Reflection Piece
Read more about our philosophy around problem solving and how we grow alongside our grantee partners
Growing Alongside our Grantee Partners
Want meaningful growth? Do it in tandem with your grantees.
In social impact, bigger isn’t always better. Scaling up often means broadening a shallow reach, rather than deepening and widening impact. And the way it is often done, with funders setting the vision and making the decisions, only worsens the funder-grantee power imbalance persists in philanthropy.
What does it take to scale meaningfully? Recent efforts to redefine scale from a community perspective have advanced its meaning beyond simply reaching a broader audience, to encompass driving deeper and more holistic impact as well as longer-term system- and policy-level change.
There are two parallel trends in philanthropy that offer promising lessons for funders looking to pursue growth. First, the movement to center contextual knowledge, localized innovations, and community-based capacity among funders offers an opportunity to re-examine challenges and solutions from the ground up. There is also growing recognition of the value of investing in strengthening grantee organizations for the long-term, especially by adopting an asset-based framing, building networks, and pursuing power sharing.
These trends are certainly positive. But tapping into them without a holistic self reflection, alongside one’s grantees, is limiting.
Women’s funds sit at a key intersect of funders and implementers. Like their grassroots grantees, they often rely on outside capital from donors who believe in their value add – but they also must identify, screen, and support trusted partners on the ground to help deliver their mission. Beyond passing through dollars, these funds have the potential to amplify value by (1) conducting due diligence to identify the most well-positioned local change agents, (2) supporting grantee driven organizational strengthening, and (3) enhancing visibility of smaller grassroots organizations to attract additional resources.
The fate of a small women’s fund is thus symbiotic with that of our grantees. This mutual interdependence, combined with recent global shifts and a long-term growth partnership model that commits us to our grantees over six years, has given us at Women First International Fund a unique opportunity: pursuing purposeful growth in tandem with, and informed by, our grantees.
Of course, we differ fundamentally from our grantee partner organizations. Our emerging, grassroots, women-led grantees, across four African countries and India, accomplish much with very little paid staff, physical assets, visibility, or cash. For many of the emerging female leaders of our grantee organizations, ours is their first institutional funding. Meanwhile, though very small within the landscape of global North funders, Women First started this journey with a small staff of U.S.- based professionals, a small endowment, a well-resourced board, an office in New York City, and a United Nations partnership.
But while our starting points differed, our journeys have overlapped in important and sometimes surprising ways – and even reinforced each other. Simply put, learnings from meaningful engagement with our grantees in recent years have catalyzed a radical rebirth of our fifty-year-old organization. They necessitated a major organizational transformation including our new name, an innovative long term partnership model, and a narrowed strategic focus on economic empowerment. They called us to reassess and rebuild a more diverse, community based, and global staff and board. And they led us to this pivotal moment: a commitment to scale our model and enhance our investment in our grantees, beyond simply program support to strengthen sustainable organizations.
This is a big bet for Women First. It means we must amplify our own partnership and development activities alongside those of our grantees. Like many of our grantees, we only recently received our first institutional funding – something we must continue to pursue together.
Being a smaller women’s fund may have forced us into this invaluable learning opportunity. But we believe other funders can benefit from what we have learned so far – and apply these principles for mutual enhancement.
Upon reflection, we find that our learnings align with the same organizational support phases that Women First has designed to support our own grantees during their six-year partnerships with us.
1. Opportunity: Assess + Prepare.
The origins of Women First’s growth journey can be traced back to 2019, when strategic planning resulted in sweeping changes across the organization. During this process, we conducted a deep self reflection on our trajectory as a membership organization and recognized the need for a new approach. Alongside our grantees, together we identified a singular topic area of focus: women’s economic empowerment. At the intersection of female livelihoods and community resilience, we recognized the value unlocked by tangible economic advancement for women, girls, and transgender people.
Historically, Women First had been making one-year grants and not providing any capacity or growth support. Through deeper engagement with these grassroots organizations, the need for both organizational strengthening and programmatic support became clear; these tenets ultimately formed the core of our organization’s Theory of Change and overall strategy, measurement, evaluation and learning.
Based on research and peer best practices, we designed the Grassroots Organization Capacity Assessment Tool (GrOCAT). As we built our strategic plan, we committed to meeting our grantees where they are in their own strategic planning journey: starting with an early focus on identity, problem definition, community engagement, and solution design.
2. Investment: Strengthen + Improve.
Within this structure, we sought to provide a flexible approach, giving grantees the opportunity to shape an organizational strengthening plan unique to their needs, which could unfold over phase two of our partnership. The global events of 2020 required a refocus for Women First and our partners, while the organizational strengthening plans that our partners had started to shape took a backseat to meeting the immediate needs of their communities. Our flexible funding model allowed us to adapt quickly.
In 2021 we invested our energy in a deep learning exercise with our grantees designed to inform a further refinement of our model. We combined a survey with a handful of deeper one-on-one interviews. The timing aligned perfectly with our grantees’ re-engagement in their internal strategic reflection, and we walked away with some important learnings:
o Women’s economic advancement was even more important
o Grantees were confident in their identity and vision – but needed help with strategy, governance, and measurement and evaluation
o Grantees struggled to communicate their impact to other funders
In parallel, we made sweeping changes to align our own operations with our mission:
o First, we moved from a volunteer board to a governance board. We conducted a board assessment and began to seek individuals who more accurately reflected Women First’s internal commitment to honoring cultural competency and diversity.
o Rather than exist in perpetuity, the board voted on a major scaling-up of our approach – unlocking operational spending from our endowment that is unprecedented in our organization’s fifty-year-plus history. This would yield major growth and investment in our own infrastructure to attract new funders.
o With this additional investment, we prioritized going “deep” (providing a more robust grantee organizational strengthening platform) and “wide” (expanding to fund more grantees than ever before).
o Women First staff tripled in size and decentralized, moving from an NYC office to a virtual global community. Our twelve new employees are mostly based in our grantmaking regions. This growth allows program staff to maintain lower caseloads, develop deep understanding of grantee context, build long-term relationships, and participate in site visits and regional convenings.
3. Leverage: Attract + Sustain.
As we look to the next stage of growth for Women First, our interdependence with our grantees is clearer than ever. As with our first cohort of grantees, who have yet to enter this third phase of our support, we have only an early picture of how our growth will play out.
At this stage in our journey, we are asking ourselves the same questions that we are beginning to ask our grantees:
o What does sustainable growth look like?
o Where should we prioritize investments of time, energy, and resources? o How can we attract the right funders and partners?
o What narratives will we lead with – and what data must support it?
During this phase, strengthening networks and deepening engagement with strategic partners will be crucial – for both us and our grantees. Women First has already made major steps in this direction, including catalytic memberships in field-leading organizations for women’s funds, like Prospera, as well as relationships with funders who share our interests and values.
For our grantee partners, in addition to supporting essential conversations on sustainable futures, Women First is deeply committed to helping strengthen their networks – advancing the meaningful connections and platforms needed to give our emerging global leaders opportunities to reach organizational goals.
As we look to the future, one thing is clear: the growth that Women First has pursued would never have been possible without the support and learning from our grantees. Growing together with them as part of a holistic self-reflection process, we hope will ensure our shared efforts last well into the future.