The Alliance launched the Learning and Solutions Hubs as a way to create a platform for meaningful cross-sectoral, multi-stakeholder learning aimed at collectively tackling some of the most challenging aspects pertaining to our feminist funding ecosystem.  In the Mechanisms for Impactful Resourcing of Feminist Movement’s Hub, members have reflected on three core questions:

• What would it take for more funders to directly support feminist movements with an emphasis on direct funding to groups in the Global South, in ways that build on existing and effective mechanisms for doing so?
• What would it take to strengthen complementarity across different funders, acknowledging their respective roles and constraints?
• What would it take for different funders to reimagine risk, to approach risk calculations in ways that include the risk of not supporting frontline feminist groups in their vital work?

This Hub will be building on existing work around reconceptualizing risk and work on questions, such as: What underpins our understanding of risk? Who do funders need to hear from to shift their practices pertaining to risk? And, how do we qualify or quantify the risk of inaction? 

The Supporting Feminist Movements in Crisis Response Hub sought to unpack:

• What would an ideal feminist crisis response ecosystem look like and how could different actors work together to achieve it?
• How can the critical connections between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding approaches to crisis be reflected in strategies to support feminist movements responding to crises on the ground? (Building Peace, the Feminist Foreign Policy Way: Good Practices)
• How can we apply our feminist perspectives to critically build connections between the siloed approaches to crisis (i.e. humanitarian, development or peacebuilding) to facilitate funding for feminist movements responding to crisis?

By deepening our collective understanding of how crisis and crisis response is identified and funded, from the different sectors and actors, and how power shifts drive the funding we were able to explore some of the critical connections between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding approaches to crisis, and how these facilitate or hinder funding for feminist movements responding to crisis on the ground. Our Deepening Understanding of Contexts and Impacts of Feminist Organizing Hub, asked, 

• What would it take to bolster transformative and connected feminist movements in a time of severe backlash and growing authoritarianism? 
• What would it take to build shared insights into how to tell the real impact stories of feminist movements?
• What would it take to deliver support that celebrates innovation and learns from failures as we strengthen movements?

Across all three Hubs, our conversations have acknowledged the role of power in this complex environment and the different power held in our collective spaces and how to transform it to build an honest understanding of each other’s limitations and potential to bring about change.

There is a boldness required for change to take place in our ecosystem. We hope that the Alliance will create a strong platform for us to collectively reflect and consolidate our thinking as we explore ways to put our past experiences, ideas and recommendations to use in our upcoming interventions and activities. Drawing on the knowledge of the collective and our own understanding of our individual spaces, we hope to use the hubs as places for sharpening and strengthening our collective approach to reaching more and better funding, in all its complexity.