The practice of feminist organizational development anchored the work of two collaborations:
1. Calala Fondo de Mujeres and Mediterranean Women’s Fund: Because both funds face similar movement contexts and demands for stronger feminist funding infrastructure, they focused on what they could learn together about the contribution of transformative feminist leadership to organizational evolutions.
2. Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, International Indigenous Women’s Forum, and Women Win: These funds focused on collective learning to embed intersectional feminism and decolonization in their organizational structures, processes, operations, grantmaking, advocacy, and programs.
Impact: Meeting the Purpose of Better Serving Movements
Both collaborations produced booklets—to be distributed through the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds—that focus on their learnings from the collaborations. The aspiration for these booklets is to provide peers with best practices and lessons to guide their own explorations of feminist organizational development.
Insights for Women’s Funds and Other Funds
1. Integrate Power Sharing and Power Analysis Into Leadership and Organizational Practice
- Organizations need to have a genuine interest in collaboration as a practice of power sharing within (and beyond) hierarchical models and to bring conscious effort to recognize the power dynamics in their organizations. This can happen not just through shared leadership models but also through organizational practices.
- Mediterranean Women’s Fund shared the reflection that sometimes “the final decision is not collective, but the process is,” offering a profound pathway for feminist organizations to bring a collaborative twist to a hierarchical structure. Astraea reflected on their drive to seek “input from across the organization based on lived experience, identity, and organizational seat.” Women Win highlighted the importance of “systems and partnerships being participatory and reflective to ensure [that]…our whole community can input into our decisions and directions of our work.” Calala dispersed decision-making power to all staff: decisions that affect all staff at Calala are decided by consensus among the team.
- Co-leadership and flexible work practices that enable power sharing require careful consideration, and they benefit from a deliberative and participatory approach to enable organizations to define roles and responsibilities, revisit operational guidance, develop new policies, and formalize certain processes. Flexibility requires a well-defined framework and needs both industrial review (to ensure legal workplace requirements are met) and innovation to address legal lacunas.
2. Reflection and Learning Drives Feminist Organizational Development
- Organizations need to integrate practices that deliver reflection and learning at the individual and organizational levels and ensure that the insights inform adjustments of strategy and practice. Reflection and learning rhythms need to be built into organizational strategy, and operational plans and resources need to be allocated to ensure it happens.
3. Care Grounds Feminist Organizational Development
- The conceptualization of care needs to be framed at the individual, organizational, and communal levels. Building an organizational care framework requires dexterity, flexibility, and a capacity to meet diverse needs with an eye to equity among colleagues.
- Measures explored by participants included
- individual measures: paid rest days, organized healthcare checks, emergency funds to support staff working in different countries from their families to return home in moments of crisis, or working remotely from their country of origin one month a year; and
- collective measures: group activities, organizational “quiet days,” or the ability to finish early one day a week.
- Implementing a care policy also requires a tax analysis to ensure that access to benefits does not give rise to financial penalties at tax time.
- Care cannot be the responsibility of one person. It must be integrated across the organization and treated as a collective responsibility.
4. Diverse Staff Teams Require Political and Practical Commitment
- Diversifying staff, including through remote work, requires a political and practical commitment from the organization:
- Integrating political objectives into transition points is vital and ensures that, for example, organizations can consciously address historical biases in their leadership through recruitment preferences that prioritize redress. In this way, leadership transitions can align with an organization’s values and contribute to strengthening the movement.
- Balancing care in a context of working across multiple time zones can be challenging when working days include both standard and non-standard working hours.
- Investing in an ethical systematization of pay scales across different country contexts is an important component of any remote team strategy.
- Organizational budgets need to provision for infrastructure investments to support remote work, meet costs associated with translation to achieve language justice, and enable teams to work together in face-to-face contexts on a semi-regular basis.
5. Collaboration Is a Constructive Tool in Feminist Organizational Development
- Collaboration is valuable in evolving feminist organizational practice:
- Collaboration acts as a source of inspiration—not only in terms of exposure to new ideas but also in making the time to focus on topics that are often deprioritized in favor of programmatic work.
- Engaging operational staff in the collaborations was particularly important as they seldom have such opportunities. Participation in the collaborations expanded their understanding of the work of feminist funds and the role they play in philanthropic and feminist ecosystems, as well as enabling them to collectivize understanding—particularly useful in the context of realizing that some of their organizational challenges are universal rather than individual.
6. Collaboration for Feminist Organizational Development Requires Resourcing
- Collaboration requires resourcing—particularly, work progresses more effectively with facilitation/coordination, and in multilingual projects, interpretation and translation are absolutely necessary.
Leçons pour les donateurs
1. Investing in Feminist Organizational Development Strengthens Programmatic Outputs
- Too often, donors focus on programmatic funding and do not consider investing in governance structures and leadership models. However there is a need to widen the scope of investment. Although the Policy Governance model is prevalent among nonprofits and civil society organizations, including women’s funds, there is a growing shift towards leadership structures that enhance collective decision-making and community responsiveness. Resourcing these experiments in leadership shifts is important for organizational growth and resilience. Many women’s funds are exploring diverse models to promote shared power, reflecting their commitment to listening to women’s and feminist movements. This shift aligns closely with their needs, moving away from rigid, top-down donor models and embodying the adaptability central to the ethos of women’s funds.
2. Decolonize Leadership and Organizational Practices and Contribute to Funder Learning
- Donors can learn a great deal from the innovations in feminist leadership practices by integrating them into their own structures when it comes to power sharing and decision-making.
Insights from the two collaborations included the importance of power sharing in decision-making, integrating reflection and learning into practices, and embedding care at the individual and organizational levels. Diversifying teams and committing to ethical recruitment practices were emphasized, as well as the need for collaboration to foster new ideas and reduce isolation. Donors are encouraged to invest in organizational development, not just programmatic funding, and to learn from feminist leadership practices, especially around power sharing and decolonizing leadership, to strengthen their own structures and decision-making processes.