Fenomenal Funds Learning Partner
- Countries
- global
- Status
- ongoing
- Duration
- June 2023 – May 2025
Feminist movements around the world comprise diverse actors and stakeholders, ranging from global organisations to local grassroots groups. Within this vibrant ecosystem, women’s funds play a crucial role as feminist philanthropic organisations. Different from women’s organisations, the primary purpose of women’s funds is to mobilise resources rather than providing direct services and programmes.
Work with the most vulnerable
Women’s funds have a long track record of knowing where and how to engage with and support organisations working to achieve gender justice in their communities, countries, and regions. Today, they are reaching women’s rights movements in some of the most challenging contexts and are at the leading edge of the most pressing human rights issues. These organisations work with those most vulnerable, such as widows, LGBTQI+ groups, and indigenous communities.
Feminist funding collaborative
Fenomenal Funds, a feminist funding collaborative that challenges traditional philanthropic models by adopting a feminist, participatory approach to grantmaking. Unlike conventional top-down funding, where donors often control the process, Fenomenal Funds utilizes shared governance and equal decision-making power among its stakeholders, including private foundations and women’s funds. This model shifts power dynamics, allowing women’s funds that are part of the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds (INWF) to influence strategies and resource allocation, fostering a more resilient and equitable feminist funding ecosystem.
KIT Institute has been the Learning Partner for the Fenomenal Funds collaborative since June 2023. As such, we have been accompanying Fenomenal Funds, its stakeholders and women’s funds in a joint-learning journey. At the outset of this journey, KIT designed, through a collaborative process of co-creation, a Learning Plan for the initiative, based on feminist principles of participation, care and inclusivity.
What will it take to strengthen the individual infrastructure and collective ecosystem of women’s funds members of Prospera INWF?
Starting in the spring of 2024, KIT Institute has facilitated reflections and storytelling for the initiative through the elaboration of ten case studies. These case studies have been co-created and reflect the experiences of six women’s funds and four collaboration groups engaging with the Fenomenal Funds model, and provide evidence for how core, flexible and pooled funding can drive resilience, collaboration and partnerships for a feminist future.
A final report sharing findings that span across the ten case studies and further investigates the Fenomenal Funds model was published in May 2025.
