Gender Equality United Kingdom Project #47120

Rosa's Covid-19 Fund for the UK Women's Sector

by Rosa Fund

Project Report | May 13, 2021
Rosa's response to Covid19 - an update on the Fund

By Rebecca Gill | Executive Director

The global pandemic created a crisis for many charitable organisations - a surge in demand but not an immediate increase in income. This was particularly challenging for organisations led by and for women and girls in the UK and around the world.

Rosa responded to that challenge immediately. We understood that the organisations we invest in were already experiencing ongoing and significant challenges with funding. Many are working with (or on behalf of) women and girls with complex needs who face multiple barriers to accessing adequate support or resource. The pandemic exacerbated long established health and wealth inequalities across the UK.

Rosa's Covid19 Response Fund was overwhelmed with requests for funding - receiving 300 applications in 10 days. We awarded small grants to 72 women's and girls' organisations. The first round of funding provided up to £10,000 (British Pounds) to each organisation which we paid in the summer of 2020. We then distributed a final round of funding to 65 of the 72 organisations in March 2021, with each organisation awarded up to £7000.

Alongside this grants programme, we also ran a Fund dedicated to supporting organisations led by and for Black and minoritised women and girls providing frontline support to address domestic violence. We awarded 27 grants through that programme in the summer of 2020. Based on the findings of that programme, we are building a new fund which will support organisations led by and for Black and minoritised women and girls across the UK working on a whole range of themes. We have so far raised almost £500k and are hoping to increase that to £800k by the middle of 2021.

We have also been awarded £1.7m in funding by the UK Government to distribute to women's and girls' organisations working to address women's mental health and economic inequality. We are running this fund- the Women Thrive Fund - in partnership with Smallwood Trust, another UK funder of the women and girls sector.

Rosa is a small organisation with huge ambitions. We are continually seeking to address the underfunding experienced by organisations led by and for women and girls, either through raising and awarding funding ourselves or by supporting others to do the same. The global pandemic has had a devastating impact on the lives of women and girls around the world - the full effects are not well understood yet. This is as true in the UK as it is anywhere else. But the pandemic also exposed inequalities in health and wealth which had been growing for decades. All of the funding we receive is invested in addressing these inequalities in the UK. We are extremely grateful to everyone who has supported our work over the last twelve months and we look forward to updating you about our work in the future.

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Attachments:

Rosa's C19 Funds preliminary report (PDF)

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Jan 15, 2021
Rosa's Covid-19 Fund Update

By Rebecca Gill | Executive Director

The impact of Covid-19 continues to be felt across the world and lockdown measures in the UK mean the work delivered by women and girls’ organisations are still in great demand. Most of these organisations are delivering services and advocacy support online, with many supporting women and girls facing severe hardship, poverty, employment and pregnancy discrimination as well as threats to their physical and mental wellbeing.

The work of our grantee organisations is central to our mission and we spent many hours in October conducting calls with our Covid19 grantees. More information about the organisations we funded and the impact this had can be found here. There is also more detailed information about our Small Grants Programme in our Small Grants Insights Report.

At the same time as running our Covid19 Response Fund, we partnered with Imkaan, an organisations led by and for Black and Minoritised women whose members are organisations delivering frontline services to women facing violence and abuse. More information about this Fund and the organisations we funded can be found in this Insights Report. We know from all the work we have done over the past decade that organisations led by and for Black and Minoritised women find it far harder to raise vital funding than other charities. We are therefore developing a BME Women’s Fund which we are aiming to launch in the late Spring 2021 and are hoping to raise £1m for it.

The impact of the pandemic is being felt by women and girls around the world. All the emerging evidence shows that they are more likely to be suffering from the economic and social consequences of a global health crisis – this is particularly true for Black and minoritised women, for women in low paid and precarious employment, and for mothers. This will be felt for decades to come. The support that Rosa can provide to organisations supporting and representing women and girls is critical for reversing this trend.

All the funds we raise enable us to support them.

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Sep 15, 2020
Update on the Rosa C19 Fund

By Rebecca Gill | Executive Director

In response to the global Covid19 pandemic, Rosa was able to raise over £1m to support the women and girls' sector in the UK and we are extremely grateful to everyone who enabled us to do this.

We opened our fund at the start of June and were inundated with applications from organisations across the UK delivering vital services and advocacy work. Many of these organisations faced a huge increase in demand for their work, supporting women and girls at a huge time of need; at the same time as their own existence was at risk.

This attached report provides an insight into how our small grants programme supported the vital work of these organisations - each one is named at the back.

Rosa Covid19 Small Grants Fund

Our work continues apace. At the same time as running our Covid19 Response Fund (Small Grants) Programme, we raised over £500k to deliver a fund supporting organisations delivering domestic violence and refuge services run by and for Black and minoritised women. We partnered with Imkaan, a UK organistion representing BME led VAWG organistions. An insight report into this fund will be available on our website at the end of September.

Rosa is working with organisations across the UK women and girls sector in order to deliver a further Covid19 response fund. This will support organisations as they face the growing impact of the pandemic on the work they do and the girls and women they help.

If you would like to know more about our work, you can sign up to our newsletter via our website www.rosauk.org You can also follow us on Twitter @RosaForWomen where you will see our regular updates.

We are a very small, busy and passionate team and our work is completely dependent on the generosity of donors, so we would like to thank the many individuals and organisations who have enabled us to respond so swiftly at this difficult time.

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