Feminist organisations and movements have long called on funders to be more strategic and responsive in their grant-making practices to better support social change. Feminists have asked funders to be bold, take risks, and join them in learning together about how change happens, and go beyond the status quo in the how of their grantmaking. 

For feminist and gender justice movements, accessing funding is an administrative nightmare, with due diligence processes that require days of document preparation and filling out complicated online portals. For the fortunate few who manage to navigate the administrative maze and receive funding; the burden of extensive over-reporting remains a hurdle that absorbs valuable resources away from doing the actual work of advancing gender justice. 

In 2017, walking the path of learning together, with the support of both Prospera – International Network of Feminist Funds and Gender Funders CoLab (CoLab) — a network of private foundations that collectively leverages over $200 million annually to support gender justice organising —  our organisations Fondo De Acción Urgente para América Latina y el Caribe and Foundation for a Just Society and other feminist funds and private foundations, came together to tackle the traditional funder-grantee relationship through a feminist approach.

Together, feminist funds and private philanthropy foundations, invited 150 grantees to participate in a survey. The survey received 73 responses from feminist movements and women’s groups in 29 countries, and one theme emerged as an urgent priority: reducing the administrative burden of the grant application and reporting cycle. With this direction, we began our journey with a question: ‘If grant applications and grant reporting are burdensome, yet embedded in and necessary to our work, how can we apply our feminist values to improve them?’

Through a series of workshops, webinars and forums, what resulted was the creation of a set of feminist common application (CA) and common report (CR) forms, to help reduce the administrative burden on grantees and to yield more relevant and interesting data for both grantee and funders. The forms were co-designed and piloted between private funders and  feminist and women’s funds. In 2020, eight CoLab members began offering the common application and common report forms to grantees, and in 2022 CoLab completed an assessment of the initiative as it transitioned from the pilot phase to an ongoing program. 

The assessment found that common application and common report forms save time. Women and feminists funds using the report spent less time on filing paperwork and more time advancing gender justice and supporting movements. It also found that common forms yielded higher quality proposals and reports even though they required less time. Women and feminist funds and their donors both said that the common forms generated better, more useful information and data.  Donors said this higher-quality information helped them to make a stronger case for funding women’s funds and feminist movements within their own institutions. Finally, the participatory way the forms were developed and the feminist lens shaping the questions were critical to their success and to strengthen the trust and partnership between donors and grantees. 

Moving Money, Building Movements – a pre-AWID Forum day for funders – is a space to showcase the common application forms and other innovative practices that challenge the status quo in current grant making practices. It’s an opportunity for funders to reimagine a new way of working that creates a lasting positive change. Adopting common application and reporting forms is not without challenges, but it can be done, and it must be done if we are serious about moving the needle forward on social issues. The common form initiative – co-created by feminist funds and private funders – can set the blueprint for other networks and alliances to take inspiration from, and more importantly, to see it as the floor and not the ceiling of reimagining the relationship between funders and feminist movements.

This article is part of a series leading up to the Moving Money, Building Movements convening. Taking place one day before AWID’s 15th International Forum, the convening is for funders and activists to come together to connect and strategize. Please note the views in this article do not necessarily represent the views of all the organising partners of Moving Money, Building Movements.

Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez (she/her/they/them) is the Senior Program Officer for the Mesoamérica region at Foundation for a Just Society. Mónica is a queer migrant from Colombia, based in New York, with 20 years of experience working on gender justice, human rights and LGBTQI rights, including 12 years in philanthropy with a focus on feminist movements in Latin America and the Caribbean and social justice movements in the U.S. 

Terry de Vries (she/her) is the Co-Executive Director of Fondo de Acción Urgente para América Latina y el Caribe. She is an Ecuadorian feminist in constant (de) construction and a sociologist in international relations, with 20 years of experience on the design, implementation, and monitoring of projects, specifically on issues such as democracy, citizen participation, and human rights.