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 ten 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.

There is also another influential factor that contributes to and is documented by researchers—the role of autonomous feminist movements. In their cross-national study of 70 countries across six continents and four decades, Htun and Weldon (2018) found that “a strong, autonomous feminist movement is both substantively and statistically significant as a predictor of government action to redress violence against women across all models.”

Their book, The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights Around the World, proves that a national autonomous feminist movements are a stronger predictor of legal and policy reform at the national level related to violence against women than the number of women in parliament, the presence/influence of leftist parties, or national wealth.

The large number of countries and the time covered allows this study to draw robust conclusions about the impact of movements. Analyzing data from 1975 to 2005, Htun and Weldon further explain that “movements are critical catalysts for policy development in all years, though their efforts are supplemented by policy machinery, international norms, and other factors.” Regarding organized efforts to bring accountability for violence against women, [national] autonomous feminist movements ensure that institutional reforms live up to the potential imagined by activists who demanded them and ensure that “words become deeds.”

Dismantling patriarchy in all forms, including misogyny, white supremacy, other race-based supremacies, heteronormativity, imperialism, autocracy, and colonialism, is critical to achieving transformational social, gender, racial, and economic justice. Humanity’s survival through the formidable challenges ahead depends on achieving wide-scale social stability and securing peace within and among nations. Gender equality is the social salve the world desperately needs.

The Global Women’s Funding Movement coined a term to explain this phenomenon—the “Woman Effect.” Today, it may be called the “Feminist Effect.” It’s the correlation of transformational social healing and democracy strengthening that happens with gender-inclusive feminist approaches to critical issues and opportunities. For example, national security is moored to women’s rights. The more significant the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society, the more likely a country is to be involved in war. Countries that oppress women are typically the ones to instigate conflicts and wage higher levels of violence when in them. Conversely, countries with protections from gender-based violence are vastly more secure in myriad ways, whether the issue is food security, risk of terrorism, or the peaceful resolution of disputes with other nations.

Women’s voting rights, reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights, women’s and girls’ access to education, legal equity, freedom from violence, and widespread economic independence all took tenacious women’s movements, some persisting for a century, to achieve progress. Massive gender justice victories have only ever been won by the insistence of women’s and feminist movements, as described in the next section of this chapter.

Chapter 1: Beginnings

We live in an era of inspiring women’s movements. Today, women, girls, and gender-expansive people are uniting in unprecedented numbers, forming diverse coalitions that are dynamic, agile, and highly effective in addressing humanity’s most pressing and deeply rooted problems. Today’s women’s movements, some well-established and others newly forming, amount to the greatest force ever summoned against gender inequity, patriarchy, racial injustice, economic injustice, autocracy, violence, and climate collapse. Crucially, women’s movements are modeling through their practices and building a vision for an equitable and just world through their impact. The emergence of so many women’s movements today and their rapid spread across the globe is in response to the rising rates of catastrophe, growing inequality, especially gender inequality, and escalating threats to democracy. It also reflects a growing desire for female autonomy and voice and a growing sense of self-worth across the planet.

Throughout millennia, women have united out of necessity and become the primary forces committed to undoing patriarchy’s self-serving systems and forging a vision for a reimagined world. This was true of the first known women’s movement, the Female Fury at the Forum, in 195 bc, when single Roman women united to demand financial freedom. It was true of the Women’s March on Versailles in 1789 when women united to fight famine and ignited the French Revolution, triggering a global wave of democracy that continues today. It is true of the Nigerian women’s movement against British colonial rule, which, under the leadership of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, challenged taxation and mobilized over 20,000 women as a formidable resistance that helped bring an end to British rule. It is true of the fierce modern-day women-led movements, including #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #NiaUnaMenos, the Kandakas, and #MahsaAmini, that tackle oppressive social norms, making society more understanding of women’s needs and rights.

By Christine Grumm and Stephanie Clohesy, on behalf of the Co-Authors

As we said yesterday, the stories in this book are born from a quiet revolution created in the partnership between women at the source of social injustice and women’s foundations and donors:

• Safetipin is a social organization that works with urban stakeholders, including governments, to make public spaces safer and more inclusive for women. Piloted in India with seed funding from the Lotus Circle, supporting the Women’s Empowerment Program of the Asia Foundation, the project has now been implemented in 18 countries.
• The Dr. Beatriz María Solís Policy Institute at the Women’s Foundation California trains women community leaders in public policy and has worked to conceptualize and pass over 50 new pro-women laws or local policies in the state of California.
• The Marea Verde, or “Green Wave” women’s movement that worked for years to legalize abortion across Latin America, has been supported by women’s funds such as the International Women’s Health Coalition, Fòs Feminista.
• Women’s Foundation of Minnesota provides funding support and leadership for the passage of the Safe Harbor Law and No Wrong Door for sexually exploited youth.
• Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. In 2002, Leymah Gbowee negotiated a grant from the Global Fund for Women for the Women of Liberia’s Mass Action for Peace. In Leymah’s words, “We women, we are tired of war.” Over time, the women organized collaborative efforts that led to reformers winning the war and electing Liberia’s first woman President (Ellen Johnson Sirleaf ).

By Christine Grumm and Stephanie Clohesy, on behalf of the Co-Authors

The Global Women’s Funding Movement has been innovating a new kind of philanthropy—one that has its roots throughout the ages—in how women come together to gather and share resources. The movement is guided by the voices of experience who have organized and formalized women’s “share culture” by creating women’s funds, foundations, giving circles, and networks worldwide.

The idea of sharing money, property, and other assets is new compared to the bureaucratic models of philanthropy common in our era. Moreover, it is shaped by egalitarian and participatory values, a belief that all people have gifts to share within flatter organizational models that help things to happen faster. To accomplish this, the women leading their funding movement have normalized the practices of trust, transparency, shared power, and intersectionality of racism, colonialism, sexism, sexual orientation, disability, classism, and casteism in ways that upend traditional philanthropy.

The Global Women’s Funding Movement has done this work with limited financial resources but explosive organizing, leadership, and authentic analysis of both problems and solutions from the ground up.