Giving Seed Grants to Catalyze Collaboration
June 13, 2017
WLS: Where Are They Now?
August 11, 2025
Innovative Multimedia
The Channel Foundation has supported organizations working to advance global women’s rights and gender equality for over 20 years. Recently, Channel has noticed that several grantee partners have been utilizing multimedia tools to amplify their work in ingenious ways. Going beyond the occasional photo or video, these innovations have the potential to reach new audiences and to build and mobilize constituencies for women’s human rights.
Channel’s grantee partners are based all around the world and work across several intersections including feminist movements for environmental, sexual, reproductive, and disability rights. The organizations employ various strategies as they focus on conducting advocacy, promoting legislative and policy change, and movement building.
Multimedia can include radio, podcasts, video, documentaries, journalism, comics, and magazines. To explore some of these tools, we herewith highlight the work of several Channel grantees utilizing multimedia to advance their goals, and ultimately to help amplify and strengthen their missions and programs. These multimedia projects have emerged in several of our Priority Thematic Areas.
Amplifying Gender Equality in Media & Technology
Dancers from Compañía de Danza Antoinette perform The Nutcracker
Global Gig graphics by the Global Press
A photo from Cultural Survival Magazine
Global Press, a Channel grantee from 2010 until its closure at the end of 2025, has been a leading figure in supporting ethical and accurate grassroots journalism in areas that are least-covered in the world. Global Press has supported and trained over 250 women journalists around the world, establishing over 35 news bureaus in 11 countries. Global Press has a whole section of their website devoted to their Multimedia Projects.
Global Press trained their journalists not only in traditional journalism practices, but also to be professional photojournalists. In fact, all the images presented on the Global Press website are original and were taken by its journalists. The image above, taken by Patricia Zavala Gutiérrez, depicts dancers from Compañía de Danza Antoinette performing the Nutcracker in the courtyard of Casa de la Cultura Pedro Ángel Palou Pérez in Puebla, Mexico. The image comes from an article titled “Framed! 13 Unique Glimpses of Life Around the World”, that captures “everyday life through unusual frames.”
Furthermore, Global Press utilized graphics such as the one presented in The Global Gig, depicted to the right, that illustrates how the gig economy functions. The animation is a part of a larger story titled “How App-Based Work is Changing the World”, which includes articles highlighting the stories six individuals around the world navigating the Gig economy. Other multimedia utilized by Global Press includes a micro-documentary highlighting its 18th anniversary and its Voices of Defiance project which depicts the untold stories of 11 local journalists and activists around the world fighting for freedom of press.
Indigenous People’s rights organization and Channel partner since 2015, Cultural Survival utilizes photos and visuals to amplify global environmental and Indigenous rights. This is best seen through its Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, which currently has over 190 issues accounting for over 40 years of the organization’s work. Its latest issue focuses on Indigenous technology, particularly the use of AI and coding in collaboration with Indigenous Knowledge. The image to the left depicts a man fishing for salmon in the Heiltsuk Nation in Bella Bella, British Columbia, Canada. This image accompanies the article “Protecting the Salmon Population with Artificial Intelligence”, as part of found in the latest magazine titled “Indigenizing Emerging Technologies”. The articles highlights the Heiltsuk Nation’s integration of Tradition Knowledge with AI to track salmon migration on their territories. Furthermore, Cultural Survival has its own radio program that it utilizes to amplify the voices of Indigenous women and provide information on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. These radio programs feature intersections with discussions of other rights including environmental rights, land rights, and education.
Numun Fund, the first feminist tech fund and a Channel grantee, employs animations and writing to magnify its work supporting feminist activists working with technology. Its 2023 report called A Seed for the Feminist Tech Ecosystem, utilized illustrations and detailed statistics to present the impact of its first year in existence. This unique medium for a report, clearly depicts the grantees, regions, and intersections Numun Fund has supported and why.
Ending Violence Against Women and Protecting Women Human Rights Defenders
Cypher Comics
Fundamental Documentary Series
Global Fund for Women (GFW), Channel’s longest standing grantee, a partner since 2000, has worked for decades on supporting Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) and amplifying their voices. A few years ago, GFW put together a five-part documentary series Fundamental, which highlights the story of five WHRDs in Pakistan, Kenya, Brazil, Georgia, and the United States of America. Defenders of Justice: Fighting Racism and Patriarchy in Brazil, featuring Lucia Maria Xavier de Castro and Daniele Duarte, two WHRDs working on sexual and reproductive rights and anti-extremism respectively, can be viewed on the films website. The film series was directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a two-time-Academy award-winning documentary filmmaker.
Frontline Defenders, a Channel grantee since 2014, has worked since their founding on protecting human rights defenders around the world. In 2020, Frontline Defenders launched Cypher, a digital comics magazine. The monthly publication was meant to advance “the organization’s storytelling and narrative framing work in collaboration with (and in support of) human rights defenders” through featuring their stories. One of the most recent issues highlights the stories of five HRDs from Afghanistan, Mexico, Sudan and Zimbabwe and serves to celebrate the courage of these activists. In typical comic-book style, these stories include illustrations alongside bubble text depicting dialogue and events.
In another example, Channel grantee partner JASS Just Associates utilizes YouTube to advocate and present the stories of WHRDs in the various places they work around the world, primarily Mesoamerica, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. These videos include interviews with activists and feminist civil society organization leaders.
Strengthening the Women's Funding Movement
The Realm of Kintsugi
FRIDA's Garden of Change
Our Seasons of the Moon
Urgent Action Fund Asia & Pacific focuses on rapid response grants to get urgently needed support to feminist movements, particularly those defenders at risk, in the Asia and Pacific region. One of UAF A&P’s creative initiatives is Shifting Narratives: Realm of Kintsugi, a video game that aims to “disrupt the hegemony of traditional arts spaces to amplify new, fresh and diverse voices” from Asia and the Pacific. The game’s objective is to build relationships between human rights defenders, activists, and artists. Through collaboration between these various groups, the Realm of Kintsugi, a representation of how these artists “re-imagined resilience and resistance from their contexts and lived realities”, was created.
FRIDA, the Young Feminist Fund, has supported young feminist movements and initiatives through funding since its creation in 2014. Utilizing animation and illustrations, FRIDA’s Garden of Change project tries to make visible the question of how to best support feminist movements. It is a walk through “report” for feminist initiatives. The garden highlights the key issue of how young feminist movement organizers are often undervalued and unrecognized for their work. It emphasizes the lack of funding these feminist often face in their roles. The garden posits that the solution to these problems is to provide feminist organizers with “the resources, leadership opportunities and capacities they need” to ensure “radical shifts to movements” landscapes and social change trajectories occur.
Purposeful serves as a feminist hub for supporting feminists in crises through its rapid-response Global Resilience Fund. Through illustration, Purposeful has produced Our Seasons of the Moon, its quarterly reports following the phases of the moon. Each quarter represents a different moon phase with unique illustrations highlighting that quarters activities and initiatives. Each phase unlocks new publications, research, blogs, and films amplifying feminist voices.
