Gender Funders CoLab
Channel Focus Area:
Strengthening the Women's Funding Movement
Mission:
Established in 2014, Gender Funders CoLab (formerly known as Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights or PAWHR) is a network that mobilizes funders to support the women’s rights ecosystem and bring more and better resources to the field.
The CoLab's mission is to expand funding that builds long-lasting movements that advance gender equality and rights worldwide. They aim to do this by building a more creative, collaborative, and effective private philanthropic sector.
Impact:
Gender Funders CoLab celebrated its ten-year anniversary in 2024 and published an impact report, Our Power Together - Impact Report: Ten Years of Powering Gender Justice, looking back at their beginnings and reflecting on what the CoLab community has achieved together over their first decade.
The report tells the story of how the CoLab community of funders collaborated and organized to resource feminist movements to advance gender justice globally - demonstrating power together.
Channel Grants:
2025: Channel made a grant to Gender Funders CoLab in support of CoLab’s Nourish Pooled Fund, aiming to strengthen the ecosystem and mobilize resources for women’s rights worldwide.
2021: Channel made a grant to Gender Funders CoLab to renew support for the Strategic Collaboration to Leverage Resources (SCLR) Pooled Fund, a technical assistance fund created to support women’s rights organizations’ ability to apply for and manage large grants or take advantage of advocacy opportunities that will increase resources for the women’s rights field.
2017: Channel made a grant to Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights (PAWHR), a funder affinity group for private women’s rights funders (of which Channel is a member), to support the Strategic Collaboration to Leverage Resources (SCLR) Pooled Fund. The SCLR Pooled Fund is a technical assistance fund created to support women’s rights organizations’ ability to apply for and manage large grants or take advantage of advocacy opportunities that will increase resources for the women’s rights field.
This was the first time Channel contributed to a pooled fund which are typically created when multiple funders come together to “pool” their resources and focus their grant making efforts toward common goals. In this case, PAWHR members decided to create a pooled fund after increasingly receiving requests to support the costs associated with collaborative, joint funding initiatives.