confident in using the new tools, and check in to see that the organization has the bandwidth to successfully make the transition to the new ways of working.
6. Shift mindsets (internally and externally) to seek funding for core costs in every funding proposal, and use scenario planning/strategic budgeting to make the case with donors.
7. Diversify funding wherever possible, including through ethical investments that align with feminist politics.

Tips on an Effective Financial Resilience Project

The project partners also generated insights into how to drive a project on financial resilience, specifically:

1. The project needs to move from learning to supported implementation. To do this, two components are critical:
   1. Internal capacity check—a frank assessment of both the organization and staff’s capacity and time must be undertaken prior to the project commencement, and project activities need to be aligned to match availability and phased to match workflow.
   2. Focused support—the project coordinator should play a vital role in keeping the project on track, seeing the big picture and connections that the project partners might miss in the day-to-day work, supporting relationship building, empowering the partners to seek solutions and expertise from within the group (rather than relying on consultants), and synthesizing knowledge. The partners particularly mentioned the role of their project coordinator in producing learning briefs. The briefs are a tool each organization can use to institutionalize the insights from the process, particularly addressing concerns about the loss of knowledge when a participating staff member moves on from their current role.
2. Recognize when you need specific technical expertise to learn new approaches, while also supporting a mindset shift to seek out the expertise that exists within the group.
3. In multi-language groups, interpretation and translation are vital.
4. Scheduling regular meetings (in this case, every two to three weeks for one or two hours) facilitate progress and enable a manageable workload when partners meet face-to-face.

It Takes Bravery: The Cost of Underfunding Operations

Throughout the project, the partners identified many common challenges in their financial practices and frameworks. And it is here again that the value-add of collaboration comes in: The sharing between project partners enabled them to shift their understanding of the challenges from being a “failure” of an individual organization to being at least partly the result of the structural pattern of women’s funds having been chronically underfunded for operational expenses. Of course, there are patriarchal dimensions to this challenge as well—with women’s labor also being chronically undervalued. 

The partners saw remedying the chronic underfunding of operational expenses and financial resilience as a two-way street. Women’s funds need to get braver and tell donors about the true costs—to both individuals and organizations—of underfunding operations and to share what they have learned from their mistakes. (To do this, feminist organizations must also address their cultures of sacrifice and urgency—see our blog on collective care for more on this topic.) But donors also need to take action: Greater flexibility in the use of funding is required, as well as supporting organizations to invest in physical and organizational infrastructure and processes and to transfer funding into reserve and endowment funds. This includes funding to support like-minded organizations to embark on collaborative initiatives and to value the time and resourcing required from iterative learning and reflection. If funders embrace this type of flexibility and value these types of approaches, women’s funds will reach new levels of feminist financial resilience.  

(1)The project team used this definition of “feminist financial resilience” during their collaboration: “a set of financial characteristics that support an organization to sustain, adapt, and grow as it advances its mission and vision while using a feminist lens.”