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.