What would it look like to fund feminist movements at the level that's needed, given the severity of today's crises?

That’s the question Swatee Deepak is asking, alongside the rest of the team at Shake the Table. In their recent report Lighting the Way, they push funders to empower feminist movements – and help them understand how to do so. The report puts forward a vision for philanthropy to invest an additional $1.5 billion each year in feminist movements, totalling an additional $6 billion in the next four years.

Deepak is a founding partner of Shake the Table, and a long-time advocate for women and girls’ rights. She works with public and private institutions, and individuals and families of wealth, to strategize development and redistribution. For her latest project, she prepared a report commissioned by Gender Funders CoLab.

We spoke to Swatee about Lighting the Way, trust-based philanthropy, and the possibilities that lie in our world’s future wealth distribution. 

In your report, you mention time-bound funding as having negative effects on grassroots women’s movements.Have you seen funders’ perspective evolve on this as trust-based philanthropy becomes more well known?

I think so. The whole space of trust based philanthropy is always evolving. I think a lot more funders are looking at the longevity of their funding and changing some of the metrics, applying deeper understanding that if you're tackling systems of injustice that have been developed and reinforced over hundreds of years, a three-year or five-year intervention will only make limited progress.

To be able to change cultural, social, religious norms will take time and patience. Grassroots groups and movements need to be sustained over periods of time in order for that change to actually happen. 

Within the frame of trust-based philanthropy, one of the things that is changing the mindset of funders is you've got a lot more trust that's elicited in those relationships. Whether that’s unrestricted funding, whether that's much more longer term funding, there are now a number of funders which are funding for eight- to ten-year cycles. I think that's great to see. That's much more within an understanding that actually sustains support and interventions for change to come to fruition.

I think the other thing that's also changing is that you're getting a lot more elements of participatory grantmaking. I think some funders are recognizing that actually having people from the communities informed within the strategy development, within monitoring and evaluation, and within grant-making decisions is able to yield much more community informed approaches. You're seeing much more of a wave of that not just amongst intermediary funders, but also amongst larger global funders, sovereign funds, and a number of high net worth individuals and their new foundations; or new kinds of funding structures are also having a lot more community informed mechanisms as well.

Shake the Table has moved more than $1 billion to date. How have you been effective at what you call “unlocking resources” – what does that entail?

It entails a lot; and it depends who you’re working with.

If you’re working with philanthropists that are much more technocratic in their frame, you do have to look at reorienting their measurements, and their impact measurements and frameworks that you're building around them, for them to see that the change that is unlocked and enabled, fits within their idea of what change looks like; that it’s trackable, but has different metrics.

Meanwhile, bilateral funding, because it’s accountable to the taxpayer, has different frameworks and different measurements that are required for a government and treasuries to be able to track what change is occurring.

Then there’s the question of whether you’re working with people who've made their money in tech, or finance, or business development; people in the Global North or in the Global South, if you're working with men versus women; if you're working with the stewards of the wealth or the creators of the wealth versus the people who are inheriting the wealth… The resource journey changes based on who you work with.

A lot of the work is really deep listening to understand what exactly the funders are looking for; finding ways that the stories of impact click with what that funder cares about.

‍What trends are you seeing in this work?

One thing we are seeing is that women are starting to hold a higher percentage of wealth among ultra high net worth individuals. 

An ultra-HNWI is someone who has a portfolio of $100 million or more. That kind of size has traditionally been stewarded by people in the Global North, and it's traditionally been held in the hands of men. But that’s about to change dramatically. By the end of this decade, the percentage of global ultra-HNWI wealth held by men is going to shift from 97% to about 60%.

Stewarding or managing wealth is fairly new to women. This is reflected in the fact that a lot of financial products have only been open to women since the 1970s. 

But we do know that women tend to give and invest in very different ways from men. From a philanthropy sense, they see philanthropy as a lifetime activity and not as a retirement activity. They want to work in their communities and globally. They also want to be focused on more systems change work as opposed to building hospitals, universities or schools.

So I do think that a lot of our work is more focused on understanding and working with the people and the wealth industry at the forefront of that change; being able to share how that can positively affect the world in order to address some of the systemic strategies and balances such as gender equality and gender justice, climate justice, economic justice.