Powerhouse funders like MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates have made big splashes in philanthropy, especially when it comes to supporting causes related to women and girls – and that can make it seem like we’re in the middle of a renaissance of nonprofit funding for women. French Gates, for example, recently pledged $1 billion through 2026 to organizations and people who are supporting women and families around the globe, as well as reproductive rights in the U.S. Scott has awarded grants to numerous gender-related organizations, including Grantmakers for Girls of Color, the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
But looking only at the high points, like Scott and French Gates’ giving, paints an incomplete, though rosy, picture of the current funding landscape for gender justice and equality. According to the Women and Girls Index from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, less than 2% of all philanthropic dollars support women, girls and nonbinary people. That number is even lower for women and girls of color, which is a dismal 0.5%.
“The second the global agenda gets crowded, women and girls fall off,” wrote French Gates in a New York Times op-ed. “When we allow this cause to go chronically underfunded, we all pay the cost.”
Continued underfunding comes at an especially volatile and dangerous time for women and gender-expansive individuals. In the past few years, we’ve seen the downfall of Roe v. Wade and other attacks on reproductive rights, dismal maternal mortality rates, the radicalization of boys and men against women, and attacks on LGBTQ rights.
One funder collaborative has been quietly working on supporting gender justice and women’s rights for 10 years. Gender Funders CoLab is a network that aims to mobilize funders to direct more and better resources to organizations working to advance women, girls and nonbinary people’s rights. It does so by engaging in advocacy, sharing knowledge and strategies among the funders involved, and supporting bilateral funding streams and a pooled funding initiative. Through its pooled fund, the CoLab has leveraged about $354 million for feminist movements around the globe since 2017.
“Our role is to be a coordinating space where people can share information and share knowledge and relationships. Then we can convene and say what the most strategic common role for us all to play [is]. Then we have a unified voice,” said Gender Funders CoLab’s co-director Keely Tongate. “I think the special sauce of the CoLab is [the] foundation of a common vision around mobilizing resources and being values-aligned with the feminist movements we support for people to then trust each other enough to take some risks… in their own grantmaking.”
The CoLab’s current members are the Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation, Foundation for a Just Society, Oak Foundation, Open Society Foundations, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Channel Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
“The hope is that by bringing greater coordination, we can leverage our resources and our expertise, and that we can also begin a process of identifying gaps in philanthropy… and then compare notes and be able to improve the art of our grantmaking as much as the impact of the work,” said Mónica Aleman, international program director for gender, racial and ethnic justice at the Ford Foundation.
“Philanthropy is still set up with a scarcity model”
In 2013, a group of feminists working in philanthropy wanted to have a space where they could work together, share ideas and delve deeper into issues surrounding women’s rights, gender justice and feminist issues. Together, they commissioned a study to determine how feasible their idea was and what the space would look like. A year later, the CoLab, which was originally named Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights, launched.
“Private philanthropy doesn’t have all these mechanisms and culture of sharing and collaboration in the same way that maybe the intermediaries and the feminist funds do. So a lot of the beginning stages was… breaking open that black box and saying, ‘Oh, who do you fund? And what are your strategies?’ And trying to bring a little more transparency into the network space,” Tongate said.
According to Aleman, the Ford Foundation – which was one of the CoLab’s original members – decided to join because it realized that its resources are limited and the scale of the issues it is trying to address cannot be solved by just one institution, even one as big as Ford. Instead, the problems at hand require funders to work alongside others, as well as governments, to catalyze change.
The CoLab is meant to be a safe space where people can come together and “not have to be beholden by the rules of traditional philanthropy,” and try models in a no-risk zone so that they can take what they learned back to their own institutions, Tongate said.
“We can begin to at least test the possibility of scaling some of these solutions that have been innovated by philanthropy because otherwise we can end up in a situation in which we are very comfortable prototyping projects around the world, but never really reach massive population groups,” Aleman said.
She added that although feminist movements around the globe have been at the forefront of driving change across a range of issues, feminism is still a mystery to many and is observed with some level of fear and risk in philanthropy. As long as that remains the case, funding for women will continue to be insufficient.
Aleman also noted that another common excuse she’s heard for why women and girls remain underfunded is the claim that organizations dedicated to these causes have not been able to demonstrate the impact of the work they’ve done. This is largely because these women and feminist movements measure their impact in more qualitative forms than other, more traditional philanthropy does, which is generally quantitative, she said.
“That measurement system is not always appreciated within the donor community,” Aleman said.
Crucially, Gender Funders CoLab takes an intersectional approach to gender, and it doesn’t just leverage funds solely for women’s causes. It also partners with organizations working in climate, democracy, gender-based violence, racial justice, economic justice and other issues.
“We’re living through really challenging times, and I think philanthropy is still set up with a scarcity model, in general, and with this siloed approach,” Tongate said. “I think sometimes in philanthropy, that’s not enough of an expansive understanding of what gender work looks like, and so people get pigeonholed into, well, this is only women’s leadership, this is only women’s economic empowerment. Whereas actually, what feminist and gender justice movements are doing is really expansive.”
For example, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CoLab’s pooled fund was repurposed to address the issues of the moment and awarded $350,000 in grants. And after the protests that took place following George Floyd’s death, the CoLab increased funding for Black-led social justice groups and convened with Black feminists to better understand how to leverage its funds to better support them. In 2021, the CoLab changed its language to explicitly include trans, gender-expansive, nonbinary and intersex people in its work.
Reacting to a shifting landscape
Gender Funders CoLab has had a lot of success in its 10 years. According to an impact report on its work, in 2015 and 2016, the CoLab advocated with the Dutch government to fund feminist organizations in the Global South to address the root causes of social injustice and catalyze lasting change. In 2017, the Dutch government began to fund the Leading from the South Fund, which is led by four Global South feminist funds – Africa Women’s Development Fund, Women’s Fund Asia, Fondo de Mujeres del Sur, and AYNI Fund/International Indigenous Women’s Forum. The fund initially received €42 million in 2017 and an additional €80 million in 2020.
The CoLab was also involved in the formation of the Equality Fund, which secured $300 million CAD from the Canadian government in 2019. It is the single largest investment by a government in global feminist movements.
Members of the CoLab have also noted that the network’s existence has allowed them to work within their own institutions to maintain and even increase funding levels for this work. Between 2014 and 2023, the CoLab’s members have committed more than $2.2 billion to the gender equity, women’s rights and feminist movements.
“There’s positive things,” Tongate said of the overall funding picture, citing French Gates’ and Scott’s giving. “[But] in some ways, we feel like the landscape is shifting to some of the really perilous times that we’re living through in terms of climate change and rising authoritarianism, and sometimes that does have an impact. The gender funding feels like it’s getting even more shrunken.”
One of the CoLab’s original members, the NoVo Foundation, left the network in 2020 after its priorities infamously shifted. This was a big blow, Tongate said, because NoVo was one of the largest funders in the space. In response, the network coordinated to put together a list of the groups and organizations that were impacted. Some of the CoLab’s members were able to go to their own boards and trustees to secure additional funding to fill some of those gaps. The CoLab has endured other shifts from funders, though some remain committed to funding gender work.
“I think people are pulled in so many different directions, and because we don’t always… have the holistic response or understanding of what feminist movements and gender justice movements are, how they’re working at all those levels, then they get lost in the shuffle,” Tongate said.
The Gender Funders CoLab has refreshed its strategy for 2024-2026, and hopes to stand up a new iteration of its pooled fund in 2025, which will prioritize organizations and movements in the Global South and East. One issue there is that while large international NGOs are often able to apply for and receive funding because they have large staff and budgets, smaller organizations cannot. To remedy this, smaller groups have begun collaborating with large organizations to share resources and apply for funding together.
The CoLab has established its Strategic Collaborations to Leverage Resources fund to support these joint efforts. Grants will range between $50,000 and $100,000, and can be used to hire consultants to write proposals, cover staff time to develop collaborations and bring together the organizations involved.
Aleman at the Ford Foundation said that it is imperative to recognize that institutional philanthropy’s existing funding mechanisms are not set up in a way that enables organizations to make immediate changes. But nonprofits backing gender justice may not have time to wait. “We have to recognize that we have to make reforms to philanthropy if we want to be responsive to the volatility of the moment that we are in.”
