By Florencia Roitstein and Andrés Thompson, ELLAS-Mujeres y Filantropia
Thousands of women, in all corners of Latin America, are mobilising in the streets demanding their rights, and are determined to transform their conditions: they are creating shelters to receive abused women in their own homes, setting up libraries to bring reading closer to children without access to school, offering their savings to set up community banks, investing their time to search for girls kidnapped by trafficking, and taking to the streets en masse to demand abortion rights. While they do all this, they are also questioning power relationships. However, and despite their effort and commitment, local philanthropy is not taking notice of these initiatives and does not support or finance them.
It is devastating to see repeatedly how women, creating different forms of “community-based philanthropy”, must self-generate resources through voluntary work and their own contributions, leading to work overload, instability , and reduced prospects for sustainability. Meanwhile, women with economic power and the philanthropy ecosystem at large (with honourable exceptions) remain immobile sitting in their velvety armchairs.
How can we change this picture and encourage foundations and corporations to invest more and better resources not just for “female” and “women-led” philanthropy but, mainly, for women’s rights and feminist organisations?
First, we believe that we need to better understand the complexities and difficulties that women and feminist organisations are facing as well as finding the reasons why “donors” are helping so little to advance the movement. Generating appropriate knowledge is key to better strategise a potential change. The preliminary conclusions stemming from the ongoing research being developed by ELLAS (Uruguay) in cooperation with Comunalia (México) on “Women, rights and philanthropy in Latin America and the Caribbean”, accounts for the great absentees that are corporate and individual philanthropy1. International funding comes in drops and is directed mainly to large organisations such as women’s funds, which have a fundamental role in supporting feminist organisations. However, hundreds of smaller activists, community-based organisations, and informal collectives and groups are off the radar. Paradoxically, it is here, at the bottom of the pyramid where fundamental change is taking place.
Second, we must encourage conventional philanthropic organisations to change their way of doing business in relation to women by including gender mainstreaming and intersectionality. Investing more resources in women and girls, if not properly done, is not enough to improve women’s rights. Philanthropic organisations, particularly donors, must change themselves and incorporate a gender lens in all their structures and programmes.
Gender mainstreaming has been embraced internationally as a strategy towards realising gender equality. It involves the integration of a gender perspective into the preparation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies, regulatory measures, and spending programmes, with a view to promoting equality between women and men and to combat discrimination2.
For example, organisations need to revisit their board composition, their mission and vision, their human resources policies, the way they design their strategies and, of course, their plans to allocate and invest resources. This is already being done in some countries beyond Latin America. To encourage our local donors to move into that direction and help those who want to get involved in that urgent journey, we will soon launch a handbook for mainstreaming gender in Latin American philanthropy and a special tool kit for community foundations in Mexico.
While women’s philanthropy is on the rise globally, it does not necessarily mean that women’s rights are following the same path. Latin American history shows us that women have always had a leading role in the field of philanthropy, but it is also known that their actions were conservative, paternalistic, and mostly religiously oriented. The rise and increasing visibility of a wide variety of feminist movements is changing that tradition while shifting from a charitable approach to women’s issues to a woman’s human rights perspective. A core concept incorporated by this NextGen feminism is intersectionality.
Intersectionality is a framework for conceptualising a person, group of people, or social problem as affected by several discriminations and disadvantages. It considers people’s overlapping identities and experiences to understand the complexity of the prejudices they face.
In other words, intersectional theory asserts that people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers. Intersectionality recognises that identity markers (e.g., “woman” and “black”) do not exist independently of each other, and that each informs the others, often creating a complex convergence of oppression3.
Both concepts, gender mainstreaming and intersectionality, are key to philanthropy development focused on women and feminist activism. A gender mainstreaming approach will certainly contribute to increasing giving in the region by expanding the donor base, not just in traditional grant-making foundations but also horizontally at the community level. An intersectional framework for philanthropy will act in the same direction since it will broaden the reach of the feminist movements by including groups, sectors and issues that previously were considered separately, like racism, and environment, among others4.
To support that vibrant movement, ELLAS has recently created the Latin American School for Feminist and Community Philanthropy5.
We strongly believe that working simultaneously on the supply side (donors) and the demand side (feminist organisations and movements) we are helping create the conditions to bridge a gap in the Latin American philanthropy ecosystem and, in consequence, contribute to more equitable and just societies.
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2https://eige.europa.eu/gender-mainstreaming/what-is-gender-mainstreaming
3https://www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me/
4Hacer feminismo es hacer filantropía: Reflexiones sobre América Latina y el Caribe. Florencia Roitstein y Andrés Thompson ELLAS-Mujeres y filantropía Enero 2022. https://www.ellasfilantropia.org/_files/ugd/c4d5a2_7e5e5689c4874eaf9df54f194d51b388.pdf
5https://www.ellasfilantropia.org/escueladefilantropia
Florencia Roitstein is the Director of ELLAS – Women and Philanthropy in Latin America. She is a professor at the University of San Andrés in Argentina and works as a consultant for international organizations and national and multinational companies at the interface between environmental sustainability, gender equity and economic development.She was program officer for Latin American and the Caribbean at International Planned Parenthood Federation/WHR in New York City and Under-Secretary of State for Sustainable Development in Argentina.
Andrés Thompson works as an independent consultant, based in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. He co-leads as senior advisor the program ELLAS -Women and Philanthropy in Latin America. He was program director for Latin American and the Caribbean at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan (1994-2010) and head of the Brazil office of streetfootballworld. He also served as the Executive Coordinator of the Brazilian Network of Social Justice Funds and as Coordinator of Institutional Relations of Fondo Región Colonia in Uruguay.