BACKGROUND
We are a global fund backing local leaders solving the world's biggest challenges. We envision a future in which everyone is conscious of and builds the kind of power that brings freedom, human rights, love and care to all. We want to see an ecosystem of robust, sustainable, and diverse feminist organizations and movements who are challenging and shifting power toward a just world in which women, girls, young feminists, transgender, and gender expansive people are thriving.
To move towards this future, we invest contributions from governments, foundations, and individuals, and generate our own wealth, creating long-term runway for funding recipients. We work with partners and allies to move money to local leaders in the Global South and fuel a people-powered movement—led by women, girls, and trans people rooted in their own communities. Their work strengthens democracy, drives climate resilience, reduces violence, and advances human rights for all. Women's rights organizations and feminist movements around the world are at the forefront of change—holding the line, resisting against rights violations, demanding equality, and driving solutions to get us there. That's why we focus on letting local women lead, giving them the long-term resources to reshape their communities and the world.
SCOPE OF WORK
The Equality Fund is seeking a consultant or a group of consultants to support the design of a stream of work supporting collective action across social movements focused on achieving gender equality. This stream, called "Connect," aims to unite diverse actors, incentivize connections, and fund strategies and approaches that are particularly suited to feminist movement strengthening.
To date, this stream of work has supported efforts to collaborate, particularly around regional and global feminist convenings that bring stakeholders together. By providing funding opportunities for collective efforts, such as coalitions and networks through Connect, we expected to increase connections, knowledge sharing and collaboration among movement actors. We know that coalitions and networks are not equivalent to movements, but they are often the connective tissue and convenors for movement work and require flexible resourcing for that role.
So far, the goals for Connect have been to:
- Provide long-term flexible funding to feminist networks, coalitions (both formal and informal) and consortia that enables them to advance collective action toward shared objectives across movements.
- Support long term and short term work: supporting the long term work of coalitions, networks and consortia around seemingly intractable issues, where movement strength ebbs and flows, and transformative change may still be years away, and strategic opportunities to support "tipping point" moments, where targeted resources may be essential for particular organizing, advocacy or policy objectives in the shorter term.
- Increase opportunities for grantee partners to build relationships, engage in mutual learning and collective action to address shared challenges and advance work at the country, regional and/or global level.
- Support networks, coalitions and consortia that are bringing together groups and individuals that might not ordinarily collaborate, but have a shared interest in addressing certain issues, challenges and opportunities collectively and at scale.
- Resource collective work that counters the proliferation of anti-rights opposition across regions and issue areas.
- Support proactive work and strategies that move beyond reacting to anti-gender and anti-rights forces.
- Learn from, document and amplify strategies that networks, coalitions, and consortia have developed across movements to advance collective action toward gender and other forms of justice, for resource mobilization and advocacy purposes.
- Fund networks, coalitions and consortia that are working on collective agendas regionally and transnationally.
Through ongoing learning around Connect, we recognized that there are additional opportunities to weave connections across adjacent movements and bridge to other actors outside of the feminist ecosystem, including in the impact investing sector. Our working hypothesis is that stronger intersectional movement infrastructure can help to sustain and strengthen feminist movements and increase opportunities to work across silos in support of advancing gender equality more broadly during a particularly challenging and fragmenting moment in time.
The successful Consultant(s) will design and deliver recommendations to inform the evolution of the Connect stream. These recommendations will be operationalized by the Equality Fund - principally through its Global Programs team - and be aligned with the Equality Fund's values, grantmaking and accompaniment strategies, programmatic stocktaking exercises, and theory of change. The recommendations will be a living document, intended to inform the Equality Fund's programmatic work over the next 5 years and will, as such, identify opportunities for reflection and learning.
For complete job description and to apply, visit:
https://equalityfund.bamboohr.com/careers/113