Developed since 2019 and formally launched in 2020, Fenomenal Funds is a feminist funder collaborative designed to strengthen the organisational infrastructure and ecosystem of women’s funds within the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds. Funded by the Foundation for a Just Society, Open Society Foundations, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, it has distributed over $20 million to 44 autonomous women’s funds across five continents.
What sets Fenomenal Funds apart as a model for evaluation and learning is the seriousness with which it treats the how of learning alongside the what. Rather than requiring grantees to report against predetermined metrics, the collaborative developed a shared Learning Plan through a five-month co-creation process involving its Advisory Committee, Steering Committee, and a dedicated Learning and Evaluation Working Group.
KIT Institute was appointed as Learning Partner through a process designed on feminist principles of participation, care, and transparency. From spring 2024, ten co-created case studies were developed with six women’s funds and four collaboration groups, generating evidence rooted in the experience of those inside the work rather than those evaluating it from outside.
Safe and brave spaces, stipends, language accessibility, and iterative reflection cycles ensured that learning was genuinely participatory. Governance was equally shared: private foundation funders and women’s fund grantees hold equal decision-making power over strategy and resource allocation. This was described by the collaborative’s co-leads as a deliberate attempt to disrupt the traditional power relationship between donor and recipient.
The collaborative’s approach embodies a shift from evaluation as compliance to evaluation as collective inquiry, treating the process of learning as a site of feminist practice in its own right.
What practitioners can take from this
Fenomenal Funds shows that how we design learning and evaluation processes is itself an act of power. When learning is co-created rather than extracted, it becomes a tool for strengthening the work and the relationships that sustain it, not just a way of accounting for it.