Democratizing Philanthropy
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.
By creating philanthropic vehicles that enable all women and girls and gender-expansive people to be philanthropists, women’s funds ensure that everyone can be an influential feminist funder, explains co-author Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro, former President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women.She observes: “These funds, these movements that handle money, serve the women’s movement. They are providing a service for feminist issues. They are not the owners of the money in the sense of the ones who say, I’m going to be giving all this money, but they gather money together. Then, they enable that money, with the participation of the people who receive it, to do the most to improve the lives of women and girls.”
With the flourishing of women’s funds came the opportunity to build collaboration, learning, and networks between the funds. In 1990, more than 70 women from 20 established women’s funds, including representatives from the Netherlands and France, met outside of Washington, DC, to discuss values, goals, and concerns regarding the founding of an umbrella fund. As a result of the convening, the Women’s Funding Network (WFN), initially called the National Network of Women’s Funds, was established as a membership-based fund that could act as a collaborative network for women’s funds throughout the United States and globally.
A decade after the founding of WFN, in 2000, another powerful fund network was formed—the International Network of Women’s Funds (now called Prospera)—to be a global fund network with leadership, presence, and voice in the southern hemisphere.
Prospera has always focused more on supporting women’s funds and feminist funds in the Global South, and WFN has had a much greater focus on supporting women’s funds and feminist funds in the U.S. However, WFN does have women’s funds from other countries as members, as well as U.S. funds that focus on funding internationally. Prospera went on to sustain the work of funds from around the world whose early development and growth were funded and supported by Mama Cash and the Global Fund for Women.
During these 25 years, between 1985 and 2010, after the creation of these two strong collaborative networks, the number of women’s funds surged worldwide: 71 percent of women’s funds operating today were formed during this time. Over 150 women’s funds are represented in these two strong networks, spanning up to 100 countries representing every continent.
Since its inception, the Global Women’s Funding Movement has functioned as a dedicated and highly focused operating system within the decentralized women’s movement, rapidly gathering and channeling to women’s movements the resources they need to succeed in the form of money, guidance, and connections.
Over the last half-century, the Global Women’s Funding Movement has become a collective support system for global grassroots women’s movements and a convening force for its collective efforts. Led by a diverse and influential network of highly skilled CEOs, philanthropists, and women’s rights activists drawn from throughout the world, Women’s Funds work as a highly communicative team to fund fierce and effective women’s movements across the world. Women’s funds have significantly influenced paradigm shifts in the global philanthropic landscape for the last 20 years. This has included demanding more and better resources for the Global South and advocating for a shift in power to the Global South and East. This includes establishing coalitions of northern and southern philanthropic funders.29
To date, women’s funds have invested over a billion dollars in gender equity efforts and women’s movements. Beyond that, they have catalyzed hundreds of millions more in funding from mainstream philanthropy and the public sector to fuel gender equity worldwide. The growing success of the Global Women’s Funding Movement has led to a virtuous cycle: by creating stronger, more independent women with more wealth and cultivating them to invest back into women’s rights and women’s movements, we have created the next generation of even stronger, more independent women with even greater wealth. These women inherit the power to invest in women’s rights and movements so that the virtuous cycle continues.
As Chris Grumm, CEO of the Women’s Funding Movement (2000–2011), explained: “Our vision propels us to raise enough capital to fund the kind of social change that can be passed from generation to generation. Our dreams must be big and bold. We must be willing to have visions so vivid and real that we can see an end to the violence against women or the eradication of poverty across the globe.”
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