By Sara Ferree | Director of Philanthropic Partnerships
We thank all of you, our friends and supporters and Gucci CHIME FOR CHANGE, for your generous partnership over the past year. With your funding, we worked with three sister funds—ELAS Fund in Brazil, HER Fund in Hong Kong, and Sociedad Mexicana Pro Derechos de la Mujer, A.C. (Fondo Semillas) in Mexico—to advance locally-led mobilization and growth of young women’s leadership in their countries. Global Fund for Women envisions a world where movements for gender justice have transformed power and privilege for a few into equity and equality for all. And we believe that building a pipeline of young feminist leaders is critical to the sustainability of gender justice movements—and lasting social transformation.
In particular, your partnership enabled us to combine our core programmatic priorities of building young women’s leadership and strengthening the work of women’s funds. Women’s funds play a unique movement building role for gender justice: (i) they are able to reach small and emerging groups that do not have the ability to access larger sources of funding; (ii) they provide direct, hands-on capacity strengthening support for gender justice through trainings, mentoring, and convening; and (iii) they strengthen and build local philanthropy and focus on incorporating a gender lens into local conversations around philanthropy.
We are pleased to share key project accomplishments below.
Global Fund for Women received and reviewed proposals from the three local funds, which organize women across generations to empower the leadership of young women and gender non-conforming youth. We assessed their proposals per our established due diligence criteria, processed and completed grants management documentation, and made one-year grant payments to the three funds. Throughout the year, we conducted monitoring and received reports in line with our evaluation process.
Key activities achieved by partners include:
Fondo Semillas strengthened the “Marea Verde,” or “green seawave” campaign, to establish a large community, especially inclusive of young women and men, in support of legalizing abortion in every state across Mexico.
ELAS Fund provided grants to 20 young leaders under age 30 to attend its third convening for the program, “Building Movements—Women in Movement” and form intergenerational networks; 106 women and lesbian, bi-sexual, and trans (LBT) leaders and 13 donors from Latin America and the UK attended the convening.
As part of the HER hub platform, feminist transformative leadership initiative, HER Fund strengthened the skills and capacity 16 women and girl leaders from grantee partners that represent marginalized communities.
One of our partner funds, Fondo Semillas, participated in a Global Fund for Women led effort, funded by Prospera, to co-design a database package in Salesforce for women’s funds. The overall objective of the effort is to strengthen grantmaking, fundraising, and monitoring and evaluation capacities of our sister funds. As part of the project, we hosted a three-day, in-person deep dive (from 29 October – 31 October 2019) into the processes, needs, and design of database with the participating women’s funds in San Francisco.
(For additional information on activities by our sister funds, please see our January 2020 report.)
We deeply appreciate our partnership with you to advance the leadership of young women and girls for lasting social transformation—particularly in this global moment of uncertainty and anxiety due the COVID-19 pandemic. While we’re still learning about the novel coronavirus and its effects, it’s clear that women, girls, and marginalized communities will be particularly hard-hit. We are already seeing reports of increased domestic violence, restricted access to reproductive healthcare and rights, and a heightened care-giving burden. Now more than ever, we appreciate your support for feminist solidarity, and gender justice, and invite you to continue this partnership by supporting our 2020 project with feminist funds addressing COVID-19 and gender-based violence. Thank you.
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