Feminist Strategy Archives

Global Resilience Fund Offers Flex Funding for Women and Girls

COVID-19 puts pressure on all of us, but many women and girls are at higher risk of danger and oppression during these unprecedented times. A crisis like COVID-19 makes the widespread effects of issues like abuse, domestic violence, and rising barriers to educational, financial, and social survival much more intense–and often, much more deadly. The new Global Resilience Fund for Girls and Young Women seeks to answer this understated emergency with rapid, flexible funding to activist groups led by girls and young women.

The Global Resilience Fund is a worldwide collective of funders committed to supporting young women and girl activists with emergency funding as they respond to the COVID-19 crisis. (Image Credit: Global Resilience Fund)

The Global Resilience Fund supports informal collectives, registered organizations, and unregistered community groups led by girls, young women, and trans and intersex young people around the world. To reach populations that may otherwise have a difficult time obtaining funding, the Global Resilience Fund only offers grants to organizations with a budget of less than $50,000 per year. Successful applicants can receive “fully flexible rapid response grants” worth up to $5,000.

Trust Women: Desiree Flores of the Arcus Foundation

Editor’s Note: This interview in our Feminist Giving IRL series features Desiree Flores, Arcus Foundation U.S. Social Justice program director.

1. What do you wish you had known when you started out in your profession?

I grew up in a large Mexican-American family with farm worker roots in the rural Central Valley of California. I started out as a young program assistant right out of college at the Ms. Foundation for Women, excited for the job but not having a clue what the philanthropic sector was! What I wish I had known is the exact lesson I learned early and often in that position: that those closest to a problem know best how to solve it. We supported women of color organizing their local communities and creating national networks for systemic policy change. Black and brown women know how to shift cultural attitudes in support of reproductive rights, while HIV-positive women know how to structure data gathering to best test, treat and prevent the transmission. Invest in those who live it, and you will change the world.

Allison Fine Featured in The New Yorker

One of the many exciting things happening for Philanthropy Women’s community is Allison Fine’s bid for New York’s 17th Congressional District. Allison is a contributor here at Philanthropy Women and she brings immense potential for real progressive leadership to our government in the U.S., leadership we need now more than ever.

But don’t take it from me. Head on over to The New Yorker where Eric Lach interviews Allison in-depth and provides a fascinating portrait of how her leadership has been both fierce and nimble in the age of COVID.

From The New Yorker:

Activist Collaboration Fund Awards 15 Grants to WOC Orgs

The Ms. Foundation for Women, through its recently formed Activist Collaboration Fund, is granting $275,000 to 15 organizations across the country that are led by and for women and girls of color, trans women and girls of color, and indigenous women and girls.

Teresa Younger Ms. Foundation President and CEO (Image credit: Ms. Foundation)

The Activist Collaboration Fund (ACF) launched in late January and focuses on social justice and movement-building, including fostering cooperation among organizations. The ACF received over 160 nominations from organizations by and for women and girls of color from 35 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

NoVo Accounted for 17% of US Funding for Women’s Rights

With so much bad news right now, it’s hard to bring up another tough topic, but bring it up we will. As a therapist, I know that having the hard conversations is part of the process of moving forward. This tough topic is the news that the NoVo Foundation will be scaling back some of its operations, particularly those that pertain to funding women and girls. As discussed in last week’s post, As NoVo Downsizes, What Next for Women and Girls?, the question of how we will fill the enormous void left by this shift is just beginning to take hold in people’s minds and produce some responses.

funding women and girls of color — The NoVo Foundation has done significant work for women and girls of color since 2016, when it announced it would invest $90 million in women and girls of color across the U.S. (Image Credit: NoVo Foundation)

Women Leaders Step Up to Respond to NoVo’s Shift

Two important leaders in women’s funding, Yifat Susskind, Executive Director of MADRES and Mona Sinha, Board Chair of Women Moving Millions, responded to the news of NoVo’s shift in focus with letters to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

New Climate and Gender Justice Funder Announces Grantees

What the world needs now more than ever is more funders who understand and address the deep intersectionalities of human experience. Recently, a new funder launched to do just that. The Hive Fund is dedicated to supporting climate, gender and racial justice, with a focus on the U.S. Southeast. Launched in 2019, it recently released its Spring 2020 grant recipients.

Melanie Allen & Erin Rogers, co-directors of The Hive Fund. (Image Credit: Hive)

Hive supports Black, Indigenous, and women of color leaders who traditionally have had limited access to philanthropic and other resources. The fund’s mandate is to fund “visionary and strategic efforts of leaders and organizations working at the intersections of climate justice, gender equity, democracy, cultural power and economic justice.” Moreover, Hive aims to embed participatory decision-making in it grant-making process.

Funders and Women Leaders Join Forces to #EndDV in COVID

MILAN (May 20, 2020) — The coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns imposed by the governments in countries around the world have intensified gender inequalities, including violence against women. Gucci, through its Chime for Change initiative, and the Kering Foundation have teamed to launch a new campaign to fund nonprofit organizations supporting women and girls around the world.

“Now more than ever is the time to join together to protect the health, safety and human rights of girls and women around the world,” said Salma Hayek Pinault, who co-founded Chime for Change in 2013 and is a board director of the Kering Foundation.

As NoVo Downsizes, What Next for Women and Girls?

A bombshell was dropped today on feminist funding: Marc Gunther reports from the Chronicle of Philanthropy that NoVo Foundation has laid off half its staff, backed out of the Women’s Building project, and is otherwise downsizing its operations in the gender equality funding arena. “It’s about time other people ponied up,” said Peter Buffett in the Chronicle interview.

Yes, it is about time for others to pony up. If only there were tons of donors standing in line to pony up for women and girls. As it turns out, that’s not quite the case. And certainly no one knows that better than Peter Buffett.

The fact is, most male donors don’t share Peter Buffett’s former sense of enlightenment about the need to fund with a gender lens — not even close. So for one of the few men who truly gets it to be walking away from the table at this particular moment in history, all I can say is, wow. Just wow. Some leaders have a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver. Apparently, Peter Buffett is one of them.

Enrolling Now: Launchpad, a Giving Circles Incubator

By any measure, giving circles are one of the biggest growth areas in philanthropy. It’s no accident that giving circles are heavily female, and women of color are involved in giving circles at much higher rates than they are in traditional modes of philanthropic giving.

A simple giving circle definition from Philanthropy Together: “Giving Circles are groups of all shapes and sizes collaborating for change: like-minded individuals come together to pool their funds, share and discuss the issues that matter to them, and decide together where to give their money, time, and talents.” Giving circles enable individuals to leverage modest individual donations into a critical mass. They are by definition participatory, and the power of the collective provides individuals greater input and influence than were they giving in isolation.

Philanthropy Together places special emphasis on the role of traditionally underrepresented communities, noting:

wiseHer Launches Coaching for Frontline Workers

Put yourself in the orthopedic shoes of a frontline worker in the midst of this crisis.

Imagine you’re a young hospital staffer, supporting a team of other frontline workers through something no one has experienced before. On top of the physical and mental demands of a regular day in the ER, now you have to handle the mental and emotional load of an ongoing pandemic, figure out how to keep your team safe with dwindling PPE, and support the emotional needs of a group of people pushed past their mental endurance.

wiseHer launches coaching — *Kathryn Rose is the founder of wiseHer, an advisory platform for women in business. (**Image Credit**: wiseHer)*

When it’s your job to support the rest of the team, where can you turn for support of your own?

Category: Feminist Strategy