Funding Feminist Activism Globally
Mama Cash introduces a new ten-year strategic guide
Visionary feminist activists wake up every day, in every corner of the world, to fight injustice and oppression, and to dream and create just and joyful futures for us all. They do this work at great personal risk and cost, and, they usually lack adequate resourcing for their work.Mama Cash’s job is to match their courage and creativity, and to support them with the resourcing and connections to make their important work possible. In 2020, as we developed a strategy for the next decade, we solicited input from grantee-partners, advisors, activists and other stakeholders to help us to ensure that our support meets the needs of feminist movements.We are now ready to launch our 2021-2030 strategy: “In Movement Together: Funding Feminist Activism Globally”.In this narrative summary and animation, we share an overview of the world we envision and the strategies we’ll be using for the next decade to support feminist movements.
Movements and money
Mama Cash’s core work is to mobilise resources to support self-led feminist movements so that they can successfully defend and advance women’s, girls’, and trans and intersex people’s human rights worldwide. We organise our work into two core focus areas: movements and money.In our work to support feminist movements, we continue to take a movement building approach because movements are critical to making change last. We channel resources to feminist movements through two strategies: grantmaking to support feminist collective action and accompaniment to support activists to be stronger movement actors.In our resource mobilisation work, we continue to mobilise money to support feminist activism through two strategies: fundraising from institutional and individual donors to support our own work and donor influencing to bring better and more money to feminist movements. Through these two strategies, we are committed to ensuring that feminist movements are well resourced by responsive donor partners.
Sharing power
One inspiring feature of our new strategy is a shift to a participatory process for making new funding decisions. Sharing power has always been part of our commitment to movements, and we are excited to make ourselves even more accountable to them. This year, and in the years ahead, new grants decisions will be made not by our staff, but by activists and community members who are part of feminist movements.Join us!
We are excited to share “In Movement Together”, and invite you explore our new strategy. We look forward to partnering during the coming decade with feminist activists, and the allies and funders who support them, to realise a just and joyful world.