In 1995, feminist activists gathered in Beijing for the Fourth World Conference on Women, creating transformative frameworks that led to significant global changes. However, feminist movements now face coordinated attacks by anti-rights forces. On March 10th at CSW69, the Alliance for Feminist Movements, Count Me In! Consortium, and Women Deliver co-hosted an event to discuss the evolution and future of feminist funding.

In 1995, feminist activists and allies gathered in Beijing for the Fourth World Conference on Women, leaving with multidimensional political and narrative frameworks, language, and strategies that would not only support transformative change – for example, the institutionalisation of the term gender, the liberalisation of abortion laws in over 60 countries, and the international recognition of rape as a war crime – but also build a dynamic feminist funding ecosystem. Due in large part to the substantial strength and progress of feminist movements, we are in the midst of a coordinated, multi-level attack where anti-rights and anti-gender forces – resourced through expansive networks – are working to threaten structurally marginalised communities and dismantle feminist organisations at the grassroots, regional, national, and global levels. 

On March 10th, the Alliance for Feminist Movements, Count Me In! Consortium, and Women Deliver co-hosted From Beijing to Today and Beyond: Funding Feminist Movements to Win Meeting the moment: What is next for the feminist funding ecosystem?* This event facilitated an inter-generational, cross-regional dialogue in which activists and funders could exchange their analyses on movement funding, both its evolution over the last 30 years and where it needs to go.

The event began with opening remarks from the representative of the Government of France, who shared the government’s commitment to feminist foreign policy. Since 2020, France has mobilised €244 million to support 1,400 feminist organisations in 73 countries and launched the Francophone Feminist Alliance, a €5 million initiative aimed at amplifying the voices of Francophone feminist organisations on international platforms. These funds have solidified the essential role that feminist organisations play in combating anti-rights movements and advancing gender equality and have demonstrated that providing financial support to grassroots organisations yields tangible results. These funding commitments reflect France’s efforts to make financial tools more flexible and point to the growing need for governments to financially support feminist organisations and the advancement of gender equality on a global scale.

We then were introduced to the panel’s moderator, who led the room through an exercise that visibilised how folks have shown up to movement spaces over the last 30+ years – celebrating the important things we have accomplished as a movement and acknowledging the collective wisdom and spirit present in the space. After this, the moderator presented the panellists, which included individuals present at the Beijing conference and global youth activists, and moved us into a robust conversation that told the story of movement funding in the last 30 years. 

Our first panellist attended the Beijing conference as a youth. They situated the 1995 Beijing moment as the culmination of women’s conferences, combined with the momentum of a series of conferences in the 90s that established the progressive UN frameworks related to human rights, the environment, and reproductive health. By participating actively in all these conferences, feminists across the world ensured that women’s concerns and rights were robustly reflected in these mechanisms and global frameworks, which, applied over the last 30 years, have critically shifted material outcomes and defined the kinds of systems and governments we live within. They also highlighted that the flexible funding available at this time was the connective tissue for the work of feminist movements, regionally, globally, and across different sectors.

In reflecting on how the movement has changed since Beijing, the following panellist – a donor at an international foundation – identified the convergence of an outcomes-based, single-issue approach with corporate movement funding structures in the early 2000s, citing donors’ deployment of private equity language and protocols in their funding of social justice and feminist movements. The consequences of this have been that funding relationships have become largely extractive, as donors seek to acquire and own the “perfect organisation,” which has led to movements being broken apart and siloed into individual issues, often positioned in competition with one another. 

They pointed out that another repercussion of the redefined funding landscape has been the “resultification” of movements where the requirement for organisers to quantify a return on investment creates misalignments between the streams of work that donors deem qualitatively valuable and the quantitative ecosystem of work that is actually needed to build out and maintain movements – work which includes the creation of social, political, and legal frameworks alongside the coordination of advocacy strategies. In this regard, they emphasised that holistic and robust resourcing of movements – and their strategic and care work – is the most impactful and cost-effective intervention.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” – Audre Lorde

The next panellist, a youth activist, reinforced these insights and shared that in their specific context, pursuing change through an expansion of legal rights is imperative and requires a disciplined strategy grounded in the current legal-political system. In reflecting on their specific context, they identified the government’s and Church’s role in the creation of a regional funding vacuum that then institutionalises a reliance on international funders – which not only makes access to funding dependent on an individual’s networks but also ensures that funding oftentimes does not trickle down to young people and LGBTQ communities. They concluded by mentioning the difficulties of being a youth organiser and the need for intergenerational collaborations that support youth with knowledge and skill-building tools so that young people can support and fund their movement work. 

In expanding on the struggles faced by youth organisers and youth-led organisations, the next panellist – who is part of a collective focused on youth-based grassroots movement building and collective care – re-emphasised the necessity of funding critical strategic work, which includes funding for operational support such as staff salaries, community spaces, and administrative support. They named the pressure faced by youth to mimic corporate or NGO structures to be seen as legitimate in their organising and how these structures contrast with the oftentimes fluid, decentralised, and care-centred ways in which young people are seeking to build movements. Finally, they shared strategies for donors and organisations to challenge existing power imbalances, engage youth participation, and resource the rest, joy, and care that sustains movements long term. 

“Ultimately, we need donors who see care, joy, and rest as revolutionary acts and who are willing to fund feminist movements in ways that centre sustainability, dignity, autonomy, accessibility, and inclusion.”

By positioning our current funding landscape within the context of the Beijing conference and all that has happened since we are reminded of the clear need to organise collectively in a diversity of ways and to draw on the knowledge and practices of movements past and present. We know that we must continue to interrogate, centre, and build on conversations around funding and strategic resourcing. The event closed with a call for funders to match the courage of feminist organisers and boldly resource them in their struggle for collective liberation. 

*Panellists

• Adeline Azrack (she/her), Managing Director US, Fondation Chanel
• Cynthia Eyakuze, Co-Vice President, Global Programs, Equality Fund
• Happy Mwende Kinyili (they/them), Co-Executive Director, Mama Cash
• Marie Soulié, Head of the Feminist Foreign Policy and Education Department at the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Government of France
• Michelle Milford Morse (she/her), Vice President for Girls and Women Strategy, United Nations Foundation
• Raven Dhillon (they/them), Co-Founder, Community Care Collective 
• Sayo Stephannie (she/her), Kenyan Lawyer and Women Deliver Emerging Leader for Change 2024

**To ensure the safety of our panellists, we have refrained from attributing information from this event to individual panellists.**