Can You Build It?
Feminist movements are not waiting for the future, they are making it. It’s never easy or linear. But in an uncertain world, we choose to engage, experiment, and create. We build.
Delivering Climate Solutions
Gender equality and climate justice are inherently linked. As the world searches for ways to address the climate crisis, feminist leaders are at work on the ground, building solutions. Getting it done.
Grassroots Knowledge and Leadership
At the Equality Fund, we are showing the world why any climate strategy must centre and fund the work of women-led organizations and feminist movements, particularly from the Global South, to secure a future for people and planet.
Over the last year, we moved strategically with partners to amplify the voices of these leaders in advance of key global convenings, including the Commission on the Status of Women and the UN’s climate change conference.
We released videos of our partners from the Global South sharing their wisdom, distributed a report capturing their recommendations, and organized discussions with policymakers from across the world, including Canada, the UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands, so their grassroots knowledge can be part of global policy conversations.
As women, girls, and trans people bear the brunt of the climate crisis, their visions of a just and sustainable future hold the solutions the world is looking for. Now is the time to follow their lead.
Moving In Crisis
As crises flared across the globe, our feminist values challenged us to move in new ways.
When Crisis Meets Determination
As crises flared across the globe, our feminist values challenged us to move in new ways.
Combining advocacy, philanthropy, grantmaking, and communications, we united across teams to amplify the voices of courageous frontline feminist activists and ensure they have support they deserve. Through it all, we are challenging the world to imagine a truly feminist approach to global crises and conflict. It is the only way to secure peace, sustainability, and security.
Respond
Building Momentum for feminist Movements
Together, we make the case that feminist movements are fundamental to a more just, peaceful, and sustainable future. And we rally governments, philanthropy, and the private sector to come together to support them worldwide.
A Historic Partnership
Convened by UN Women in 2021, the Generation Equality Forum sent a rallying cry across the world: Fund feminist movements.
This year, the United Kingdom answered the call. We were thrilled to finalize a six-year, 33 million GBP partnership with the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office to supercharge our support for women’s rights organizations and feminist movements across the Global South.
Momentum
Together, We Move:
African Women’s Development Fund
Collaboration is core to everything we do at the Equality Fund. Put simply, it’s how we move.
One of the most powerful examples is our deep partnership with the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), a leading grantmaking foundation—and oldest fund on the continent—that supports local, national, and regional women’s and feminist organizations working to advance the rights of African women.
AWDF is the Equality Fund’s lead partner on resourcing women’s rights and feminist organizations in Africa—through grants, shared learning, and network and solidarity building. In this role, AWDF advances its strategic vision for Africa and resources and accompanies women’s rights organizations. AWDF also provides strategic input on the overall design of the Equality Fund’s global grantmaking program, feminist philanthropy, and investment strategies.
While maintaining distinct strategies and structures, this partnership makes it possible for AWDF and the Equality Fund to advance our deep commitment to local feminist leadership, multiply our shared impact, reach organizations that often have limited access to mainstream funding, and deliver even more momentum for feminist movements across the African content and around the world.
Living Our Values
Our vision of a feminist future must begin with ourselves. Over the last year, we have deepened our ongoing work to build team culture, practices, and workspaces that align with our values. And it all starts with living, breathing, and reinforcing them every single day.
Through a process of continuous reflection and discussion, we linked up across the Equality Fund to identify four core values that guide and ground what we do. For every team, these shared values illuminate a path forward with integrity and purpose.
Four Core Values
Feminist Leadership
Feminist Leadership is showing up in solidarity and action at all levels of our organization, reimagining risk through an equity and justice lens, and shifting and sharing power within the feminist funding ecosytem. It is a pledge and practice to work consciously with power, creating space for everyone, and valuing humility, vulnerability, and learning.
Accountability
Accountability is transparency inside and outside our organization, with clear processes, thoughtful reflection, and consistent communication. Accountability means sharing knowledge, resources, access, and power. It is comes alive in our responsiveness to the needs and agendas of the feminist movements we seek to support and centering their voices and priorities in our work.
Anti-Racism & Anti-Oppression
Anti-Racism & Anti-Oppression moves us to enact the principles of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization across everything that we are as an organization, and everything we do. This value is both an expectation and a commitment to unlearning, learning and growth, enabling us to show up in transparent and answerable ways, internally and externally.
Radical Love
Radical Love is finding joy in the why, what, and how of our work, tending to our collective care, nurturing wellness and wholeness, and moving forward with gratitude and grace. Inspired by the wisdom of Black feminisms, we believe that the way to build a just world is through resistance and love. It means that we lead with our humanity, engage in generosity of spirit, and demonstrate grace and imperfection along the way.