Funding Feminist Groups Plays Crucial Role in Creating Social Change, Report Says
Published in Barron’s Penta | By Abby Schultz
Photo by Domingo Alvarez E on Unsplash
Donors who want to further social change should step up funding for feminist movements and organizations by at least US$6 billion by 2026, according to a report published last month by the Bridgespan Group, a U.S.-based nonprofit that advises philanthropists globally, and Shake the Table, a project of the nonprofit Panorama Group, that seeks to bridge social justice movements with philanthropy.
In “Lighting the Way: The Power and Promise of Feminist Movements,” Bridgespan and Shake the Table argue feminist funds are necessary to “hold ground against the anti-gender movement and gain traction in shifting power.”
“The solution is in movements—organizations, networks, and leaders that are actually doing this work within communities, led by people who have faced multiple systems of oppression,” says Nidhi Sahni, head of U.S. advisory at Bridgespan and a co-author of the report. “Because they are cutting across systems, they aren't being resourced at the level they need to be.”
Feminist funds are proven, effective, on-the-ground resources with a track record of creating change, but they lack sufficient dollars and unrestricted support to allocate funds to where they are most needed, the report said. At the same time, 80% of wealthy donors surveyed by Bridgespan want to support organizations that are creating social change and are addressing racial and economic inequities, Sahni says.
Donors who want to support systemic social change tend to give to specific causes, such as education or healthcare, the researchers found. But data shows gender inequities are “hard-wired into every system, every society,” Sahni says.
In natural disasters, including fires, floods, and hurricanes, for instance, “women are 14 times more likely to die than men,” she says. There are more examples of gender inequities throughout global healthcare, education, labor rights, and in areas affected by climate change, among others.
The report details how feminist funds—which refers to a range of movements, organizations, and donor collaboratives—have effectively cut across these silos. The funds include “organizations, leaders, and networks working together to change power structures that reinforce gender and other inequalities,” a definition the report authors took from Srilatha Batliwala, a womens’ rights advocate based in India.
Examples of successes include wins for reproductive rights by feminist organizations in Mexico, Argentina, and Ireland; state bans on nondisclosure agreements in sexual misconduct cases in the U.S. in the wake of the #MeToo movement; and strengthening of farmworker rights by major food companies in response to “decades of organizing” by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization based in Immokalee, Fla.
Recently in Afghanistan, several organizations, including the New York-based international women’s human rights organization MADRE, the global feminist membership organization the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, and Dublin-based Frontline Defenders, were able to collect and send U.S. donations to feminist funds on the ground during the takeover by the Taliban in 2021.
MADRE, for instance, sent donated funds to women-led and women-focused partners in Afghanistan before the takeover to ensure they could survive through the initial crisis, and continues to collect and send funds.
Efforts such as these could be expanded if feminist organizations received more money, the report says.
“Ultimately what we need to do is change societal norms, and the dollars aren’t flowing,” says Debby Bielak, a co-author of the report and a Bridgepsan partner.
To arrive at the figure of US$6 billion by 2026, or US$1.5 billion a year, the report considered data from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development from 2019, which found that women’s funds give US$100 million annually to feminist movements. According to Bridgespan’s research, donor collaborative funds focused on gender equity have the ability to deploy 10 times more than that, or another US$900 million a year, according to the report.
At the same time, philanthropic foundations give US$600 million annually to feminist movements. “From what we can observe, those organizations can absorb twice that amount,” Bielak says.
That combined additional annual funding—US$900 million from donor women collaboratives and US$600 million from foundations—is a “floor” for what’s possible, she says. “What we know is there are so many opportunities for investment.”
The report offers the example of Amsterdam-based international feminist organization Mama Cash, which funds women’s, girls’, trans’, and intersex people’s movements globally. The group was only able to fund 15 of the more than 1,000 applications from new activist groups in 2021.
Given the potential within feminist organizations, Bridgespan and Shake the Table recommend donors make multi-year unrestricted grants because “the work of transforming systems [and] movement building is multi-year work,” Sahni says. “Restrictive, one-year grants don’t allow them to plan.”