FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is gender justice?
For us, gender justice means centering the leadership, lived experiences, and diverse needs of women, girls, trans, and gender non-conforming people. It requires advancing equality by addressing the structural barriers that prevent people from fully exercising their rights and achieving equal opportunities, access, and outcomes.
We know that no two people face the same barriers. The fight for women’s rights is deeply connected to racial justice, queer justice, immigration justice, climate justice, and many other movements for justice.
We also believe that a gender justice framework means our partners define their own priorities and indicators of success—not us. Through this approach, we aim to mitigate the harms caused by discriminatory, racist, and patriarchal practices embedded in traditional Global North philanthropy.
Who does Global Fund for Women fund?
We are a global intermediary feminist fund. We raise money and grant it directly to grassroots feminist organizations and activists around the world, rather than running programs ourselves.
Our partners are crisis responders. They are abortion access networks where laws are changing. They are the lawyers, shelter leaders, and organizers working beyond the reach of most institutional funding. They are grassroots groups taking action, organizing protests, and challenging laws in over 180 countries, often at great personal risk.
We fund grassroots feminist organizations across Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Southwest Asia and North Africa, and Eastern Europe. We support organizations of all sizes and legal structures, including groups that operate outside traditional nonprofit models when that best serves their communities and context. Read more about their stories here.
How does Global Fund for Women identify new partners?
We proactively identify grassroots feminist organizations through trusted relationships with our global network of partners, advisors, and movement leaders, combined with movement data and insights that help us spot emerging needs. This approach helps us reach organizations that traditional philanthropy often overlooks, particularly those working in restrictive or high-risk environments. We respond to changing realities while remaining a consistent, long-term partner to grassroots feminist organizations.
Does Global Fund for Women have open calls or accept unsolicited grant applications?
No. We don’t accept unsolicited funding applications.
In the past, we received thousands of funding requests each year but could only support a small percentage of them. We also recognized that grassroots organizations were spending significant time and resources preparing applications without knowing whether funding was available. Instead, we find partners through trusted relationships with grassroots leaders, advisors, and movement networks, combined with publicly available data that help us spot emerging needs.
If you're looking for funding opportunities, we've compiled a list of organizations that support women's rights and gender justice around the world.
What does flexible funding mean?
It means our partners decide how to use their grants based on their communities' needs — not ours. We give flexible, multi-year funding with minimal reporting requirements, so our partners can focus on the transformational work they already do and use resources where they are needed most.
We generally do not award project-based grants that require organizations to implement a predefined set of activities. We also don't set a maximum percentage between organizational programs and operational costs; partners can use their full grant on operational costs if that's what their work needs.
Beyond core grants, we invest in the long-term resilience of grassroots organizations through flexible organizational resilience grants that strengthen their ability to navigate change, respond to emerging challenges, and sustain their movements.
We also support partner-led convenings and travel opportunities, collective learning, and advocacy spaces, and we continue to adapt our processes to meet the needs of our partners and move resources quickly when crises emerge.
What is your track record of success?
Global Fund for Women was founded in 1987 by Anne Firth Murray, Frances Kissling, and Laura Lederer. Recognizing a lack of resources for women's human rights causes worldwide as a key barrier to the improvement in the status of women, they decided to establish a new foundation to raise money for women's human rights organizations around the world.
Over the past 40 years, Global Fund for Women has awarded $263 million in grants to more than 5,000 groups in 180 countries. For the next four years, we have set a bold goal: $100 million in grants to feminist grassroots organizations. We have supported feminist leaders to end civil wars, expand access to healthcare and education, and secure laws giving new protection to millions of people. See here our transparent financial reporting on what we've raised, granted, and achieved. raised, granted, and achieved.
Is my donation tax-deductible?
Yes, when you make a donation to the Global Fund for Women without receiving goods or services in return, you can deduct it from your taxes. When you give, we will provide you with an acknowledgment by mail or email showing the amount of your tax-exempt donation and our tax ID number.
How do you ensure that my gift is well spent?
Every year, more than three-quarters of our spend goes to grants and program services. That includes funds that go directly to feminist grassroots organizations, as well as funding the work of our program, communications, and learning and evaluation teams. The remaining quarter of our budget invests in our fundraising team, as well as the organizational infrastructure and support that let us optimize our work and continue supporting our grantee partners. We invest in fundraising so that we can award more grants, which we have done every year since our founding.
Can I designate my donation to a specific organization?
According to US tax laws, you may not designate your donation to be given to a specific grantee. Global Fund for Women’s feminist funding approach is built on flexibility and trust. We provide flexible funding so that organizations can use our support however they may need it. That is just one way we try to shift power from a top-down, donor-led philanthropic approach to a movement-led approach.
Is it cost effective to support grassroots movements?
Yes! Grants to grassroots groups and activists working for equality and justice prove to be one of the most effective uses of financial resources. Rooted in their communities, grassroot groups hold the knowledge, trust, and lived experience needed to advance solutions that last. Our grants are given directly to grassroot leaders who know how to get things done. .
Do you pay your Board of Directors?
No, they volunteer their time.
Who funds Global Fund for Women?
We couldn't do this work without individual contributions like yours. Donations from individuals account for nearly half of our annual contributions. We believe that real philanthropy means each and every one of us can make a difference. Learn more about our financial information.
I don't have money to give. What else can I do to help?
In order to transform power and privilege for a few into equity and equality for all we need contributions of all kinds. We use social media to post about topics that matter, share our distinct point of view as a feminist funder, and participate in conversations that uplift gender justice and the power of movements. Follow us and spread the word about our work on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Gender Justice Data Hub Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Global Fund for Women start the Gender Justice Data Hub and why focus on emerging social movements?
We created the Gender Justice Data Hub (GJDH) to better understand how gender justice organizations and movements emerge, evolve, and respond to changing contexts. Grassroots feminist organizations are often the first to recognize emerging threats, mobilize their communities, and develop lasting solutions, but they're frequently the last to receive funding.
The Gender Justice Data Hub helps us change that. By combining movement data, feminist analysis, and the expertise of our global network of partners, advisors, and movement leaders, we identify emerging organizing, generate insights, and move resources when and where they're needed most. These insights strengthen our grantmaking, help us respond more quickly to emerging needs, and contribute to broader learning across philanthropy
What data sources do you use?
Our quantitative analysis draws on data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), which is compiled by a global network of local researchers with relevant language skills and in-depth country knowledge. This dataset allows us to examine historical patterns in protests and other forms of collective action across different contexts.
In a second stage of research, we analyse publicly available digital content to identify relevant discussions, narratives, trends, and signals of emerging organizing. Our final stages of research and analysis incorporate insights and collective sense-making from local gender justice activists and advisors, whose lived experience and contextual knowledge are essential to interpreting the data. One of our goals is to strengthen the impact of gender justice movements by meaningfully involving them in data collection, interpretation, and analysis—processes from which they are too often excluded.
How does Global Fund for Women ensure ethical use of data?
We use publicly available data and anonymize the data we generate from meetings with activists and feminist groups and advisors. We are also exploring how to provide data security training and support to movements.
What about movements that are not active online or are exclusively using encrypted messaging, including for safety reasons?
The Gender Justice Data Hub’s research approach relies in part on publicly visible indicators of movement activity. As a result, it may not identify movements that are not active online, do not organize publicly, or rely exclusively on encrypted communications for safety reasons.
However, the Gender Justice Data Hub is not the only way Global Fund for Women identifies movements to support. You can visit our page ‘How We Fund’ to read about the multiple way we identify and fund grassroots feminist organizations, inclusive those operating in repressive and authoritarian contexts, and groups that may remain entirely offline to protect their members.
The Gender Justice Data Hub has also identified rural, Indigenous, and other movements with a limited online presence. By collaborating with local gender justice activists and advisors, we refine our research using locally relevant keywords, alternative media sources, regional platforms, and contextual knowledge. This helps us better recognize forms of organizing that may be less visible in mainstream digital spaces.
How does the GJDH give back to engaged movement actors and avoid extractive practices?
"Extractivism" is an important consideration, and the GJDH has been designed to address this concern through a participatory approach. Transparency is crucial throughout the entire process, starting from the first engagement with gender justice activists and movement actors. Maintaining an open, transparent, and adaptative narrative ensures that activists and movement actors understand the objectives, data collection process, and information use. Building and maintaining trust is achieved by clearly communicating that the findings will lead to actions, which should be shared with process participants and other actors. This process involves validating preliminary findings through meetings with movement actors and disseminating final results through various channels, including convenings, media campaigns, public reports, and other collaborative activities.
How is result sharing handled in terms of privacy, security, and safeguarding practices?
Privacy and security are crucial for data collection and storage, and it is equally important to consider safe forms of result sharing and interpretation within the GJDH. It is essential to emphasize that individually consented information collected will not be shared. To ensure confidentiality, all GJDH visualizations will be password-protected and/or de-identified. Priority should be given to sharing aggregate results and anonymized testimonies, respecting the privacy and anonymity of the participants. Throughout the entire process, the guiding principle is to ensure that no movement actor or implementer is put in danger due to their participation, and information should only be used per the terms respondents have agreed to. Safeguarding their privacy and well-being remains our utmost priority. Global Fund for Women’s Privacy Policy is available here.
Why don’t you conduct a survey with Global Fund for Women’s advisors, grantees and partners around the world to get insights on the movements that are emerging in their countries?
Collecting and analyzing survey responses takes a long time and is labor intensive for translation and analysis, and by the time the analysis is done, it’s already out of date.
Through the GJDH we are able to integrate our advisors’ and partners’ perspectives and rich insights into our data analysis process. Furthermore, the GJDH helps us see outside of our own networks to get a more robust view of movement activity to make more equitable funding decisions, as we aren’t just relying on who we know.