This blog post brings together the reflections and discussions of two collaboratives working on collective care and well-being as part of the Fenomenal Funds Collaboration Grants. The first collaborative brings together Women’s Fund Fiji, FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund, Doria Feminist Fund, Tewa, and MONES (Mongolian Women’s Fund). The other collaborative includes four women’s funds who have been working together as the Leading from the South consortium, which includes Women’s Fund Asia (WFA), African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), Fondo de Mujeres del Sur (FMS), and International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI). Together, these two collaboratives will look at four core areas: institutionalizing collective care in each fund, strengthening their care practices through collective learning, exchanging experiences across different contexts, and centering care in feminist movements and philanthropic spaces. 

Why is this an important issue to work on at this time?

“As feminist funds, we want to prioritize the care and well-being of our people and our movements.”

Collective care is often overlooked in philanthropy, but it is increasingly recognized in feminist spaces. In particular, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, feminist movements, especially in the Global South, have been speaking out about the need to care for each other as a political act of resistance and as a requirement for the sustainability of our movements. Layering on the context of the pandemic and its aftermath, we are experiencing multiple, intersecting, and persistent crises, including backlash and violence against activists, defenders, and feminist movements.

Pushing against capitalist ways of working and norms of productivity and expendability, the collaboratives working on collective care recognize the critical role that the feminist funds can play, ensuring that organizations incorporate care in their policies and practices. Playing a critical role as the link between larger funders and movements, the women’s funds participating in these initiatives can model this change by aligning values and practices within their own organizations. This means enacting and resourcing changes within their funds, supporting their partners to prioritize the care and well-being of their communities, and continuing to advocate for the adequate funding of this work for the long term.   

This collaborative journey provides new opportunities for strengthening women’s funds and movements, redefining and reclaiming collective care tools and practices that already exist in our cultures. It also presents a powerful opportunity to spark exchange and shared learning across different contexts and realities, given the varied circumstances and ancestral practices in different corners of the world.

“This collaborative journey connects our roots and branches towards new opportunities for strengthening women’s funds and movements. In our cultures, whether it be in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, or Latin America, we have long had collective care practices. They are part of who we are and where we have come from. As we delve deeper, we seek to look at, redefine, and reclaim the tools and culture we already have around collective care.” 

What do these collaborations hope to achieve?

These initiatives provide women’s funds with an opportunity to support and promote collective care, as well as a responsibility to understand and embody the care politics and practices that they seek to promote.

The collaboratives are interested in documenting and learning collective care practices from different contexts and co-producing collective knowledge through a feminist-learning model that values intersectionality and diversity. Women’s funds have expressed their commitment to honor the diverse, rich background and lived experiences of each person in the collaboration and to create opportunities to learn from each other. Thus, collective learning and exchange across different contexts is a key element of this work.

Internally, women’s funds have committed to institutionalizing collective care into organizational practices and policies according to their contexts and specificities. Embedding these practices will ensure that in the future the people who will lead the organizations also will continue this work, so future generations from the organization can build on that culture. 

To better serve their core mandate of resourcing feminist movements, women’s funds will also work externally, influencing the women’s funds and philanthropic communities to ensure that collective care is fully understood and integrated as a core value that needs to be supported and financed. 

What are some of the learnings so far?

• Collective care must be rooted in feminist principles, including a commitment to inclusion and diversity, non-hierarchical decision making, equitable power sharing, and subversion of traditional power dynamics and systems of oppression. 
• The various funds working on collective care are at different stages in their journeys. While this can make the coordination of activities challenging, it also presents an opportunity to learn from one another’s experiences. Rooting the collaboration by trusting in the process and each other can serve as a good basis for collective care work.
• Coordinating a large collaboration spread across different contexts and territories can be challenging. Women’s funds have committed to take the lead for a specific period of time or to take responsibility for coordinating specific aspects of the collaboration and to share progress and lessons with the larger community. Maintaining active participation and engagement throughout the collaboration will contribute to the sustainability and success of these initiatives.
• Sustained collective care needs dedicated resourcing. This means introducing care as a key consideration when preparing budgets and allocating a concrete budget to fund these costs. This also means advocating to other funders when applying for grants and putting resourcing care on the agenda.