For Participating Women’s Funds
Who is eligible to participate as a decision maker?
- Any women’s fund that is eligible to apply for funds (see eligibility), and that indicates an interest and their availability to solidarityfund@mamacash.org by 16 February 2023.
- Participating funds must be willing to review at least 10 proposals of approximately 2 pages each during the review period (15 March to 12 April 2023). The Solidarity Fund team will distribute proposals to participating reviewing funds randomly.
- The fund will need to be able to review proposals in English.
How should women’s funds manage this process?
- Each participating women’s fund will have one voice/vote for each submitted proposal despite the number of reviewers per fund. They will be asked to score the applications as well as provide a rationale for their score.
- The Solidarity Fund team suggests using this exercise as a team building and knowledge sharing activity. Reviewers will have around 4 weeks to submit scores. We suggest at least two staff members participate in the review and encourage the involvement of several, differently situated staff members. For help or ideas on how your fund could participate in the review process, please contact solidarityfund@mamacash.org.
What will the voting process be like?
- Assuming each women’s fund is reviewing 10 proposals, they receive 20 points to vote on their preferred proposals that they would like to support.
- Since they have more than 10 points, they can allocate points to add support to the proposals they prefer.
- Reviewing women’s funds are welcome to allocate more than one point to a proposal they strongly support. However, they cannot allocate more than 5 points for one proposal, to ensure that at least 4 proposals of the 10 receive votes.
- Before the deadline, women’s funds will submit their final points allocation for those 10 proposals, and 2-3 sentences about each proposal they reviewed to explain their score.
- Mama Cash will organise a session for reviewers beforehand to explain the reviewing process on 16 March.
Questions on review form:
- How many proposals can your fund commit to reviewing during the review period (15 March to 12 April 2023)? The minimum is 10.
- Which organisations would you have a potential or real conflict of interest with?
- A conflict of interest is any situation in which the person(s) representing the fund has professional, personal, or financial interests or obligations which may affect or may have an appearance of affecting this person’s judgment and ability to participate in the Solidarity Fund. A (potential) conflict of interest could prevent the fund from making an unbiased decision about a particular grant proposal. This potential benefit can be any professional, personal, financial or other benefit to the individual women’s fund staff members, their family or friends, or their organisation(s). Even if an interest would not necessarily influence the reviewing fund, it could still result in the person or fund’s impartiality being questioned by others. Such a situation is also considered a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest is when your organisation benefits directly (not indirectly) from another proposal. If your fund is a co-applicant with another, your fund would need to recuse itself from reviewing that proposal.
- Knowing another organisation or people that work there is not a conflict of interest. We are encouraging radical transparency with this project and want to ensure that we are assessing proposals with the context we have.
- As long as your fund is eligible, whether or not your women’s fund submits a proposal, you are welcome to participate in the reviewing process. Your fund would need to recuse itself from reviewing a proposal your fund is involved with.
- If you have questions, want to report or discuss a potential conflict of interest, please contact solidarityfund@mamacash.org.
Requirements
Note that your fund’s votes will be submitted confidentially to the Solidarity Fund team. The votes will be tallied, and the total scores will be public but not with the names of the voting organisations attached.
All reviews submitted by voting women’s funds will include a final scoring/ranking with required rationale to explain their assessment, which will be aggregated and shared back with applicants. This is part of our transparency to each other:
Questions? Email solidarityfund@mamacash.org