Our Priorities

Organizations That Are Women-Led and That Center Women

Women, long- marginalized from the dominant capitalist agenda, are the progenitors of the solutions we seek. Women are the center of families; they raise children, form the fabric of community life, and care for elders; they nourish and sustain human wellness.

Women drive local economies. They procure the goods and services needed for family survival and health; they make our food systems and food security possible. Women are responsible for growing and producing 60-80% of the food consumed in the developing world and are largely responsible for household water and sanitation management.

We partner with women-centered organizations because we share a belief that women are the primary stewards of local ecosystems and positioned with the social capital within communities to drive transformation to build the reparative global agenda.

Depth of Local Integration

We seek approaches that have deep local roots and contextual grounding and where participatory methods inform program design and evaluation. Because we believe the work of an impactful organization is deeply embedded in the community. The approaches are tailored to the unique needs and conditions of the local context – geography, resources, culture, economics – and successful innovators demonstrate a deep and strategic understanding of the full ecosystem.

We want to understand how you see your organization’s work in context of the entire system. We value your perceptions of the local economy and power structures, as well as your views on the fulcrum points for change and how your strategies are positioned to be transformational in the context of your local, regional, and national ecosystem.

Growth Potential

While there is no one-size- fits-all approach to tackling the size and scope of the actions needed to transform how we live on this earth we are looking for ideas that can grow and that can be adapted and replicated broadly to help more people. Notably, this is different from the buzzword “scale.” Not everything can scale. Too often, we put outsized value on the expectation that there is a linear path to scale and the notion that, if an approach is good and elegant enough, it will just naturally click into a track of exponential growth. We know the world is more complicated than that.

We also believe the most promising solutions are built locally – and that they have the potential to unlock solutions broadly. A feedback loop of iteration and learning is a vital part of systems-change. We want to know what you’ve figured out and what new questions and opportunities came from that learning. We seek ideas that can grow in depth and in breadth.