Flexible Funding and Rapid Response
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.
Women’s organizations can mobilize and reach the most isolated women, girls, and gender-expansive populations while working to sustain important gains made. Because of their rapid response and funding prowess, women’s funds have been critical first responders in numerous wars and disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy in the U.S., the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the military coup in Myanmar, and the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Women’s funds have become some of the most rapid responders in the philanthropic world, transforming first responder practices from the ground up with women- led, women-focused solutions.
Women’s funds have deep relationships, networks, and knowledge that can be tapped during a crisis to get funds quickly to where they are most needed.
Following the kidnapping of 276 primarily Christian female students aged from 16 to 18 on the night of April 14, 2014, by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram from the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State in Nigeria, women’s funds swung into action. Many donors were keen to provide funds to support the girls’ recovery and strengthen women’s organizing. Three funds—the Urgent Action Fund, the African Women’s Development Fund, and the Global Fund for Women—liaised to get funds to where they were most needed, using their respective networks to send funds for women-led organizing and response rapidly.
What is crucial about how women’s funds work is they fund women’s movements to pivot in a time of emergency while also sustaining funds to women’s groups and movements to hold ground on significant gains made through continued organizing. This example shows that the women’s funds recognize that women’s organizing requires different forms of support at different times. There is value in the urgent response, phased support, as well as flexible general support to implement long-term strategic priorities.
In their 2022 joint op-ed, “Ukraine Donations Go Further and Faster with Women’s Funds,” the CEOs of Prospera Network and the Women’s Funding Network, Alexandra Garita and Elizabeth Barajas-Román, explain how these two strong networks of women’s funds enable them to excel in rapid response and as first responders: “Women’s funds move money six times faster than traditional philanthropic channels, and we get it where it’s needed the most since we often fund at the margins, reaching nascent, small, or underfunded but critical funds on the ground that women lead.”
Tomorrow we learn about: Holding Ground, Gaining Ground