Trust-Based Giving
The Resilience Fund is flipping the script on traditional, top-down philanthropy by:
Offering flexible, multi-year funding that puts trust and resources into the hands of women leaders to determine their own solutions for their own communities.
Shifting power through democratized governance, participatory grantmaking, and accessibility.
Flexible funding enables organizations to direct resources where they will yield the strongest outcomes in challenging and rapidly changing contexts, allows for quick pivots when needed, and supports important investments into the strength and backbone of an organization.
This approach challenges traditional impact measurement norms, instead focusing on learning and co-creating measures of impact that reflect the experience and realities faced by grantee-partners.
The Fund provides direct grants to women-led organizations and indirect grants through Women’s Fund Asia, which allows it to support the most grassroots organizations.
Democratized Governance. The Fund Advisory Board, made up of corporate investors, women’s funds, and civil society organizations, ensures that non-corporate members represent 50 percent of more of the voting members. Thus, no one sector controls board decisions. Decisions are made through a ‘gradients of agreement’ process that seeks consent but also surfaces specific concerns that must be resolved before finalizing a decision.
Participatory Grantmaking. The Fund takes a participatory grantmaking approach that selects grantee-partners through a democratic Board process that engages a community peer panel. The peer panel, comprised of women or non-binary community leaders from the communities in which the Fund is investing, reviews and scores applications and makes recommendations to the Advisory Board.
Accessibility. The Fund invests in language justice and accessibility. From the application process in which the Fund provides free translation and application support and advice in local languages, to its community spaces in which documents and discussions are translated, the Fund recognizes that for organizations to have more equal footing with other stakeholders, they need to be able to communicate in their preferred language.