How can feminist organizational practices reflect the politics of justice, care, and collaborative leadership?
How can new models and ways of working and leading help women’s funds better support feminist movements and challenge patriarchal and colonial power imbalances in philanthropy?
These pivotal questions are central to two Fenomenal Fund collaborations. This blog post delves into the emerging insights from these projects, focusing on transformative organizational development from an intersectional feminist perspective. We explore the essence of feminist leadership within women’s funds and offer practical steps to integrate an intersectional feminist approach into internal processes and grantmaking. (Check back in March 2025 for their final reflections.)
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Two Collaborations—United in Thematic Focus, Diverging in Approaches…
The Discover, Define, and Refine process enabled two distinct but connected inquiries into the power of feminist leadership and organizational practice.
…One Exploring Feminist Leadership During Periods of Transition and Growth…
One collaboration includes Calala Fondo de Mujeres (Calala Women’s Fund) from Spain and the Mediterranean Women’s Fund from France—both facing similar movement contexts and demands for stronger feminist funding infrastructure. These factors have put the two funds on a shared path of organizational growth, with bigger budgets, larger teams, and strategic shifts. They share a common interest in centering transformative feminist leadership in their evolution.
…And Another Exploring How to Embed Intersectional Feminism in Organizational Practices.
The other collaboration aims to grow and transform internal processes through shared learning, with a focus on intersectional feminism, particularly working with LGBTIQ+, Indigenous peoples, and women. Together, the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, International Indigenous Women’s Forum, and Women Win work to collectively evolve structures and practices to better care for their teams and more effectively fulfill their organizations’ missions. Through this, they are meeting the changing needs of grantee partners, expanding into challenging geographies, and engaging with diverse identities.
We’ve Found Some Shared Practices That Make Feminist Organizational Development Work
Fundamentally, the funds infuse their feminist values and politics into their approaches to organizational development. Common to all is the following:
- an interest in collaboration as a practice of power sharing within (and beyond) hierarchical models,
- a commitment to reflection at individual and organizational levels,
- a focus on the power of relationships, and
- an integration of care at the individual, organizational, and communal levels.
Collaboration, Power Sharing, and Reflection
It’s Hard in a World That Funds Hierarchical Organizations…
A hallmark of feminist work is, of course, the commitment to greater collectivism. Our spirit of collaboration—in our leadership models and in our organizational practices and movement-building activities—is a conscious exploration of how not to replicate the hierarchical drive of patriarchal leadership and organizational models.
This is hard work, not the least, because of the dominance of neo-liberal economic structures that have privileged a very particular organizational model of governance: the Policy Governance model (also known as the Carver Governance model). While there are other models of governance, the Policy Governance model is the default by virtue of the contractual settings of most funding agreements—institutional or philanthropic.
The Policy Governance model stands in direct contrast to feminist collectivism. A governance board (with strategic and executive oversight) delegates day-to-day operational power to an Executive Officer. The Executive Officer enacts these delegations through a series of practices that distribute power and decision-making through a funnel—with those at the bottom of the organizational structure having the least autonomy.
…But Resistance is Possible When Collaboration Drives Transformation of Leadership and Decision-Making.
Although the Policy Governance model is prevalent among non-profit and civil society organizations, including women’s funds, there is a growing shift towards leadership structures that enhance collective decision-making and community responsiveness. 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.
Sometimes, the Final Decision is Not Collective, but the Process is…
This reflection, shared by the Mediterranean Women’s Fund and affirmed in the discussions across the groups, offers 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 […] our whole community can input into our decisions and directions of our work.”
…Or You Can Disperse Decision-Making Power to All Staff When the Decision Affects All Staff…
For the most part, it seems that the institutional power to decide is still vested in senior roles. But, in an interesting dispersal of power to all staff, decisions that affect all staff at Calala are made by consensus among the whole team. These types of decisions usually take more time to come to, and the different perspectives are incorporated and reviewed until the proposal “fits” for everyone.
“This means that the result is not necessarily perfect for everybody, but that we can all live with the final decision.” – Calala
…And, with Care and Deliberation, You Can Move Leadership Transition Points to Distribute Executive Power to a Collective Rather than an Individual.
The Calala and Mediterranean Women’s Fund collaboration focuses on transition and the opportunities they provide to shift organizational practices and infuse new feminist approaches. Both funds are committed to moving at the “pace of reflection”—taking time to learn from others, bringing these insights into internal discussions and planning, and supporting their teams to reflect on the past and generate new leadership approaches.
For Calala, this has meant a year-long process to explore whether a model of three co-leads enables the organization to flourish and realize a more collaborative form of leadership. Within this process, the possibility to go further in building a more horizontal structure emerged. The Mediterranean Women’s Fund is also building a co-leadership model, aiming to hire one co-director from the north shore of the Mediterranean and one from the southern shore. For both funds, the departure of a long-time executive director immediately preceded these explorations in leadership.
During a community learning and sharing session with other Prospera partners, Fondo Semillas highlighted the importance of transition points for reflection. After the departure of one of their co-leads, they engaged an external consultant to understand the limits and benefits of the co-leadership model. The process affirmed the model and emphasized the value of co-leaders coming from within the organization, having had a pre-existing relationship.
The Calala and Mediterranean Women’s Fund collaboration, along with the insights from Fondo Semillas in the community learning and sharing session, underscores the importance of evolving the understanding and practice of a co-leadership model. Co-leadership is not just about dividing leadership responsibilities between two people. The challenge is to balance workloads so that co-leads can genuinely share their thinking and move ideas forward together.
Transparency and Implementation are Key to Powering Collaboration
Across the discussions, transparency was seen as an enabler of effective collaborative processes. Without transparency (for example, ensuring everyone understands the context and intention of a policy or project), genuine participation and collaboration are impossible.
And as collaborative discussions gave way to organizational policies and procedures, Astraea reflected on the importance of balancing flexibility with consistency at the point of implementation: “Input, implementation, and consistency are keys to honoring everyone’s work by moving it forward.” This drive to implementation is vital, as a collaborative approach requires intellectual and time commitments from a broader set of actors than might otherwise be engaged, sometimes needing more time than is available.
Care as Intrinsic to Feminist Organizational Development: “We Seek to Put Life Before Productivity”
As feminist funds bring more focus to care, one of the key insights that emerged from the discussions across the project is that a diversity of responses is needed if you want to center care—it means different things to different people. Or, in the words of Astraea:
Astraea acknowledges that all staff members are unique in their experiences and bring their whole selves to the work, which is why we believe a holistic staff development process is the most effective in guiding individuals on a growth journey.
So, building an organizational care framework requires dexterity, flexibility, and a capacity to meet diverse needs with an eye to equity among colleagues. These considerations become more complex as funds embrace remote work and diversify their staff teams. For example, balancing care in the context of working across multiple time zones was identified as an issue. Another issue recognized was ensuring that organizational budgets could support adequate infrastructure investments for remote work to meet costs associated with the translation needs to achieve language justice and enable teams to work together in face-to-face contexts on a semi-regular basis. The fishbowl discussions also identified that 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.
However, progress is being made in developing care frameworks. Common practices identified across the collaborating funds and among the funds who participated in the fishbowl include
- individual and collective measures:
Individual measures: paid rest days, organized healthcare checks, emergency funds to support staff who are working in countries different from their families to return home in moments of crisis, or working remotely from your country of origin one month a year - Collective measures: group activities, organizational “quiet days,” or the ability to finish early one day a week
These interim reflections have demonstrated the power of bringing a feminist perspective to organizational development. From being concerned about care work to redistributing power within roles and within organizational hierarchies, feminist funds are actively subverting the limitations of traditional models of governance to entirely rethink and redefine the working world.
Check back with us in March 2025 to learn more about the evolution of feminist organizational development as a cornerstone to the development of a resilient feminist funding ecosystem as part of the powering feminist movements globally.