OUR
ACTIVITIES
The Alliance is the only pooled fund focusing on gender equality in Europe. The initiative emerged from broad consultations with the women’s sector, including women’s funds, civil society organisations, and corporate and private donors. We engage a diversity of funders, whether they have experience giving to gender equality or not and facilitate collaboration, mutual learning and increased impact.
GRANTMAKING
The Alliance implements regular calls for proposals and their focus is discussed and agreed by members.
Supporting long term structural issues of gender equality in Europe such as gender-based violence, access to economic resources, access to education and training, environment and listening to the field to identify emerging issues.
Ensuring a geographic distribution of grants across Europe to underscore that there is a need to improve gender equality in all regions while responding to specific geographic needs.
Focusing on small, frontline organisations working on gender equality led by people with lived experiences who are acknowledged experts in the field. We believe this approach help us engage with previously overlooked actors who are close to the problems they seek to address.
Where needed, providing unrestricted core support to increase organisational development, resilience and sustainability.
Using streamlined and flexible processes to adapt to the capacity of small organisations and to reduce barriers to participation.
Complementing the work of other funders working on gender equality in Europe and to address gaps.
LEARNING
The Alliance is committed to being a learning organisation engaging with the sector to strengthen our impact.
This commitment unfolds with the following activities :
FUNDING +
The Alliance is committed to support grantees in their organisational development and building collaborations between themselves, with other CSOs and with funders that accelerate their learning and build more effective work. The Funding+ framework is guided by the following principles: needs-driven, ownership and solidarity and is implemented through the following set of activities:
- Convenings
- Feminist leadership & governance community of practice
- Small grants for organisational development
- Bespoke organisational development support grants
- Financial management support
LEARNING, MONITORING & EVALUATION FOR SYSTEMS CHANGE
We have developed an approach to MEL that is guided by principles of emergent learning and strategy, and a feminist-informed approach to evaluation.
We have committed to focus more on gathering information on the learning questions specific to our specific sphere of responsibility than the one of grantees. Thus our current learning questions relates to developing an effective donor collaborative and mobilizing more resources for gender equality in Europe, providing funding and organisational development support that are useful to frontline gender equality organizations, and supporting cross-grantee/funder learning.
EXTERNAL EXPERTISE
The Alliance is relying on the support of an advisory committee to advise the strategy and a selection committee to select the grantees. Both bodies are made of external gender experts (including from CSOs and women’s funds) benefiting from their expertise covering the diversity of local contexts in Europe and the wide topic ranges included in gender equality.
