Home > With and For Girls Fund
We are the world’s first Africa-rooted global fund for girl activists and their allies, resourcing girls resistance across the globe. We dream of a world in which girls’ activism and organising is resourced in healthy and sustainable ways that genuinely works for girls at the unique intersections of age, gender and other identities.
Our ambition is to reframe power in philanthropic practice, showing what is possible when girls are put at the centre of resource distribution. We reimagine grant-making practice so that girls can define and determine resource distribution in the service of their own visions, goals and dreams of freedom. We are grounded in feminist principles of solidarity, reciprocity and collective learning, we are reimagining what it means to hold movement resources in deep relationship and with deep accountability to girls.
The With and For Girls Fund brings all of Purposeful’s experimental feminist funding initiatives into one integrated participatory grantmaking hub, resourcing girls resistance from the village to the global and everything in between.
The Founding partners of With and For Girls continue to work as a collective to power the fund with resources. They leverage learnings to influence more and better resources for girls in philanthropic and development spaces.
We also work to support young feminist organising during emergencies, crisis and at catalytic movement moments. The Global Resilience Fund for Girls and Young Women is just one example of the ways in which we shift resources and power to young feminist groups at crisis moments.
As activists and organisers, we understand how critical it is to have access to resources at key movement moments, to support strategy creation, communications, logistics, travel, healing space and so much more. In Sierra Leone, our Rapid Release Fund supports survivor leaders with a grant within 24-hrs of a key moment, allowing groups to organise and amplify their work at speed and scale.
Girls activists submit profiles via text, voice note, video centering words and artistic expression
Girls invited to dialogue based application across funding windows
Defining decision making criteria and co-creating further funding windows based on needs of group database
to each other with advisors and Purposeful team to collectively define a shared learning and doing agenda
(including those in the database) and access to feminist political education, self and collective care spaces
locally, regionally, and transnationally
We offer a range of funding, predominantly core and flexible support, to girls and their allies. Our funding streams are designed to meet specific context, needs and catalytic moments in the lives of girl activists including resources for:
We centre collective care and accompaniment across our work, grounded in principles of solidarity and reciprocity. We trust girls as experts of their own realities, working with them where they are in the ways they ask for support.
As a result, we offer the following:
Be considered for funding opportunities and connect with other girl activists in your region.