The Global Women’s Funding Movement Emerges, part 1

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.