Books stop time for the reader.

In exchange for your attention, books animate a moment in time so that readers can get a sense of a complex landscape that is not otherwise visible or well-known.

The challenge of this book—despite its static form—is to describe a historical movement that is alive, surging, and still evolving.

On behalf of the 10 authors, here’s the preface by Stephanie Clohesy, former board chairman of the Women’s Funding Network, and Chris Grumm, past president and CEO of the Women’s Funding Network

It aims to immerse readers in the past while looking toward the near future to fully grasp the broader implications of a complex global movement whose influence spans multiple geographies of diverse communities and cultures, all driven by myriad goals and purposes.

This book breathes life into a world that might otherwise seem hidden from view by weaving together intersecting and shared journeys captured through a diverse ensemble of shared voices. The world of women’s philanthropy has many surprises and even more shocking truths that are revealed through acts of courage and defiance.

The Uprising of Women in Philanthropy is a book that will elevate your appreciation of what has been and still needs to be accomplished. It tells the story of the Global Women’s Funding Movement as its unique cause that parallels and supports women’s movements worldwide, serving as social justice innovators for women, girls, and gender-expansive people.

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The Uprising in Women’s Philanthropy has gathered many voices to tell the origin stories of how the Global Women’s Funding Movement began over 50 years ago, embedded in the women’s movement, and grew into its distinctive movement. More importantly, it focuses on how women have amassed and currently use money to wield the necessary power to achieve equity and justice in the world. Although the Global Women’s Funding Movement is about money and power, it is not about the financial power of the individual. Rather, it’s the revelation of how collectively that money is applied to support the women, girls, and gender-expansive people doing the hard work across continents and communities, wherever justice is threatened in the lives of all people.

To truly understand the Global Women’s Funding Movement, it would be ideal to hear and see what has been happening everywhere at once. The Uprising of Women in Philanthropy comes as close as possible to conveying the extensive human drama of building a funding movement. This movement has turned traditional philanthropic norms upside down while venturing into the challenging and often dangerous edges of women’s lives where change is most needed and where few, if any other, philanthropists dare to tread!

To attempt to tell a story everywhere all at once, many voices have been included so that a diverse set of experiences and their collective wisdom could be highlighted here. A core group of women’s funding activists/writers/observers gathered and grew into ten co-authors who conceptualized and designed the story.

Over the course of this project, they, in turn, reached out to other innovators and eyewitnesses with first-hand experience in the Global Women’s Funding Movement; some are quoted in the book, some served as critical readers and advisors on early drafts, and all shaped and reshaped the stories to produce as robust and honest a narrative as possible.

The book chapters tangle with the same struggles and ethical knots faced by those building this movement everyday. At all times, there are strains to resolve power dynamics and maintain close working relationships and clear communications. Power relationships define inclusion and exclusion and can arbitrate who is at the center, at the periphery, and who decides who leads and who follows. In the very nature of the writing process, the Co-Authors, writers, and editors felt the burden of power in organizing the telling of the story: whether discussing whom to approach as readers, which stories were the best to include, and which concepts and whose exactly matter most—all these dilemmas mirror movement-based power struggles.

It is easy to fall into the “never-before-told” gap, especially when narrating something as innovative as the Global Women’s Funding Movement. However, this movement has authenticity in its evolution, especially as every community, region, and culture has defined its struggle for freedom while holding to movement-wide ideas about equity and justice to build its women’s foundation. The Co-Authors hope this book will serve as a catalyst that opens and refreshes assumptions and questions. To do this, the process of reflection and refreshing our values needs to continue to happen with donors, with women’s foundations, and with movements on the ground. Movement building is a constant process of reflection. It also encourages the willingness to embrace an open paradigm where searching for better solutions is more meaningful than relying on an authoritarian process or set of answers. Everyone in the Global Women’s Funding Movement lives with the paradox of being egalitarian and participatory while also being strategic and coordinated in the search for implementing equity and justice.

The process of writing this book has been a mirror of how this movement struggles to find all the voices and then move things forward. The Global Women’s Funding Movement has been innovating a new kind of philanthropy—one that has its roots throughout the ages—in how women come together and share resources. The movement is guided by the voices of experience who have organized and formalized women’s “share culture” by creating women’s funds, foundations, giving circles, and networks worldwide. The idea of sharing money, property, and other assets is new compared to the bureaucratic models of philanthropy common in our era. Moreover, it is shaped by egalitarian and participatory values, a belief that all people have gifts to share within flatter organizational models that help things to happen faster. To accomplish this, the women leading their own funding movement have normalized the practices of trust, transparency, shared power, and intersectionality of racism, colonialism, sexism, sexual orientation, disability, classism, and casteism in ways that upend traditional philanthropy.

This movement has provided traditional philanthropy with many current ideas and organizing tactics for incorporating participatory philanthropy, though there usually has been no visible tie between mainstream and women’s philanthropy. Practices proven by women’s funds are usually described within a different lexicon, thereby enabling others to wave away the visibility of women’s funds around the world. Recently, this trend has begun to change, with women’s funds receiving overdue recognition and increased resources. This book of voices from everywhere lifts the veil on how things get done and how effective change occurs with women’s philanthropic support. These are the stories from a quiet revolution created in the partnership between women at the source of social injustice and women’s foundations and donors.

A sampling of stories to be found in the book includes:

• Safetipin is a social organization that works with urban stakeholders, including governments, to make public spaces safer and more inclusive for women. Piloted in India with seed funding from the Lotus Circle, supporting the Women’s Empowerment Program of the Asia Foundation, the project has now been implemented in 18 countries.
• The Dr. Beatriz María Solís Policy Institute at the Women’s Foundation California trains women community leaders in public policy and has worked to conceptualize and pass over 50 new pro-women laws or local policies in the state of California.
• The Marea Verde, or “Green Wave” women’s movement that worked for years to legalize abortion across Latin America, has been supported by women’s funds such as the International Women’s Health Coalition, Fòs Feminista.
• Women’s Foundation of Minnesota provides funding support and leadership for the passage of the Safe Harbor Law and No Wrong Door for sexually exploited youth.
• Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. In 2002, Leymah Gbowee negotiated a grant from the Global Fund for Women for the Women of Liberia’s Mass Action for Peace. In Leymah’s words, “We women, we are tired of war.” Over time, the women organized collaborative efforts that led to reformers winning the war and electing Liberia’s first woman President (Ellen Johnson Sirleaf ).

All these stories and dozens more are told in exciting and graphic detail throughout the book. They are just a few illustrations of the vast quantity of past and present work in the hundreds of women’s funds worldwide. By choice and deliberate strategy, women’s funds have claimed roles at the forefront in bloody wars, face-to-face conflict with dangerous authoritarian leaders, and investigations in life-threatening zones where women are disappearing while also attending to the everyday and pervasive barriers of jobs, food security, housing, childcare, healthcare, etc. that block women from full participation. Women’s funds have trusted women to tell the truth about their lives and build action strategies from those truths, whether that results in local change or an advancement in international law.

The bright threads throughout this book focus on the future of social justice work by creating successful and fast-paced change that benefits the people most affected by injustice and oppression. The success and speed of so much women’s funding characterize how women’s funds take action with their partners and how the mostly place-based organizing tactics, relationships, and leadership of women, girls, and gender-expansive people all come together as part of the action design. Women’s Funds believes that a community of women leaders more fully understands the depth and breadth of the problems and solutions than any single or small group of leaders. And they believe that, with adequate resources, they can solve most of the world’s problems from the ground up.

Read this book with a vision in mind of a world with fewer problems, more diverse leadership, more equitable sharing of resources, and a willingness to get engaged with the entire ethos of the women’s funding movement. We invite you to add your voice to this growing movement by funding your local women’s fund/foundation, acting to advance gender justice activism globally, and/or telling the story of how women’s funds changed philanthropy and the world. With an abundance of energy, the world needs you to do all three. If you are already involved, use your voice to tell new stories and share them with us.