Deadline: 5-Oct-20
The Equality Fund’s first grant program is now open for applications from women’s rights and feminist organizations.
Women’s rights organizations and feminist movements around the world are at the forefront of change—holding the line, resisting against rights violations, addressing the visible and invisible impacts of COVID-19, demanding equality, and driving solutions to get us there. The Equality Fund invests in the brave work to build a more equal world, together.
The Equality Fund is an international feminist fund based in Canada. It is a groundbreaking collaboration harnessing diverse actors to catalyze new momentum for women’s rights and feminist movements. Building on the experience of The MATCH International Women’s Fund and with significant contributions from the Government of Canada and other donors, they provide resources to women’s rights and feminist organizations working from the grassroots level to the regional and global stage.
Funding Priorities
- General Funding Priorities: The Equality Fund provides resources and accompanying support to organizations across intersections of feminist work to advance women’s rights and gender equality. Groups may work in one or several thematic areas depending on their priorities and agendas—such as addressing different forms of violence, furthering economic security and justice, promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights, working on environmental justice, advancing the rights of LBTQI people, fostering feminist leadership, participation, and movement building, etc. Under these broad themes, they prioritize organizations that:
- address issues that are under-funded or contested;
- are led by women, youth, girls, and non-binary people most at the margins and facing multiple forms of discrimination (including but not limited to Indigenous women, women with disabilities, lesbian, bisexual, and trans (LBTQI) populations, and sex workers).
- Specific Funding Priorities: Through consultations with women’s rights and feminist activists, grantees, and allies around the world, the Equality Fund is committed to constantly assessing the areas where there is the greatest need for funding, within the framework of their general funding priorities. They adjust their program strategies and specific thematic and administrative criteria for each application cycle and periodically invite organizations to submit Advanced Applications.
Funding Criteria
Their goal is to shift power and flexible resources to women’s rights and feminist organizations so they can advance their own priorities and agendas. Please see the Feminist Funding Principles they have jointly articulated with other Equality Fund partners.
- The Equality Fund provides core support grants, which can be used for operating expenses as well as specific program activities or projects. They provide multi-year grants for up to three years. Emerging organizations or groups they have not supported before may be offered a one-year grant.
- Equality Fund grant sizes range from $10,000 CAD/year to $100,000 CAD/year for some of the larger organizations. The maximum yearly grant size may not exceed 50% of your organization’s highest annual revenue in the past three years.
- The Equality Fund is open to supporting informal, unregistered groups of activists or networks, working through a fiscal sponsor (organizations are required to identify their own fiscal sponsors).
Eligibility Criteria
The Equality Fund is seeking Organizational Profiles from women’s rights and feminist organizations that:
- are primarily governed, led, and directed by local women, youth, girls, and/or non-binary people (i.e. women, youth, girls, and/or non-binary people make up a majority of the organization’s staff and board or coordinating committee);
- have the promotion of women, youth, girls, and non-binary people’s rights as their primary mission—and not only as of the focus of part of their programs;
- work from a feminist and/or women’s rights perspective for structural change on issues affecting women, youth, girls, and/or non-binary people;
- are committed to feminist movement building and collaborating with other women, youth, LBTQI, and/or Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) organizations;
- are able to complete proposal documents, narrative, and financial reports in English, French, or Spanish (additional language capacity will be added in the future);
- have been working for at least one year at the time of filling out their Organizational Profile;
- are registered/headquartered in an ODA- eligible country in the Middle East, Asia and The Pacific, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe.
- are able to demonstrate the organizational capacity to accept, manage, and report on funds directly or through an established relationship with a fiscal partner.
For more information, visit https://equalityfund.ca/section/funding-apply/