Three Ways to be a More Feminist Philanthropist

Alliance Magazine
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Giving Compass' Take:

• Alliance Magazine spoke with women’s rights organizations to identify three steps funders can take to improve their feminist philanthropy.

• Are you ready to engage in feminist philanthropy? Which of these steps can you practice in your giving?

• Learn about impact philanthropy by and for women. 

We spoke to 26 funders and nine women’s rights organizations about their motivations, priorities and the challenges they face, to see how funders and practitioners can work together more effectively. We found that despite sharing many of the same principles and ambitions, there is a mismatch between the needs of women’s rights organizations and what many funders are offering.

1. Mind the gap: Recognize that women’s rights organizations have been chronically underfunded and are trying to meet an increasing demand for their services. These challenges can be particularly acute for specialist organizations working with minority women. At Apna Haq, we support women and girls from black and minority ethnic (BME) communities who are living in Rotherham to escape violence. We have sometimes found that the needs of the BME communities we work with can be lost in the funding ecosystem.

2. Quality as well as quantity: Flexible, core funding allows us at Equality Now as a women’s rights organization to remain agile and responsive to the needs of the women and girls we serve, as well as adaptable to a constantly changing context. By one institutional funder in particular providing us with significant, multi-year commitments to our work, we have been able to plan for longer-term programming and organizational development, while maintaining a healthy accountability.

3. See the big picture: Women for Women International began receiving funding from Postcode Equality Trust, raised by players of People’s Postcode Lottery, in 2017. The relationship has been characterized from the start by a long-term vision, and willingness to listen and learn. Their willingness to provide core funding during the first year of establishing a physical presence in Iraq allowed us to create the infrastructure and systems we needed to deliver real change into the future, rather than fixating on quick results within the grant period.

Read the full article about three ways to be a more feminist philanthropist at Alliance Magazine.

Interested in learning more about Women and Girls? Other readers at Giving Compass found the following articles helpful for impact giving related to Women and Girls.

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    Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector: Evaluation

    If done properly, evaluation holds the potential to be a valuable tool for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in individual foundations and throughout the work of the field. Indeed, if DEI is to mean anything, evaluation must become fully incorporated into everything that happens in the work of philanthropy. Toward this goal, there is a wonderfully promising effort called the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, a five-year effort that attempts “to align evaluation practices with an equity approach — and even more powerfully, to use evaluation as a tool for advancing equity.” The Initiative’s approach is based upon four important principles: diversity of teams, cultural appropriateness, use of evaluation to reveal structural inequity, and advancing the community role in shaping evaluation. It is establishing critical infrastructure for embedding and assessing DEI efforts throughout the field and should be supported and embraced by foundations and field infrastructure organizations alike. Philanthropy needs to recognize that organization size and access to resources should impact considerations of the type of evaluation deployed. In particular, small nonprofits and those operating in poorer regions and communities of color in literally every state are often negatively impacted by broad, one-size-fits-all approaches to evaluation.   (Of the nation’s estimated 1.5 million nonprofit organizations, 72 percent have budgets of $500,000 or less, and of those, 61 percent have budgets of $100,000 or less, according to Nonprofit Finance Fund.) At the end of the day, the sector must recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach to evaluation doesn’t benefit foundations, nonprofits, or the constituents nonprofits seek to serve. Read the full article about social justice by Miles Wilson at The Center for Effective Philanthropy. 

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