The Resource Mobilization Hub (RMH) at the 12th International AWID Forum was developed in close collaboration with peers in the funding community and women's rights movement. The RMH was the first of it's kind at an AWID Forum and offered a dynamic, interactive space for both funders and women’s rights activists.
At the RMH, both donor representatives and women's rights activists participated in:
- Deepening discussions and understanding across different funding sectors, and between funders and activists. These dialogues focused on the funding context of the time and strategies for collective resource mobilization for women's rights organizing and wider movement building.
- Practical skills-building on effective feminist resource mobilization.
- Small group and one-on-one dialogues between and among diverse funders and women's rights activists.
The Hub offered several different types of activities, including:
Breakout Sessions: 11 sessions on resource mobilization topics. The WITM team organized introductory and closing sessions to help link the various pieces together and frame the Hub agenda.
The Resource Mobilization Clinic: offered skill-building opportunities on fundraising and monitoring and evaluation for Forum participants.
Donor Office Hours: representatives of funding agencies offered “office hours” for activist participants to ask specific questions about their agency’s work.
Letters to Donors and Grantees Postboxes: representatives from women’s movements could leave anonymous letters offering advice or suggestions to donors – and vice versa.
Ideas and Research Feedback Boxes: Forum participants could share their resource mobilization ideas and feedback on the WITM preliminary research findings.
Evening Plenary: The evening plenary, or Funder’s Forum, gathered a panel to discuss “Tapping Opportunities and Assessing Challenges for Mobilizing Resources for Women's Rights and Feminist Organizing Globally.
Here you will find resources from the our 2012 Resource Mobilization Hub sessions.
The Funding Landscape: Setting the Tone
This session offered an overview of the funding landscape, drawing on the preliminary results of the 2011 AWID Global Survey "Where is the Money for Women's Rights?" as well as offered a broad strokes analysis and political framing on funding trends.
Materials:
- Setting the Tone, Part I
- Setting the Tone, Part II
- 2011 AWID Global Survey “Where is the Money for Women’s Rights?”: Preliminary Research Results
Speakers:
Emilienne de León Aulina, Executive Director, International Network of Women’s Funds (INWF)
Rosalind Eyben, Professor, Institute for Development Studies (IDS) and Convenor, The Big Push Forward
Patti O'Neil, Secretariat, DAC Network on Gender Equality (GENDERNET), OECD
Trends Affecting Women’s and Rights Funding: Global and Regional Perspectives
This session brought together donors, women’s and rights activists and feminist researchers to debate and strategize around the state of women’s rights funding in specific regions and globally.
It drew on research findings and experiences and challenges with mobilizing resources for women’s and girl’s organizing. Through a lively and dynamic discussion, five panellists shared research findings around similar research on Where is the Money for Women’s Rights? in different contexts and regions and their practical experience around challenges for assuring funding for women’s rights organizing and for securing unrestricted funds for women’s rights work.
Materials:
- Trends Affecting Women’s and Rights Funding, KIT, IDS, CEGENSA, BRAC
- Trends Affecting Women’s and Rights Funding, FWRM
- Rights and Resources
Nicole Farnsworth, Kosova Women's Network
Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, Area Leader, Social Development & Gender Equity, Royal Tropical Institute, (KIT),
Tara Chetty, Programme Manager, Fiji Women’s Rights Movement,
Mashuda Khatun, Executive Director, Bangladesh Women’s Foundation
Organizers:
Asian Network of Women’s Funds, (Bangladesh Women’s Foundation,Her Fund, Mongolian Women’s Fund and Tewa);
Fiji Women’s Rights Movement,
Tonga Women and Children Crisis Center
International Women’s Development Agency.
Economic Solidarity: Raising Funds and Awareness for Feminist Activism through Resource Sharing
This session went beyond the statistics on the underfunded women's movement and looked at models of economic solidarity that pool women's knowledge and resources to generate unrestricted funds for our activism.
Speakers:
Linda To, Executive Director, HER Fund
Amanda Mercedes Gigler, Executive Director, Calala Fondo de Mujeres.
Iluta Lace, Manager, MARTA
Dita Lace, Financial Director, MARTA
Organizers:
HER Fund
Calala Fondo de Mujeres.
Invest in Women – it pays!
Panellists at this session discussed how adequately financed rights-based holistic program and outcomes on women’s health, education, economic empowerment, political engagement, and sexual and reproductive rights, work to dramatically transform not only women’s lives, but the lives of their families, their communities, and the world. The panel shared data and case analysis on the impact achieved by these investments.
Materials:
- Invest in Women – It Pays! FEIM
- Invest in Women – It Pays! FOWODE
- Invest in Women – It Pays! UNFGE
- Invest in Women – It Pays! Women Deliver
- Video, Invest in Women, It Pays!
Facilitator and Speakers:
Joanna Hoffman, Special Projects Manager, Women Deliver.
Mabel Bianco, President and Founder, Foundation for the Education and Study of Women (FEIM)
Patricia Munabi, Executive Director, Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE)
Ana Maria Enriquez, Chief, UN Fund for Gender Equality, UN Women
Organizers:
Women Deliver
Big, Bold Giving for Women and Girls – Cultural and Financial Issues
Income inequality is rising in most countries of the global north, led by the United States. One effect has been a truly striking rise in philanthropy. Is there some good that can come of it in the short term? This session hosted a discussion on the costs and benefits, through the example of the Women Moving Millions Campaign.
Speakers:
Laurie Emrich, Women Moving Millions
Gael Sylvia Pullen, Women Moving Millions
Tracy Gary, Founder, Women Moving Millions/Inspired Legacies.
Organizers:
Women Moving Millions Campaign
Inspired Legacies
A Dialogue with Donors and Activists on Funding Women's Economic Rights, Not Women's Economic Rescue
Current discourses identify women's economic engagement as a strategy to improve economic indicators, ignoring root causes of women’s poverty and shifting donors’ focus away from promoting women’s rights. This session explored strategies to challenge instrumentalist views and to promote a discourse focused on women's rights.
Materials:
Economic Rescue
Speakers:
Shalini Nataraj, Global Fund for Women (GFW),
Susan Jessop, Senior development officer, institutional giving, Mama Cash
Sangeeta Budhiraja, Director of Programs, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice
Organizers:
Global Fund for Women (GFW),
Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice
Mama Cash.
Ingredients for Successful Sustainable Fundraising
This practical workshop offered a set of ingredients women’s rights groups should consider in order to effectively fundraise.
Topics included ingredients such as staffing (Do you have to have a fundraising staff person? Can fundraising be a collective effort? How? What skill set should fundraising persons have?), mechanisms (What systems should you have in place for effective fundraising? How is fundraising related to your programs?), among other topics.
Materials:
Ingredients for Successful Fundraising, CREA
Organizers:
Rachel Humphrey, Consultant
Angela Ryan, Manager, Resource Development at CREA
Rights-Based Evaluation for Social Change Work: a Skill and Strategy Building Session Led by Feminists Reclaiming Evaluation
In this session, experts in evaluation and organizational learning from all corners of the women’s movement, activists, donors, and academics came together to share ways of putting the Gender@ Work matrix to work for evaluation purposes for an organization’s self-evaluation and learning, for a donor’s evaluation, and for movement building when we use it to share our learning about our own organizations with each other.
Materials:
- Rights-Based Evaluation for Social Change Work, PDF
- AWID M&E wiki
- Gender @ Work Framework
- Brooke Ackerly. 2012. "Breakthrough evaluation: an External Rights‐based Evaluation of Grantmaking for Gender Equality."
Speakers:
Brooke Ackerly, Professor, Vanderbilt University
Caitlin Stanton, Global Fund for Women (GFW)
Devi Leiper, Program Officer for Asia/Oceania, Global Fund for Women (GFW)
Claire Layden, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD)
Kellea Miller, independent consultant
Aruna Rao, Director, Gender at Work
Organizers:
Global Fund for Women (GFW)
Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD)
The Present and Future of Women's Funds: Activists Have the Floor
This session had two goals: to provide the space for honest and critical reflection and dialogue between women’s funds and movements’ activists about the key aspects of women’s funds’ mandate and how they have been implemented in practice and to think collectively about what funds need to become/do in order to meet the challenges ahead and be truly effective to support the women’s movements in their different expressions.
Materials:
The Present and Future of Women's Funds, HER Fund, PDF
Speakers:
Alejandra Sarda-Chandiramani,Senior Programme Officer Women's Funds, Mama Cash.
Emilienne de León Aulina, Executive Director, International Network of Women’s Funds (INWF)
Linda To, Executive Director, HER Fund
Usu Mallya, Executive Director, Tanzania Gender Networking Programme
Jessica Horn, Founder, Akiiki Consulting
Organizers:
International Network of Women's Funds (INWF)
Mama Cash
Tapping Opportunities and Assessing Challenges for Mobilizing Resources for Women's Rights and Feminist Organizing Globally
This plenary shared analysis of current trends, explored how various donors are putting their commitments into practice and offered recent data on the funding situation of women’s organizations. The panel discussed how diverse actors can work together to ensure that the new resources becoming available for women really contribute to longer-term structural change and how we tap current opportunities to mobilize more resources to support women’s rights and feminist organizing around the world.
Speakers:
Srilatha Batliwala, Scholar Associate, AWID
Irma Van Dueren, Head of Gender Equality Division, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Musimbi Kanyoro, President and CEO, Global Fund for Women
Joanna Kerr, CEO of Action Aid International
Florence Tercier Holst-Roness, Head of Programme for Issues Affecting Women, Oak Foundation
Amina Doherty, Coordinator, FRIDA, the Young Feminist Fund
Women's Relationship to Money: How does it affect our activist work?
Women activists are caught in a paradox! Money is an essential resource for their work and it is often not. Is it perverting the women's rights organizations? Do we need more money in order to reach our goals? These were some of the topics explored in this session.
Speakers:
Caroline Brac de la Perrière, Founding Member, Mediterranean Women's Fund
Fawzia Baba Aissa, Mediterranean Women's Fund
Nadia Aissaoui, Mediterranean Women's Fund
Marta Giral, Mediterranean Women's Fund
Organizer:
Mediterranean Women's Fund.
Where is the Money for Girls' Rights?
Adolescent girls are organizing for economic and social justice, yet there is insufficient funding for girls from a rights-based framework. This panel brought together donors and girl-focused groups to discuss the challenges and opportunities of funding girls' rights, and to identify strategies to mobilize more money for girls.
Speakers:
Carla Lopez, Executive Director, Central American Women’s Fund (FCAM)
Ayero Sarah
Selamawit Terefe
Sarahi Maldonado Baquero
Organizers:
American Jewish World Service (AJWS),
Global Fund for Women (GFW)
Mama Cash.
Trans Access to Financing: A Political Approach
The objective of this session was to collectively elaborate a historical and current analysis of the conditions of trans access to funding. It also focused on collectively designing transformative strategies.
Speakers:
Mauro Cabral, Co-director, GATE
Karthini Slamah, Trans activist
Amets Suess, Trans activist, International 2012 Stop Trans Pathologization Campaign
Lohana Berkins, Trans activist
Organizers:
Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE)
The Task Ahead: Mutual learnings and next steps to ensure sustainably funded women's rights movements
In a format of open conversation with all participants, this final session aimed at underlining important learnings from the Forum in relation to resource mobilization for women's rights and gender equality. By the end of the session, a list of tasks ahead for the movement and for funders had been identified and concrete commitments made.
Materials:
The Task Ahead
Facilitators:
Ellen Sprenger, Founder, Spring Strategies
Angelika Arutyunova, WITM Manager at AWID