WE MOVED MONEY
Money is a form of power and possibility. Moving it is a concrete way to move our world toward the just and sustainable future we need.
Grantmaking
With so much on the line across the globe, we more than doubled our grantmaking and moved money to leaders forging lasting change. Because the world can’t wait.
In a time of global uncertainty, our grantee partners are holding the line amid a wave of crises and challenges, from renewed attacks on women’s bodily autonomy and LGBTQI+ rights, to environmental catastrophes and war, to unsustainable hikes in cost of living and criminalization of human rights defenders.
In response, we moved over $21 million in grants to women’s rights and feminist organizations and funds—more than double the amount we distributed last year. Across three grantmaking streams, we resourced a total of 654 organizations throughout 90 countries in the Global South and East. This included 42 new countries for the first time. Critically, this money is reaching a good number of unregistered and emerging organizations, groups who are on the very frontlines of challenges but who often struggle to access funding through traditional channels.
The net result? We are injecting resources across an ecosystem of change, from emerging groups doing essential work in communities to global organizations influencing change at the United Nations, and everywhere in between. The result? A living mosaic of outsized impact that would not have been possible through any single fund working alone.
We thank World University Service of Canada (WUSC) for the due diligence, compliance, financial, and capacity-building support it provides to our grantmaking program.
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Moving money across the world
The multiplier effect in action. Our granting dollars are moving to leaders so they can set their own agendas for lasting change. This living tapestry of possibility and purpose now links five continents.
Doing a double take? Maps are political—and they’ve long centered the perspective of people in the Global North. Our map, like our work, centers the Global South. It’s one small way to disrupt colonial mindsets and challenge dominant narratives about whose lives and leadership matter most.
Growing a Global Community
Our Catalyze grants support one important part of global feminist movements. These organizations have deep ties to their communities and nearly all are governed and led by local women, girls, and trans people. Together, they are shifting norms, advancing structural change, and rebuilding the world from the ground up. Because that’s how change sticks.
This year, our Catalyze program took a big leap forward—supporting a total of 69 partnerships, including 34 grants to new partners.
Catalyze
Moving In Crisis
Our Prepare, Respond and Care grantmaking stream mobilizes and provides resources for women’s rights and feminist organizations and networks working in crisis situations. These brave partners are leading work in some of the most challenging contexts on earth.
Crisis
Stories of Change
Lasting change. It’s why we exist—and it is what we are designed to resource.
At the Equality Fund, we are purpose-built to support leaders in the many different ways they are organizing across the world. This collection of stories chronicles the incredible ways our grantee partners are forging change.
Put it all together and the result is what we call the multiplier effect. By supporting different types of groups at different levels—from diverse feminist funds, to individual feminist organizations, to movement leaders working in crisis and conflict—our resources flow throughout an entire ecosystem of organizing. This includes emerging, unregistered, and other organizations who are leading the way, but often don’t have access to traditional funding. As one of the stories illustrates, we also move money through gender-lens investing—one more concrete way to shift resources and power to women, girls, and trans people.
Our investment portfolio
At the Equality Fund, we don’t just move money through our grantmaking, we also move it through our investments, using fit-for-purpose gender-lens investing tools and investment products. It’s a reflection of our commitment to put every lever we have to work for change—today.
We’re proud that 100 percent of our portfolio is invested with a gender lens. And this year, we were thrilled to celebrate strong results in terms of both financial and social impact.
The Equality Fund portfolio outperformed market benchmarks, delivering living proof of the power of gender-lens investing to generate financial and social value simultaneously. Many of the Equality Fund Government Pool’s financial performance metrics are compared to the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI), a global market-based benchmark commonly used by institutional investors. During this fiscal, the portfolio produced an impressive return of 2.8%, net of investment management fees, and also contributed $7.5 million to Equality Fund grantmaking and operations.
Now we are taking the tools of this approach and sharing them with other asset owners and partners to accelerate change across the investment landscape. See our “We moved ideas” section to learn more.
As ever, we thank members of the Investment Advisory Council, as well as the Toronto Foundation, which serves as our fiscal partner for the Government of Canada.
Hear from Ladé Araba
“I'm excited to see the tremendous impact”