Fenomenal Funds is a feminist funder collaborative using a shared governance model and participatory grantmaking to support the resilience of women’s funds who are members of the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds.

2023-09-17 No Comments

Feminist Organizational Evolution Collaborative: Co-creating practices to transform intersectional feminist funds to make the invisible visible

This group recognizes the inhTerited colonial and financial practices in the philanthropic sector that perpetuate disparities and oppressions. They decided to flip the paradigm on what it means to create change. This resulted in focusing on internalizing intersectional feminism and decolonization within their organizational structures, processes, operations, grantmaking, advocacy, and other activities.

2023-09-17 No Comments

Collaborative Learning on Resource Mobilization

This collaboration of six funds aims to address the lack of mechanisms for building sustainable funding ecosystems among women’s funds. The goal is to strengthen their growth strategies through mentoring, learning spaces, and meaningful engagement within the WF community.

2023-09-10 No Comments

Feminist Financial Resilience

Feminist financial resilience involves sustaining, adapting, and growing organizations to advance their missions using a feminist lens. This collaboration supports Women Fund Tanzania and Women Fund Z in building knowledge, skills, tools, resources, and connections for long-term financial resilience.

2023-09-10 No Comments

Feminist Fund Database: Emergent Group

As women’s and feminist funds grow, their need for systematic data collection and management increases, outgrowing tools like Excel. Salesforce offers potential but requires effort, time, and a cultural shift within organizations. This collaboration aims to provide technical and peer support for implementing Salesforce in grantmaking processes.

2023-08-04 No Comments

Theory of Transformation

Our Theory of Transformation captures how we see the Fenomenal Funds model contributing to change in philanthropic ecosystems. Transformation in our case is framed by feminist values and ethics centering on the needs of women’s funds.

2023-07-18 No Comments

Reimagining Power to Build Resilience

Reimagining Power to Build Resilience is a report that shares highlights and learnings from the Fenomenal Funds’ model capacity to disrupt the traditional power relationships of philanthropy – particularly focusing on how our 2021-2022 Resilience Grants supported Fenomenal Funds to respond to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that would not have been possible under a different kind of model.

2023-05-18 No Comments

The Four Outcomes

So what does it mean to catalyze change in an ecosystem? When the board of the Hewlett Foundation invited their Global and Development team (since renamed to Gender Equity and Governance) to submit a concept for a special initiative, they joined forces with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to commission research to inform the […]

2023-04-12 No Comments

Decolonizing knowledge in philanthropy

By Shama Dossa What does it mean to use power-building and feminist approaches to Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) in philanthropy?   This is the question we Shama Dossa, [Fenomenal Funds] and fellow feminist practitioners Clara Desalvo [FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund], Boikanyo Modungwa [Purposeful], and Ramatu Bangura [CRIF]) posed to funders at the […]

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