Among women’s funds, two key areas emerged as possible points for collaboration and exploration.

• Organizational Transition and Growth 

In the global landscape, the calls for the need to resource feminist movements are becoming louder and bolder. Amid this, women’s funds are part of a growing movement of social justice philanthropy and are an essential source of financing for women’s movements throughout the world. New women’s funds join the movement every year, including, for example, funds in the Middle East, the Maghreb, and Argentina. While the overall grantmaking of women’s funds compared to other social justice philanthropy is small, there has been uneven growth among women’s funds in terms of their size (staffing) and budget. 

The challenge of growth, as articulated by the women’s funds in the collaborative process, is that often the growth may not have been planned but happened over time as circumstances, fund visibility, and resource flows changed. Such growth, amid the challenges of effectively resourcing the feminist movements of each specific fund, introduces more difficulties. One such difficulty is ensuring that the organizational processes and systems (i.e., grantmaking, finance, human resources, organizational design, digitalization, and security) are grounded in feminist principles as the fund evolves and grows. They also identified the process and practice of decision-making as another challenge, particularly instances when teams grow such that there needs to be a clear distinction within the fund as to where and when to engage in collective decision-making and in what areas to support and capacitate autonomy so that the work can move forward.

An additional challenge identified was related to organizational design. In other words, what capacities need to be developed (and grounded in transformative feminist leadership principles) to ensure that all team members are moving together and have the same understanding of strategy, process, and practice? Organizational design is also an important challenge relative to the constant clarification of changing and evolving roles, particularly during periods of transition. In relation to internal practice, the women’s funds expressed a real need to keep the team together such that they not only felt held and supported during transitions, growth surges, and pressure points but also that they were able to be more intentional about engaging with issues of well-being.

• Co-Leadership and Governance

Co-leadership, or shared leadership, has increasingly emerged among feminist organizations in resistance to leadership models based on hierarchy, particularly patriarchal hierarchies. As such, there has been an increasing willingness to experiment and explore leadership practices in process so that it does not emphasize a single role or person. Within women’s funds too, there has been increasing use of co-leadership models as part of transformative feminist practices. As articulated by the women’s funds, this is a practice—rather than the static identification of a “leader”—that strives to activate at different moments in collective, decentralized models while not completely dismissing the importance of accountability. With this exploration of different models, there is a steep learning curve, as the women’s funds acknowledged that there is much to learn about what the practice of transformative leadership would be in terms of the individual, collective, and systemic elements (i.e., systems, processes, and policies). Importantly, the application of these models would apply at the staff, board, and even grantee partner levels so that the learning and deepening of practice flows in multiple directions. 

Given that such models of leadership have less of a clear, predetermined roadmap, there was an acknowledgement of the need to increase capacities throughout (as in not once) to stay true to the very intentions of the leadership approach and practice.