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For nearly two decades, feminist activists and movement leaders have posed a bold question: where is the money for feminist organizing?
This inquiry has catalyzed historic levels of support for movements driving feminist causes, women’s rights, and gender equality. Over the past twenty years, both private and government donors have stepped up to resource creative, responsive and flexible feminist funds around the world.
However, today, much of that progress appears to be at risk.
As many in the feminist community gather for the 15th International AWID Forum, our peers share that they are facing significant challenges, from funding cuts by increasingly restrictive bilaterals, to a downturn in private philanthropy, to fears of retaliation. The future of resourcing feminist movements looks bleak.
Still, we shouldn’t despair. As we look to the future, we must also look to the past. Just as feminist funds were some of the first to practice participatory grantmaking and trust-based philanthropy, women and gender-expansive communities are now pioneering alternatives to traditional philanthropic practices – alternatives that are rooted in the global majority.
Specifically, the past few years have seen the growth of horizontal philanthropy – feminist collectives, mutual solidarity networks, giving circles and mutual aid. These models operate outside the bounds of major foundations or bilaterals, and instead build off local or diasporic giving practices that are often centuries old and rooted in community.
When we ask where funding will come from in the future, we must not ignore these exciting developments. We believe the future will be defined by systems of support outside of traditional philanthropic institutions. That future is yet to be written. Who will write it?
We reflect with a sense of nostalgia on the early days of advocating for feminist resources, starting with AWID's landmark 2006 report, Where is the Money for Women’s Rights Research?
When that report was published, most women’s rights organizations operated on budgets of less than USD $20,000, and the funding they did receive was neither feminist nor flexible.
Over the next few years, AWID's research and other advocacy unlocked an explosion of feminist philanthropy. Over the course of two decades, we saw hundreds of millions of dollars unlocked from bilateral partners in countries like the Netherlands' MDG3 Fund and Canada's Equality Fund, as well as substantial investments by major foundations and collaboratives like the Gender Funders Co-Lab partnership. At the same time, organizations like Bridgespan began to offer strategic guidance and support to initiatives like Co-Impact.
That influx of money, in turn, spurred a proliferation of new feminist funds. These ranged from community-specific initiatives such as FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund, the Black Feminist Fund, the Red Umbrella Fund, and several Indigenous Women’s Funds to place-based initiatives like the Doria Feminist Fund, the Pacific Women’s Fund and the Dalan Fund, to name a few.
Beyond increasing the pie for feminist work, these 21st century funds have altered the philanthropy landscape by modelling different kinds of grantmaking.
Funds like FRIDA or Dalan Fund are not only powerful interlocutors, accountable to the communities and movements they serve. They have also driven adoption of models like participatory grantmaking, once an experimental approach practiced by a few (such as the Central American Women’s Fund), and now embraced on a global scale by established funders like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Porticus, and advocated for by institutions like the Ford Foundation. Other concepts like trust-based philanthropy, which are foundational for feminist funds, are now widely spread across the field.
While we can celebrate the past two decades of progress, we can also acknowledge the current moment of collective exhaustion.
Within the last five years, feminist organizations have faced profound challenges, including funding cuts from long-standing top funders and a broader decline in private philanthropy. It seems like every month brings new threats to funding for feminist movements, like the incoming U.S. administration's plans to cut $1.5 billion in aid, defund Planned Parenthood and challenge the tax-exempt status of feminist nonprofits. These stark shifts demonstrate how rhetoric is rapidly transforming into action.
There are glimmers of hope, like MacKenzie Scott's transformative model of flexible philanthropy. However, her approach seems to be an exception rather than a new trend among high-net-worth individuals. Despite Scott’s leadership, we are not witnessing a widespread "Scott effect".
Within feminist organizing spaces, these pressures have resulted in organizational restructuring, significant staff reductions, and scaled-back programs, leaving many feeling overwhelmed and expected to accomplish more with fewer resources. Faced with this overwhelming present, we find ourselves compelled to ask: what comes next?
As we approach that question, we hold a cautious yet determined optimism. As we think about the future, we start by looking to the past, and the very nature of creativity, flexibility and innovation that has defined feminist funds for the past two decades.
As we think about the future, we start by looking to the past, and the very nature of creativity that has defined feminist funds for the past two decades.
Just as feminist funds were some of the first to practice participatory grantmaking and trust-based philanthropy, women and gender-expansive communities are now pioneering alternatives to traditional philanthropic practices. And that is where we must begin.
The past two decades of feminist funding were defined by varying degrees of adoption of feminist principles within traditional philanthropy. We believe the future will be defined by systems of support outside traditional philanthropic institutions – that we need to look to the global majority.
One side effect of the abundance of the past two decades is that the global majority of philanthropic ecosystems have flourished.
This has been marked by the growth of philanthropic support organizations, grantmaking networks across the African continent, Asia and the Pacific,as well as increases in diasporic philanthropy, university programs dedicated to the study of philanthropy, and so much more.
This evolution has infused greater flexibility, opportunity, and funding into the sector, solidifying the infrastructure of feminist movements. We have seen the growth of feminist collectives, mutual solidarity networks, horizontal philanthropies, mutual aid and giving circles. Women are reshaping definitions of who can be a philanthropist, advocating for a more holistic understanding of philanthropy that embodies love, commitment, and connection.
Women and gender non-confirming led groups are also reclaiming narratives, histories, and lived experiences, notably through initiatives like Harambee-Ubuntu pan-African and Feminist Philanthrophies Initiative and Adoye, Love in Action, which document and center women’s philanthropic narratives and traditions. They are creating Feminist Dreaming Spaces for collective reflection, learning and strategizing about the future feminist economies and worlds that we want and deserve. By doing so, they are reimagining an ecosystem in which sustainable, equitable, and locally-driven resource infrastructures can thrive.
These emerging models redefine resources to encompass non-financial contributions and emphasize that safety and well-being should be accessible to all. Philanthropy, deeply rooted across the African continent and within diasporic communities, includes diverse forms of giving—horizontal, solidarity-focused, financial, and non-financial—that reflect the generosity and resilience of the global majority.
As the funding landscape evolves, we face pressing questions: What lies ahead? How do we resource our collective futures in an era of profound political shifts and intersecting crises? The future of our movements depends on our ability to answer these questions, and we invite our collective vision to help shape it.
The three of us come from the history of being in a similar spot before – a junction of what is next, where do we go from here in our collective liberation journey. And we have seen that research, advocacy, convening, and collaboration have been key ingredients for feminist movements to unlock unprecedented resources before.
We end with an invitation and a provocation for our collective inquiry into the future of resourcing. In light of our decades of experience and the challenges ahead, we pose the following questions: Where will the resources come from for progressive causes in the next 10–20 years? And, equally vital, what innovative models of resourcing will emerge to support progressive causes in this coming era? If progressive movements received the resources to work at scale, nourish and sustain rather than starve and survive, what is the world we want? And what are the resourcing models and pathways that follow from it?
We offer here several themes as the ones needing deeper dive, unpacking, visioning, and strategizing around:
There are so many more questions to be asked at this very moment. In this piece, we merely scratch the surface of themes and the stones that need to be turned over. We invite you to contribute to these conversations, which resonate across our movements and funding spaces. In the coming year, we will engage in a series of dialogues to explore these ideas in depth, including in person at the AWID Forum.
About the Authors
Angelika Arutyunova (she/her) is a resource activist and co-founder of FRIDA: The Young Feminist Fund and Dalan Fund. She was a program director for AWID Feminist Forum in 2016, and led the Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia regional grantmaking portfolio at the Global Fund for Women.
Amina Doherty is a philanthropic visionary and global citizen with a proven track record of building effective social justice programs. Amina has collaborated with governments, NGOs, activists, grassroots organisations, and philanthropists to support underserved communities with resources.
Leila Hessini is a global feminist leader with over twenty-five years of executive and programmatic experience advancing a more just and equitable world by working with organizations working to advance the rights of girls, women and gender non-binary individuals.
The authors extend appreciation for thought leadership and co-conspiring with these folks and special thanks for reviewing this article in its draft forms: Annie Hillar, Cindy Clark, Lydia Alpizar, Theo Sowa, Jess Tomlin, Ellen Sprenger, Swatee Deepak and Betsy Hoody.
It's been a busy year – and we're excited for what's to come
Ben Wrobel
