Lessons from the Fenomenal Funds Collaboration Labs
Written by Dr Caroline Lambert. Dr Caroline Lambert has been contributing to gender equality change for over 35 years, in Australia and globally. She is a consultant, focusing on feminist twists on organisational development, strategy and impact and learning.
What happens when you hardwire resilience into collaboration? This inquiry was at the heart of Fenomenal Funds’ recent series of Collaboration Labs. In this blog post, we will share what we’ve learned about the mechanics of collaboration and what it means to pave the way for collaboration as a tool for resilience.
In their most essential forms, non-competitive grantmaking and a commitment to women’s funds’ self-determination create the conditions for trusting, vulnerable, and strengthened relationships. This unleashes the wisdom of women’s funds to generate projects that deliver innovative organizational strategies and practices, addressing long-term sustainability and resilience. And those relationships we created? They travel forward in time, strengthening the fabric of the feminist ecosystems locally and globally.
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Emerging as an experiment in feminist power sharing and participatory grantmaking, collaboration and resilience are critical to Fenomenal Funds. We are a five-year collaboration between private philanthropy, women’s funds, and the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds (Prospera INWF). Our governance structures (the Steering Committee and Advisory Committee) embrace power sharing. Our grantmaking processes subvert traditional competitive models. As we embarked upon our Collaboration Grants, we set a clear vision: to strengthen the members of the Prospera INWF as a collective. By facilitating connection and collaboration, women’s funds can co-create solutions to shared challenges. These solutions, in turn, contribute to the resilience of the feminist funding ecosystem and the feminist movements we support.
Our conceptualization of resilience is expansive—we think about it as access to both internal and external resources. Our Advisory Committee designed the Collaboration Labs to deliver dual outcomes: strengthen the internal resources of women’s funds through the substantive focus of the projects and build external relational resources through collaboration with other women’s funds. And our understanding of resilience is multi-layered—we think about it as existing within ourselves as individuals, within our organizations and projects, within the feminist movements we support, and within our own feminist-funding ecosystem.
Throughout 2022, the Fenomenal Funds Collaboration Labs resourced the women’s fund members of Prospera to harness their collective power, wisdom, and creativity. The Labs led to the launch of 13 projects in 2023 that focused on building the resilience of the feminist-funding ecosystem. Over the next six months, we’ll be sharing insights from the projects. Be sure and check back with us.
Relationships and Self-Determination: What We’ve Learned About Collaboration
From the outset, the Advisory Committee was equally focused on how the process of the Collaboration Labs could contribute to the resilience of the feminist funds’ ecosystem and how the projects themselves would generate new practices and strategies for resilience.
Power-Sharing Governance Drives Innovative Collaboration
The power-sharing governance structure of Fenomenal Funds ensured that the women’s funds’ different perspectives and experiences of the power dynamics of grantmaking were directly integrated into the design of the Collaboration Labs, as were the lessons of the first grant round. The Advisory Committee discussed how they hoped the funds would feel during the Labs and the types of experiences they would have. They captured these in the vision and guiding principles for the Collaboration Grant round, leading to three crucial decisions:
- Embracing a non-competitive approach: all projects that emerged from the Collaboration Labs would be funded.
- Implementing a co-design process focused on women’s funds self-determination and relationship building.
- Resourcing the co-design process with facilitation and documentation support.
Noncompetition, Self-Determination, and Resourcing Facilitated Relationship Building and Power Navigation and Enabled Collaboration
Funding rounds that pit organizations against each other are, by their very nature, anti-collaborative. The dominance of competition undermines movement-wide learning and strategizing, undercutting collective insights into strategy and resistance and perpetuating duplication of effort. We were guided by the funds’ own insights into the creativity and strategy of open funding rounds, in comparison with thematic or directed rounds, and committed to the idea of funds self-determining their own projects.
The decision to embrace non-competitive and self-determined funding set the stage to evolve more equitable relationships than normal. Relationship and trust building were key focuses in the first phase. We had anticipated that the projects would be able to draw on pre-existing relationships, and this was the case in some instances, but many of the collaborations built new relationships, which required additional time.
Resourcing our facilitators and documenters was absolutely critical—both in terms of their accompaniment with the women’s funds during the Collaboration Labs and the investment in an induction phase to ensure a deep understanding of the process’s vision. The facilitators created supportive environments for robust discussions and worked transparently to navigate the diverse power dynamics between funds (size, geography, focus, length of operation, etc.).
The focus on facilitating relationship building in a non-competitive granting context engendered both vulnerability and generosity of sharing. This enabled the women’s funds to surface thorny issues they might not admit to in another environment and to learn from each other in finding solutions. The trust that grew between the funds, and our commitment to supporting their self-determined project designs, enabled their collective wisdom and creativity to flourish.
Despite our efforts to properly resource the process by bringing on facilitators and documenters to support the funding proposals, we underestimated the time it would take to establish relationships, build trust, and iterate project designs. We extended timelines in response to feedback from participants. And, with hindsight, we recognize that we could have usefully resourced staff participation in the Collaboration Labs.
Adjustments Based on Learning are Vital in Paving the Way for Collaboration
The Fenomenal Funds’ commitment to learning and its embrace of responsive decision-making as part of its participatory approach to grantmaking were two other keys in successfully paving the way for collaboration. Both the facilitation teams and the women’s funds gave considered feedback at the end of each phase. We sat with the facilitation teams to reflect on what we learned and how we could redesign subsequent phases based on those insights. Without these adjustments, the feedback loop would have dwindled in the second and third phases.
This flexibility was only possible because the Fenomenal Funds’ governance structure advocated participatory grantmaking as an iterative process. We leveraged learning to drive responsive decision-making and meet changing contexts and the evolving awareness of needs.
The Three Phases of Our Collaboration Labs
Leveraging the Insights of Shared Power to Innovate
So, what did we do? The Advisory Committee worked collectively to set a vision for the process, advanced components of the work separately in project pairs, and then came together again to integrate the work and create a cohesive plan for the Collaboration Labs. They set out on a three-phase journey in which women’s funds were supported in exploring and choosing the issues for attention (Discover), co-creating their approach and activities (Define), and finalizing their plans (Refine).
Discover: Shared Interests and New Relationships
- The Discover Phase started with funds self-identifying topics of interest.
- We created 12 thematic discussions and selected skilled facilitators who could support the discussions with care and intention.
- Funds could participate in as many discussions as they wished to—and participate they did! One fund commented, “It feels like I am a child in a toy store.” We didn’t anticipate what a gift this phase would be. Connecting to each other, learning more about each other’s work, and exploring ideas together were exciting and inspiring, particularly for national women’s funds that had fewer opportunities to do so.
- We doubled the time frame for the Discover Phase to three months.
- In our view, our commitment to properly resourcing this opportunity to learn together and build relationships provided a strong foundation for the Collaboration Labs.
Define: Set the Collaborations Up for Success
- We didn’t just define the scope of the project; we also deepened relationships and explicitly built the culture of the group.
- We resourced each group with facilitation and documentation. This enabled the participants to engage freely in the robust discussions on substance and process.
- Our facilitators were asked to encourage funds to think critically, analyze their choices, and imagine expansively yet practically. They also distilled work plans for the funds to discuss and agree to follow.
- A critical—and rewarding—component of this phase was the careful way the funds cooperated to balance individual needs with collective interests. Trusting in the nascent relationships, the funds were open to complexity, integrating diverse work styles and leaning into the sense of mutual discovery, as discussions took the projects to unanticipated places.
Refine: Peers Offering Feedback
- As we leaned into the non-competitive nature of the grantmaking round, the review process was framed as peers offering support and connection rather than decision-makers perpetuating judgment and competition.
- The Committee’s reflections on the project groups encompassed what excited and intrigued them, combined with feedback posed as questions that supported further reflection. Concerns were framed as suggestions to problem-solve areas of perceived risk (for example, the scope of ambition, resourcing, and the practicalities of tasks such as translation).
- With their bird’s-eye view, the Advisory Committee was also able to identify possible opportunities for connection across the collaborations.
- The groups had the power to decide whether to integrate the offerings (with some groups sharing refined plans) or to let them go.
- Fundamentally, we trusted in the internal wisdom and logic of the project groups.
What This Approach Delivers
“This funding is responsive to the needs of women’s funds.… We were in the process of considering if the healing and trauma should be a separate collaborative. Then, the war started, and we concluded that this initiative to provide healing spaces was even more needed. We were in a very dynamic context and, at the same time, developing this idea. The process was flexible enough to allow us to consider the context. It further strengthened our motivation for the healing spaces. We are listening to movements as we create these collaborations, and it’s very meaningful to me that these collaborations are so much needed now.”
Practical Tips to Augment the Principles and Practices
In addition to the principles and practices we’ve set out above, the practical tips below also eased the work of the Collaboration Labs:
- It’s a collaboration:
- Don’t be afraid to ask participants for their help to problem solve with you as you operationalize the activity.
- Be transparent about the steps, timeline, responsibilities and expectations:
- Develop clear communication tools to create a shared understanding of—and comfort with—the process.
- Recognize that time constraints and workload pressures will mean people won’t always take in this knowledge immediately, so build in flexibility to enable people to come up to speed.
- Prioritize accessibility to enable participation by all—examples include the following:
- Provide translation/interpretation at all stages.
- Budget for reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.
- Shift meeting times around so those in Asia and the Pacific are not always penalized.
- Hire facilitators and supporting staff from different regions so that the Labs can be conducted across different time zones with greater ease.