Women’s funds play a crucial role in both funding grassroots gender justice movements and mobilizing resources. They face challenges in securing long-term, flexible funding to support both program and operational costs, striving for financial resilience within a short-term-focused, restricted funding ecosystem.
Feminist financial resilience involves sustaining, adapting, and growing organizations to advance their missions using a feminist lens. This collaboration supports Women Fund Tanzania and Women Fund Z in building knowledge, skills, tools, resources, and connections for long-term financial resilience
Inspiration
Women’s funds face evolving challenges and opportunities. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified existing struggles, but women’s funds responded creatively, making grants more flexible and mobilizing responsive funding. To sustain dynamic gender justice movements, women’s funds need sound financial policies, systems, and strategies to move from surviving to thriving. Feminist financial resilience promotes autonomy, enabling women’s funds to stay true to feminist causes without compromising due to funder demands.
The Process
Five elements guide this collaboration:
- Financial Assessment: Reviewing financial statements, budgeting, and policies to create a customized financial health dashboard and recommendations.
- Knowledge Building: Training on financial resilience pillars: capital assets, diverse revenue streams, and strategic budgeting.
- Plan Development and Implementation: Creating and implementing financial resilience plans, building organizational capacity through coaching, training, and developing a financial resilience toolkit.
- Peer Exchange and Mentorship: Participating in each other’s financial assessments and resilience plans, with mentors within the women’s fund ecosystem.
- Documentation and Sharing: Documenting and sharing insights with women’s funds and the broader feminist funding community.
Ways of Working
- Steering group meets quarterly for reflections, learnings, and decisions.
- Peer learning visits for mutual learning between the two funds.
- Two project coordinators within each fund work closely together.
- Decisions made by consensus.
- External consultants and translators contracted for training and plan development.
- Collaboration Partner coordinates mentorship and supports documentation.
- Mentor women’s funds receive stipends for their commitment.
- Exploratory Investment Fund supports practice of feminist investment strategies
What Does Success Look Like?
Success includes developing and implementing financial resilience plans, deepening knowledge of financial resilience, and increasing staff capacity. Policies and procedures will embed financial resilience into the funds. Peer exchange and mentorship will provide insights, deepen relationships, and result in tangible resources for women’s funds to assess and increase their financial health.
Between the lines
This collaboration builds on the Financial Resilience program started with Prospera INWF, enhancing individual funds’ ability to shift from surviving to thriving. It involves other feminist and women’s funds in mentorship, promoting mutual learning and advocacy targeting funders. The collaboration will share narrative and visual documentation of the process with the women’s funds community and the broader philanthropic sector, potentially through articles, blogs, or interviews in sector publications.
