The Global Women’s Funding Movement is like a prism to look through to find new developments in feminism and gender equality and a portal to the frontlines of women’s movements worldwide.

Over the course of time, women’s funds and the movements they support routinely face fresh political and philanthropic challenges and possibilities. This requires nimbleness, flexibility, and responsiveness from grantmakers and activists alike. This reality is often at odds with traditional philanthropic practices, which can be based on fixed plans, top-down governance, and little flexibility with the resources offered. No other realm of philanthropy works as the Global Women’s Funding Movements does—a decentralized, justice-centered, self-perpetuating movement of feminist funders investing in women’s and feminist networks and movements.

The overarching goal of trust-based philanthropy is to change the usual power dynamic between a funder and the social justice change agent to one of true partnership.

Trust-based philanthropy is the antithesis of evidence-based philanthropy, a prominent practice in mainstream philanthropy. Rather, trust-based philanthropy is oriented to “trust” organizations and leaders to do the work more than requiring evidence of a project’s impact in unrealistic timeframes and rigid reporting formats. Trust-based philanthropy also intersects with another feminist funding principle and power-shifting practice, and that is participatory grantmaking.

Participatory grantmaking is demonstrated when women’s funds incorporate grantee partners into decision-making to select new grantee partners. Women’s funds have incorporated this practice, recognizing that those who receive grants from women’s funds are on the frontlines in their communities and are the subject matter experts on the issues they confront. For this reason, women’s funds often ask their grantee partners to serve on their advisory or grantmaking boards.

Trust-based philanthropy emphasizes relationship building and the belief that the grantee partner is the change agent best suited to lead the way. In practice, trust-based philanthropy provides multiyear, unrestricted funding, empowering women leaders to implement their strategies and solutions. This allows activist leaders to make critical strategic changes in real-time, removing onerous paperwork that detracts from the most critical work and offering support beyond the check.

Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro tells a story she heard from an older woman from Brazil. Click here to read more!

Women of all levels of means must be literally invested financially in gender equity movements for the movements to succeed fully.

To ensure this, women’s funds have incorporated and created new philanthropic vehicles that democratize philanthropy and allow them to partner with women, girls, and gender-expansive philanthropists at all giving levels.

Women’s funds also educate and engage men, family foundations, and other donors, including governments, about the importance of applying a gender lens to grantmaking and programming decisions to build a strong and expansive philanthropic movement for women’s rights and gender justice. Women’s funds believe that philanthropy deserves to be a part of everyone’s life, regardless of one’s level of wealth.

For there to be broad societal investment in gender and racial equity, there must be a broad societal financial investment in gender and racial equity, and this will not happen by just engaging the wealthiest people. Philanthropy in Black communities and for Black transnational causes has a very long history but has usually been in parallel to majority-white institutions. Mainstream funds need to better address and fund the lived realities of women of color and people of color more broadly to achieve the level of systemic change required.

Women’s funds have actively shared learnings and best practices with each other across generations and geographies, making for a richer community of funds that evolve as they learn and strengthen.

One key tool the feminist funding movement has prioritized is the formation of feminist principles. For instance, on May 17, 2019, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice released its Top 10 Feminist Funding Principles. The principles share what Astraea has learned over the last four decades about supporting activists on the front lines to make enduring social change. When combined, these feminist strategic precepts have the potential to unleash transformative and enduring social justice victories. Funds such as FRIDA, the Global Fund for Women, and Fondo Semillas use similar principles of grantmaking.

These principles are:

1. Fund those most impacted by gendered oppression;
2. Fund at the intersection of women’s rights and LGBTQI liberation movements;
3. Apply an intersectional lens to break down funding silos;
4. Provide flexible and sustained core funding to activists;
5. Fund efforts to make social and cultural change alongside and as part of legal and policy change;
6. Support cross-issue and cross-regional movement building;
7. Go beyond grantmaking: accompany activists with capacity building and leadership support;
8. Invest in holistic security and healing justice;
9. Support work at the crossroads of feminist activism, digital rights, and internet freedom;
10. Partner with women’s and other activist-led funds to ensure that funding reaches the grassroots.

Women’s funds continue to flip the traditional philanthropic script by promoting and enabling frontline and marginalized communities to lead.

This has made women’s funds more agile, effective, cutting-edge, and open to innovation than traditional philanthropic practices. Unlike traditional philanthropy, women’s funds provide unrestricted grants and trust that grantees know best how to deploy resources. This is the essence of the Feminist Funding Principle of trust-based philanthropy that women’s funds practice.

Tomorrow, learn about: Trust-based Philanthropy

In the immediate aftermath of the birth of the Global Women’s Funding Movement, between 1975 and 1985, the number of women’s movements worldwide more than doubled. This triggered a virtuous cycle: as gender justice movements grew and multiplied, women united to form new, powerful women’s funds, which funded more women’s movements.

By 1985, approximately 35 women’s funds were in some stage of development. The Global Fund for Women supported the emergence of other women’s funds, such as the African Women’s Development Fund, now a strong regional fund that made $11 million in grants in 2022 and which also brings an influential voice to philanthropic discussions in Africa and globally.

The early funding provided by women’s funds were grants determined by what was needed immediately or as seed funding to pilot initiatives. Today, women’s funds work through diverse strategies that enable them to seed new ideas, fund pilots, collaborate on funding projects, invest in programs that can be adapted and scaled in different contexts and settings, and mobilize hundreds of millions of dollars in funds for gender justice from larger, mainstream funders. The Global Women’s Funding Movement is a revolutionary philanthropic movement that gives women, girls, and gender-expansive people a way to collectively wield their money as a source of great power for themselves and each other.

Nearly every great social advancement for women over the last half-century has been powered by women’s movements, many supported by this global women’s philanthropic force. This includes laws expanding women’s access to their financial accounts, laws supporting women’s inheritance rights (associated with greater agricultural landholding), and laws protecting women against sexual harassment.

A strong women’s movement led to the UN’s world-changing 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). In the U.S., feminist activism has had the most profound effect on advancing policies that have improved women’s lives and economic status, including equal workplace and education opportunities.27 The movements that women’s funds have funded have begun not only to close the gap in gender inequity but to strengthen democratic practices and improve women’s economic options and power.

Tomorrow learn more about: Democratizing Philanthropy

Gloria Steinem and the founders of Ms. Magazine wanted to do more than publish a magazine. They wanted to change women’s lives by supporting organizations and programs that helped women with employment, domestic abuse, reproductive health, and other issues. To achieve that goal, in 1972, Ms. Magazine established the nonprofit Ms. Foundation, which quickly established a reputation for fearless action. In 1976, they became the first national foundation to give money to shelters for women suffering domestic violence. The following year, they funded a project to defend lesbian mothers threatened with losing custody of their children.

One of the other great catalyzers of the creation of women’s funds was the UN World Conferences on Women in Nairobi in 1985 and, more recently, the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing. This conference was attended by 17,000 representatives from 189 countries and territories. In conjunction with the Fourth World Conference on Women, the Non-Governmental Women’s Forum was held in Beijing between August 31 and September 8. This forum was attended by 31,549 people, including 26,549 overseas participants and 5,000 Chinese participants.23

The power of women’s movements was so evident that women realized they needed to mobilize funding for the causes they cared about. The Urgent Action Fund in the U.S., the International Women’s Development Agency in Australia, and the Victorian Women’s Trust in Australia were all created by founders inspired by their experience at the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing.

When the Global Women’s Funding Movement was born, it was unclear how much, if any, philanthropic money was being directed toward women’s liberation.

To better determine the situation, in 1975, a small group of foundation program officers surveyed the level of foundation giving for women and girls. The results were shared in a publication titled Who’s Funding the Women’s Movement by Mary Jean Tully (Dec. 15, 1925 — Dec. 27, 2003, pictured above) and published by NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1975.

Key data points included:

• Of the 30,000 foundations registered at that time, only 20 identified women’s organizations as grantees.
• A total of $12 million of the $7 billion distributed could be identified as having gone to women’s organizations and projects and only $2 million for women’s movement and feminist projects such as addressing gender-based violence. That amounted to less than 5 percent of the total pool.
• Only 12 corporations were identified as donors to women’s organizations and projects; most of these gifts were $5,000 or less.

The research revealed that while generations of people were united and on the streets, demanding gender equity and equal opportunity, philanthropy—like society—was plagued with sexist and discriminatory practices, which resulted in it completely ignoring the systemic oppression of women and girls and gender-expansive people.

When the second wave of the feminist movement emerged in the 1970s, the concept of gender lens philanthropy—a feminist funding practice of considering the influence of gender, its impacts on people of all genders, and funding organizations that work for gender equity—did not exist in any form in philanthropy. Indeed, the foundation survey revealed that donors to charity and foundation directors hadn’t thought about how their philanthropic investments impacted women and girls and gender-expansive people.

Once the results of this survey were shared, feminist activists and philanthropic-minded women began organizing. Within five years of the survey, a dozen “women’s funds” had been established as nonprofit funds created and run by women to support women and associated populations. After the first funds were founded, women’s funds rapidly multiplied worldwide and flourished—as did the women’s movements and women’s empowerment initiatives they funded.

The Global Women’s Funding Movement emerged during the second wave of the women’s movement of the early 1970s. The origin story of the Global Women’s Funding Movement is a feminist parable—a testament to the magnitude of what small groups of dedicated women can achieve together. In the pages of this book, hundreds of years’ worth of collective wisdom is distilled, earned from first-hand experience of leaders in the Global Women’s Funding Movement by cultivating, researching, partnering, and supporting women’s movements to unleash seismic and lasting social change.

Among the first women’s funds were the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a U.S. national lesbian action foundation that would later become global in reach, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Women’s Sports Foundation (launched by sports legend Billie Jean King), the San Francisco Women’s Foundation (now the Women’s Foundation California), and Mama Cash, the first international women’s fund.

Each of these funds was founded by small, diverse groups16 of four or five women, independent from each other, each having the same epiphany: It will take a movement of women to raise the money required to fund women’s equality. These feminist philanthropic pioneers knew they needed to raise massive amounts of money to challenge patriarchal control. This money was needed to fund the formation of feminist funds, cover the money to rent or purchase gathering spaces that are essential for organizing, finance the budgets needed to amplify the call to equity, and pay for the essentials that sustain the feminist activists who show up for the fight, among other needs. Since that time, these feminist foundations built a worldwide philanthropic movement of women from scratch and, over the last half-century, raised the money needed to construct the strong women’s movement infrastructure that exists throughout the world today. In the process, they established feminist funding practices as a counterpoint to the oppressive, hierarchical, patriarchal-styled power structures they sought to end.