Gender Funders CoLab

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.  Through creating a stronger and more effective private philanthropic sector, Gender Funders CoLab can enable quality funding that builds long-lasting feminist movements that advance women’s rights and gender justice worldwide.

Gender Funders CoLab News:

Channel Grants:

2021: Channel made a grant to Gender Funders CoLab (formerly known as Philanthropy Advancing Women’s Human Rights or PAWHR) via the fiscal sponsorship of Panorama Global 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) (via the fiscal sponsorship of the Proteus Fund), 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.

Applicants must be current or recent grantees of a PAWHR member institution and can apply for joint funding opportunities or advocacy opportunities.  PAWHR hoped that the Pooled Fund will give at least two organizations, coalitions or networks a chance to collaboratively apply for or advocate for large grants that advance women’s human rights/gender equality that they would not be eligible to apply for individually (due to budget size, scope of Request for Proposal RFP etc). Funding decisions are made collectively by an Advisory Committee of those PAWHR members contributing to the Pooled Fund.