What We Do
PHOTO: BSR
The Resilience Fund aims to raise at least US$10 million in pooled funding over three years to support locally driven solutions to systemic problems—and to build resilience over the long term.
Funds will be disbursed to local and regional women’s funds, women-led organizations, and feminist leaders—trusting these groups to know what their own communities need and to direct resources where they will have the most impact.
Why We're Different
This is not the typical funding model. With its democratic governance structure and Learning Hub, the Fund lifts up innovative, locally led solutions through flexible funding to adapt and scale in a rapidly changing world. It builds accountability and transparency through collective decision-making and creates shared spaces for learning and innovation.
The Fund's pooled investment model enlists more minds and more resources. It brings like-minded investors together to maximize the impact of their investments while minimizing risk—combining different perspectives and insights from a variety of sectors to make progress toward a shared goal.
The Fund will do what no organization or corporation can do alone: collectively build new democratic approaches to giving, learning, and impact measurement, and keep power in communities’ hands to advance gender equality, economic justice, and feminist leadership.
Who We Fund
Women’s participation in the economy and public life is dependent on her safety, bodily autonomy, and reproductive freedom. When a woman thrives, her community also thrives—but economic resilience is possible only if she is able to make decisions about her own body, her life, and her future.
Before COVID-19, women made up 60-80% of export manufacturing workers, 41% of agricultural laborers, and 75% of apparel workers. The Fund will invest in communities in these value chains.
The Resilience Fund will invest in women-led, community-based organizations that are working on championing sexual and reproductive health and rights and women’s safety and security as long-term drivers of economic resilience.
One-third of grants will go to women’s funds based in the Global South that can redistribute resources swiftly and effectively in complex settings and ensure local transparency and accountability for investments.
Two-thirds of grants will go primarily to women-led community-based organizations, as well as to CBOs that are committed to significantly increasing women in their senior management positions.
Funds will be disbursed without restrictions to allow organizations to design and deliver the most effective solutions for their local contexts amid rapidly changing circumstances. This nimble, responsive structure supports new, emerging, or proven solutions driven by local feminist leaders and grassroots organizations with the knowledge of what works best in their communities.
How We Learn
Systemic change takes time. It also requires real-time feedback loops and continuous learning and sharing so that strategies can be improved, replicated, and scaled.
The Fund's robust Learning Hub offers a technology-rich platform for investors, grantees, partners, and other stakeholders to communicate, share analytics, and adapt programs in response to input from those women leading the work in communities. The Learning Hub is central to the Fund’s comprehensive governance structure and a primary vehicle for building community and networks among Fund stakeholders.
Using a customized platform designed for collaboration, the Learning Hub creates a knowledge-sharing ecosystem that makes a wealth of information about grantees, and work being funded accessible in real time. In this way, funders and grantees can learn what is working well locally, or what needs adjusting.
The Model of Change highlights the three key principles and five key defining features that animate the Fund.
