In November 2025, Gender Funders CoLab launched the report “Moving Beyond Grant Capital: Meeting the Moment with Innovative Finance,” a timely exploration on reimagining how to finance feminist movements. With significant cuts to funding and international aid in 2025 (including the closing of USAID), the report contributes to new solutions in the current ecosystem.
Keely Tongate, Innovative Finance Director of Gender Funders CoLab, cites rising hostility to women’s rights movements as spurring the urgency to “build creative resourcing flows.”
“As funders, our strategies must meet the complexities of this moment to ensure continued support for those leading the vital work of advancing rights and justice for women and LGBTQ+ communities around the globe,” Tongate writes in the report’s foreword.
The report details how Gender Funders CoLab interviewed 79 individuals who bring diverse perspectives across the women’s rights ecosystem, from grassroots leaders to investment managers. CoLab then analyzed these discussions to inform innovative finance strategies that . These build on the philanthropic network’s mission of mobilizing funders to power gender justice.
The findings identify key opportunities for CoLab to support their partners advancing women’s rights amidst unstable times. On an even broader scale, CoLab’s research has potential to serve as a resource crucial to efforts in strengthening the women’s funding movement worldwide.
Participating as a research interviewee, Jac Sm Kee from Numun Fund, a Channel Foundation grantee that resources feminist tech infrastructure, discussed the need to toward a new model of funding.
“We want a feminist economic model. We are trying to build infrastructure: the technology infrastructure, the narrative infrastructure, community infrastructure that supports distributed governance and decision-making,” Kee said.
Along with guiding next steps as Gender Funders CoLab imagines new innovative tools for the funding sector, Tongate hopes the report can act as a resource to the community.
Gender Funders Colab writes, “it is essential that we support what social movements have long advocated: strategies for financial resilience, autonomy, and economic self-determination.”
Read from Colab’s report contribution to the evolving discussion on innovative finance for here: “Moving Beyond Grant Capital: Meeting the Moment with Innovative Finance.”
