Written by Sarah Rose, this report is a summary of her review of Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s work towards gender justice. We would like to thank the many individuals and organisations across the gender justice sector who generously contributed their time and insights for the review. We’re especially grateful to Sarah for her expert research and analysis, and the care she showed throughout.
About Sarah Rose
Sarah Rose is an independent consultant working at the intersections of philanthropy, social change and evidence. Sarah applies value based and feminist approaches to understand how to deepen impact. For more information, please visit Sarah’s LinkedIn page.
Foreword from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation has been a long-time funder of work towards gender justice, and in 2022, we identified gender justice as one of five priorities under our strategy for A Fairer Future1. In 2025, we commissioned a review of this area of work to help us explore the direction of our strategy beyond 2027, when the current strategy is due to end.
Esmée Fairbairn
Foundation’s gender justice priority
Gender justice requires changes to systems, policy and practice so that everyone’s rights are recognised and protected. We will work with others to ensure that women and girls can live in safety and fulfil their potential, and that transgender and non-binary people’s voices are heard.
Esmée is working towards four long-term outcomes:
1
Gender based violence is reduced through the delivery of preventative work.
3 Policy, practice, and the law better meets the needs of women experiencing multiple challenges and discrimination.
2 Trans and non-binary people’s rights are recognised and protected.
4 The negative impacts of the criminal justice system on women and their families are reduced.
1 A Fairer Future strategy – update, July 2022
Foreword from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
We wanted to:
Understand how effectively our work has advanced the outcomes we set, and where we need to adapt in response to a rapidly shifting external context for gender justice in the UK –politically, socially, and financially. This would help us understand what this meant for our goals and the levers available for change.
Assess how well Esmée’s portfolio aligns with, and delivers against, our outcomes. This includes the difference our funding has made to date, where progress has been more challenging, and what important gaps remain. We also wanted to explore the intersection across outcomes, identifying where we might be able to unlock greater impact.
Review Esmée’s role within the wider gender justice funding landscape and highlight areas of overlap, opportunities for deeper partnership, and issues where joint effort or more proactive exploration might have strengthened the field.
The primary aim for this work was to use the findings to inform improvements to current delivery and to shape the development of our next organisational strategy.
To ensure a robust and constructive assessment, Esmée appointed an independent consultant, Sarah Rose, to act as a critical friend – bringing external challenge, independent insight, and a fresh perspective. The review combined:
• Desk research on contextual and funding shifts since 2022
• Analysis of learning from all gender justice grants awarded between 2020 and 2025
• Facilitated discussions with staff, funded partners, and other stakeholders.
The process concluded with a report and a debrief session with Esmée staff to reflect together on the findings and their implications. The learnings about the changing context for gender justice, and what progress our work and funding has made so far, will inform our future work. This report is a summary of this work, which we hope is helpful to organisations working towards gender justice, and to other funders interested in supporting this work.
Esmée as a funder
External analysis and partner feedback confirms that Esmée occupies a highly strategic and influential position, underpinned by its scale and progressive funding model. The organisation stands out against other grant makers for specifically naming gender justice as a priority, and especially because it includes support for trans and non-binary rights. The Foundation is also known for its strong convening power to bring partners and other funders together.
When looking across the funding landscape for gender justice, there appear to be three types of funders:
1
Grassroots funders:
Small grants, seed funding, capacity building, supporting marginalised communities.
2
Mid-level funders:
Medium/large-scale grants, core funding, 3 to 5 years, organisational strengthening, systems change.
3 Government/ public contracts:
Large-scale service commissioning (e.g., refuge, domestic abuse support, sexual violence services) –but often inaccessible to smaller groups.
Esmée occupies the middle tier in this ecosystem, helping organisations to grow, stabilise and, in some instances scale impact.
Esmée’s funding support
Main grant funding from September 2020 to October 2025
77 Grants awarded to 68 organisations
£15m
Total awarded
£190k
Average grant size
74% Grants awarded for three years or more
In addition to Esmée’s open application process, funding managers also proactively invite applications from organisations they think are a strong fit for the strategy. All applications, regardless of route, follow the same application process.
Who the funding supports
Women
Ex-offenders and prisoners
Victims of crime or abuse
Communities experiencing racial inequity
Children and young people
Refugees and migrants
LGBTQ
Multiple and complex needs
Disabilities and sensory impairments
Mental health needs
Homeless
Poverty or financially excluded
Care leavers
Drugs and addiction
Some organisations support multiple population groups. This chart shows how many grants support a specific population group, so grants can appear multiple times.
Leadership of the organisations
Women and girls
Communities experiencing racialinequality
Migrants
LGBT+ people
Disabled people
Faith communities
People who are educationally oreconomicallydisadvantaged
Older/younger people
Esmée asks all applicants to complete a DEI monitoring form to track progress on their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, and how they can improve their practice. The form uses the DEI Data Standard, with organisations defined as ‘led by’ when 75% or more of the Board/Management Committee AND 50% of senior staff share a particular identity or experience, where staff exist.
Out of 70 grants, 65 (93%) were awarded to organisations majority-led by individuals from at least one group experiencing inequity.
7 grants did not provide DEI data. Some organisations are led by groups that share more than one characteristic, so grants can appear multiple times
Impact of Esmée’s support on funded organisations
The grant-making activity, particularly the commitment to flexible, long-term funding, has a substantial impact on funded organisations by strengthening their organisational capacity, enhancing stability, improving internal infrastructure, and empowering them to achieve high-stakes systemic and legislative reforms.
Strengthening organisational infrastructure and stability
The Foundation’s funding model, which provides a high proportion of core and unrestricted funding enables organisations to achieve greater organisational resilience. Grants enable organisations to grow their infrastructure and staffing; develop financial resilience and adapt to crisis.
Enhancing credibility and influence
Developing internal capacity and equity
The grants support organisations to improve internal operations, particularly around diversity, equity, strategic communication and lived experience.
Achieving systemic change and policy wins
The stability provided by the grants allows organisations to dedicate energy and expertise to complex, long-term policy and legislative changes.
Grants help organisations gain leverage within the sector and among decisionmakers, as well as credibility with other funders.
The changing context for gender justice
The external context for gender justice work has significantly deteriorated in the last few years – defined by heightened political hostility, systemic retraction, and a global rollback of human rights. This trend is exacerbated by a sense of complacency in some sectors that believe gender equality has already been achieved.
Far-right ideology and digital harm
The rise in misogyny and misinformation, fuelled by farright ideologies and well-funded political opposition, contributes to a global roll back of human rights. Misogyny and racism reinforce each other, severely impacting migrant communities and trans and non-binary people.
Digital harms are increasingly critical, reproducing and amplifying offline inequalities (misogyny, racism, transphobia). Algorithms and AI systems frequently replicate gender and racial bias, and tech companies show weak accountability with most reported misogynistic material receiving no action.
Political and institutional decay
Since 2016 there has been a gradual shift in the policy environment from enabling an open to a closed space. This shift has sped up and become considerably worse since the launch of Esmée’s strategy. This slows any progress and requires civil society to fight merely to keep existing rights.
Internal and public challenges
Simultaneously, the gender justice sector faces chronic underfunding and internal strains (the women and girls’ sector received just 1.8% of £4.1 billion in grants in 20212), particularly concerning wedge issues like the trans rights, which consumes significant energy and forces communities to assimilate or fight amongst themselves. Communities are being pitted against each other and forced into spaces where they cannot speak as a united voice. Unequal power dynamics often leave Black and minoritised organisations co-opted or expected to assimilate. And many actors feel increasingly unsafe.
There is an increasing need to understand the intersectionality of these issues; question what gender justice is; understand the role of men and boys; and search for unifying narratives.
2 Mapping the UK Women and Girls’ Sector and Funding – Rosa, 2023
The changing context for gender justice
How does this context block progress?
Political and ideological opposition
Hostile political rhetoric and organised opposition, including the far-right, threaten to criminalise or halt significant parts of gender justice work, especially in trans rights and intersectional areas.
Messaging complexity
Progressive arguments are often complicated and nuanced, making them difficult for the general public to absorb, while the messages from the populist right are simple and easily digestible. The rise in misogyny and harmful narratives is limiting change and creating a highly negative, politicised environment. This is further exacerbated by the rise in digital hate and misinformation.
Closing civic space
(the space for people to influence and organise)3
There is a roll back on rights which creates a blocker to progress and a backslide on victories already won. The advocacy and influencing space shrink drastically as the democratic space closes. The rollback on rights is creating safety concerns for gender justice organisations, which results in a pivot to crisis management rather than addressing long term systemic issues.
Internal fractures
Funding instability
The sector suffers from chronic underfunding and an over-reliance on precarious government funding. For organisations supporting Black and minoritised women and girls, this is even more stark. At the same time, the sector is overwhelmed by surging demand. This is resulting in organisations being at risk of closure. The need to spend energy on survival, leading to a retreat to service delivery over advocacy and several people leaving the sector citing burn out as a reason. Added to this, some funders are feeling increasingly nervous to speak out or even fund some gender justice work.
There are internal strains, with communities being pitted against each other, and internal conflict resolution challenges (particularly concerning trans rights).
3 Monitor: Tracking Civic Space – Civicus
Additional challenges
Esmée and the sector are struggling with several interrelated issues stemming from the current climate. The primary struggle is the difficulty in translating policy victories into consistent, intersectional improvements on the ground and developing strategies beyond lobbying. Broad scale change requires a ‘whole of philanthropy’ response.
• Policy-to-practice gap:
There is a recurring issue where policy wins are not adequately translated into improved outcomes for women on the ground, often due to insufficient funding for comprehensive implementation or a lack of intersectional design.
• Siloing of interconnected issues: The sector often silos issues (e.g. poverty, violence, childcare) to identify winnable objectives, but this fails to meaningfully address the root causes and interconnected nature of women’s challenges.
• Political engagement vs. movement building: Influencing work is overwhelmingly focused on policy lobbying, with very little attention given to organising approaches and movement building. There is a question to ask on whether the sector leans too much on policy/legislative change when the external context is bleak. Continuing to pursue policy wins where success is unlikely can lead to a sense of hopelessness.
What this means for Esmée’s gender justice strategy
The general context is an overall blocker for progress, leading to a focus on retaining rights rather than advancing them.
Outcome 1:
Gender based violence is reduced through the delivery of preventative work
The external context is defined by rising rates of violence, institutional failure and an inadequate response. Violence against women and girls (VAWG) remains high, intensified by cost-of-living pressures. Progress includes the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 (raising the legal threshold for police access to counselling notes) and the Worker Protection Act (2023). However, these are countered by systemic institutional failures, notably acknowledged racism within institutions like the Metropolitan Police, along with the estimated £321 million funding gap for domestic abuse services.4
Impact of Esmée-funded organisations
Despite the context, Esmée funding has enabled organisations to contribute to changes in legislative protections, institutional accountability, developing educational tools for professionals and communities.
While this outcome focuses heavily on prevention, the impact documented often encompasses both preventative measures and strengthened support/protection for survivors, addressing the immediate and systemic drivers of gender-based violence (GBV).
• Securing institutional and legal accountability: Securing policy changes and legal reforms that offer immediate protection for survivors or raise accountability for perpetrators, thereby acting as a deterrent/ preventative measure.
• Institutional practice transformation: Driving systemic change within major institutions (e.g., financial sector, media, police) to embed safety, accountability, and trauma-informed practice, reducing opportunities for economic or reputational abuse.
• Enhancing community intervention and professional training: Developing and implementing scalable models, training, and tools that enable community members and frontline professionals to proactively identify abuse, intervene early, and provide appropriate referral pathways.
4 Women’s Aid Annual Audit 2025: The funding gap risking the future of domestic abuse services in England, 2025
What this means for Esmée’s gender justice strategy
Outcome 2:
Trans and non-binary people’s rights are recognised and protected
This is one of the most challenging areas of the gender justice portfolio. The external environment is defined by gains lost, extreme hostility and rising mental health challenges. Significant blows include the indefinite ban on prescribing puberty blockers to under-18s in England (December 2024) and the UK Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act 2010 terms, leading to an openly discriminatory environment. Funders are becoming nervous, seeing trans funding as too risky.
Impact of Esmée-funded organisations
Esmée funding has provided vital support to sustain the infrastructure, service delivery and public voice of key organisations in the sector.
Funded organisations are providing vital support and guidance for trans and non-binary people. They are establishing political platforms for trans youth voices to directly influence senior government and NHS decision-makers, including organising meetings with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. And they are ensuring that Trans People of Colour’s voices are not lost.
Funded organisations are at the frontline of services delivery and are collecting a large body of evidence on the impact of policy decisions.
• Elevating youth voice and influencing healthcare policy: One organisation established an advocacy and policy programme, successfully securing access to key strategic influencers and developing asks led by young people.
• Responding to legal and political shifts: Coordinated action across the sector to respond to the impacts of the Supreme Court decision on the legal definition of sex.
• Advancing structural and racial equity: The Trans Learning Partnership, focused on integrating racial justice and lived experience within the trans-led sector.
• Challenging institutional bias and driving grassroots inclusion: An organisation focused on recognising and protecting trans and non-binary rights within sports policy and grassroots participation.
• Providing vital mental health support and guidance: Organisations are providing safe spaces and peer support as well as guidance on trans inclusion and explainers following the Supreme Court ruling.
What this means for Esmée’s gender justice strategy
Outcome 3:
Policy, practice, and the law better meets the needs of women experiencing multiple challenges and discrimination
This outcome overlaps with all the other outcomes. There is ongoing scrutiny on inequality in taxation, housing, labour market inequality and multiple forms of discrimination.
There are concerning and rising levels of digital harm. Rising levels of racism shape and compound the experience of violence and discrimination. This is resulting in a particularly unsafe environment for migrant communities, who have very few safety nets.
In this context, unequal power dynamics often leave Black and minoritised organisations co-opted or expected to assimilate with large, white-led organisations. There are, however, some people in positions of power who are still calling for reviews on equality laws and multiple forms of discrimination.
Impact of Esmée-funded organisations
The context that this work takes place in is of deep and intersecting inequality. This outcome gives greater flexibility to fund around intersectionality, racism, migrant rights, disability etc. The outcome is generally succeeding in achieving major structural victories and demonstrating the power of grassroots movements to influence national policy and secure unprecedented government commitments, often performing as the flexible area for experimentation and responsiveness to emerging issues e.g. current and ongoing discussions on disability.
Funded organisations working under this outcome have secured significant legislative wins and policy shifts across economic, maternal health, and migrant rights issues.
• Major economic and maternal health wins: Campaigning for additional investment in childcare spending and legislation surrounding flexible working.
• Systemic exclusion and anti-migrant hostility: Safeguards for pregnant women seeking asylum and safe reporting mechanisms.
• Advancing intersectional justice in policy and practice: Racial inequality in education, support for pregnant women and mothers of infants involved in care proceedings and the framing around the COVID inquiry.
What this means for Esmée’s gender justice strategy
Outcome 4:
The negative impacts of the criminal justice system on women and their families are reduced
Radical, systemic change is urgently needed, underpinned by addressing racial disproportionality. Women’s offending is linked to unmet socioeconomic factors and support needs. While there are key victories around the Women’s Centre Model (a proven enabler) and the Women’s Justice Board momentum, survivor confidence is low due to disclosure problems and delays.
Impact of Esmée-funded organisations
There appears to be more progress in this area. Funded organisations have achieved significant, often transformational, victories through the reform of judicial procedure, strengthening of community-based alternatives to custody and challenging systemic racism. However, the live and ongoing response to migrant justice is putting this at risk.
• Legislative and judicial accountability wins: The protection of children from parents convicted of killing their partner; including pregnancy and the postnatal period as a mitigating factor in sentencing and protecting survivor confidentiality.
• Strengthening community alternatives and diversion: The women’s centre model is recognised as a proven enabler of holistic woman-centred support and training on trauma-informed approaches is supporting organisations to provide effective services.
• Providing political alternatives:
The launch of the Women’s Justice Board (WJB) in January 2025, and the associated Independent Sentencing Review, creates a powerful opportunity for change. These initiatives focus explicitly on reducing the women’s prison population and enhancing community alternatives, aligning with the evidence base provided by women’s organisations.
• Intersection of race, migration, and the CJS: The Women’s Justice Reimagined alliance is actively challenging systemic racism and exclusion.
The interconnected nature of these issues is clear; economic pressures intensify abuse, while systemic racism and inadequate education/health services compound the challenges faced by women already navigating a hostile political environment.
What are the levers to progress
Despite the hostile environment there are sources of hope and community action emerging from hyperlocal communities. Local organisations and leaders are providing vital support, shaping narratives and building counterpower through allyship and movement-building.
In the external focus group for this review, participants shared that they felt there is still hope and that we need to have hope to continue. They are witnessing grassroots organising defined by love, solidarity and humanity. They see organisations providing wellbeing and care for communities, bearing witness to the range of experiences and listening to each other. They also noted that young people want to contribute to this, which is leading to a rise in inter-generational ways of working.
The external context shows that we are moving from a highly conducive environment for policy change to one of closed doors. The political opposition is ‘financially weaponised’, promoting anti-trans and anti-feminist narratives that influence youth and erode public belief in equality.
This observation mirrors what is missing from the portfolio. To articulate this thinking, the review draws on the Gender at Work Framework. 5 The framework helps us to understand opportunities and barriers to gender equality, map strategic approaches and measure.
Gender at Work Framework
Individual consciousness and capabilities
e.g, knowledge, skills, political consciousness, commitment to change
Individual conditions and resources
e.g, voice, freedom from violence, access to health and education
Informal norms and exclusionary practices
e.g, specific gender roles, division of domestic labour
Formal rules and policies
e.g, in constitutions, laws, workplace policies
What are the levers to progress
When comparing this to the grant portfolio, it is evident that grant making is to a large degree focused on a more (visible) formal and systemic approach, with examples of success including policy and institutional changes.
However, the context shows us that the environment for this is more restricted and so it is important to consider the (invisible) informal and individual responses that could be taken.
Possible levers for progress include:
• New leadership and lived experience: There is recognition of the power of new types of leadership and the central role of lived experience in driving policy dialogue.
• Movement building and allyship: There is an opportunity to more formally invest in allyship, solidarity and movement building.
• Engaging unlikely suspects: As a sector, we have fully embraced an intersectional understanding of the problem, but there is now an opportunity to apply this thinking to allies and advocates outside of the formal gender justice sector. Movement building can look to engaging parent groups, faith groups and the arts.
• Strategic capacity: Maintaining the policy dialogue and focusing on up-to-date analysis and strategic capacity building are crucial for sustaining progress.
• Evidence: As some organisations increase service provision they are generating evidence of the problem, this can be more formally utilised and shared, potentially with unlikely partners like academic institutions.
• Wellbeing and care: Wellbeing and mental health support are increasingly recognised as essential for staff (to combat burnout) and for service users.
• Criminal Justice System (CJS) and prevention models: The Women’s Centre Model remains a proven enabler, offering holistic support and demonstrating costeffectiveness. There is momentum around the Women’s Justice Board (WJB) and the Sentencing Review to reduce short sentences.
• Devolved influencing: Influencing work outside of Westminster, specifically in devolved nations (Wales and Scotland), has shown greater effectiveness due to a more receptive environment.
Approaches funders can adopt
• Counter power and movement building: Counter power and movement building is a force that opposes and challenges a dominant power, acting as a check or counterbalance to an existing authority. It can take the form of another powerful person, a social movement, an organisation, or even a government’s internal checks and balances, and its goal is to contest or limit the power of the first group. While a lot of progress has been focused on visible power, counter power would address some of the more invisible power structures in society. There is an opportunity to more formally find ways and opportunities to support gender justice organisations to build counter power and movements –for example in the use of storytelling and the arts. The approach would include lived experience leadership.
• Solidarity/allyship: Across the review, participants spoke about the power of allyship, and the fact that it is mostly informal. There is an opportunity to build and grow allyship, acknowledging that in some instances, organisations will need allies to speak out on their behalf.
• Deep narrative work and crisis communication (with specific targeting of young men and boys): There is a missing focus on long-term, sustained funding for work that challenges and reshapes deep societal narratives, values, and misogynistic attitudes. There is a need to find messages and narratives that everyone can gather around. This involves understanding who and how the far right is funding narratives. This insight can apply more broadly across all Esmée’s work to counter anti-rights messages, although targeting of young men and boys is of particular relevance to gender justice.
• Strategic litigation and safety:
There is a need to explore ways to support legal action by mapping examples that could lead to critical court cases, like successful models in the climate space. Focus on supporting people’s personal safety, potentially through funding anonymity or thinking about risk mitigation.
• Wellbeing and care: Investment in collective care, wellbeing, dialogue, and mental health support for activists, particularly those at the sharpest end of marginalised communities.
• Hyperlocal focus and wellbeing: There is potential to connect arts issues with health and wellbeing. Hope is also emerging from the hyperlocal level, offering a crucial pivot point for community work.
• Advocacy for equitable funding structures: The external context repeatedly points to the severe financial precarity of the sector and the power dynamics within grant-making, there is an opportunity to look at this crosscutting issue within the portfolio. This could be looked at by mapping out and ensuring the critical foundational organisations survive through holistic security and wellbeing needs.
Approaches funders can adopt
• Evidence: Many organisations are on the frontline of support and are collecting valuable evidence on the status of gender justice in the UK. There is an opportunity to work with funded organisations to make these insights more readily available to the sector and support joining up the dots.
• Devolution: The portfolio is largely England-heavy. Opportunities in Scotland and Wales (where there is potentially more space for policy action) and in Northern Ireland (where statistics around violence are worse) are potentially being missed.
• Being vocal: While it is commendable that Esmée have taken the view that funded organisations should lead discussions, there is feedback that Esmée can play more of a vocal role externally. Particularly because it is unsafe for some activists.
• Grassroots organisations:
Esmée does not typically fund small grassroots organisations. While the evidence shows that they occupy an important place in the funding ecosystem, there is an unmet need for smaller minoritised groups and funding across wider geographies such as rural locations and in Northern Ireland.
• Impact investing: Impact investing could expand its focus on specific issues like feminist technology or AI, where there is both social impact and potential financial returns.
The report also identified a number of specific thematic areas Esmée could further invest in.
For example, the intersection between gender justice and children and young people’s rights. See their blog, reflecting on the findings and what actions they will be taking forward.
Foreword Esmée as a funder
for gender justice Impact on Esmée’s strategy
and recommendations
Levers to progress
Strategic potential for collective action
The strongest potential for deeper collaboration is collective action to confront the structural conditions driving gender injustice.
Evidence from the wider social justice funding field shows a lack of long-term, coordinated investment and a high level of churn, which weakens organisations’ ability to plan, advocate, and build resilience. 6 Funders are urged to move beyond incremental grants and undertake bolder action. Here are some examples.
• Endowments and pooled funds: Exploring ways to release more capital from their endowments or collaborating to create substantial pooled funds for gender justice. Potential also exists for creating a pooled fund led by women with lived experience to address equity issues.
• Proactive collaboration and convening to break down siloes and fund issues at the intersection of issues: For example:
6 Funding Justice 3, An analysis of social justice grantmaking in the UK – Civic Power Fund
• Joint investment in narrative change and public communications: The sector currently lacks expertise in largescale public relations or advertising campaigns, requiring funders to partner with external communication experts. The arts are another crucial avenue for keeping voices alive and engaging communities when democratic space is closed. Collaboration between the gender justice sector and the arts allows for shaping narratives, generating social dialogue, and changing attitudes. Narratives work taking place in other areas, including migrant justice, could be scaled to more widely support anti-oppression visions, including in the gender justice space.
– Gender justice and climate policy: Building gender justice as a mainstream component of climate policy. This cross-cutting work could specifically address issues such as women in the fishing industry.
– Gender justice and technology/digital safety: Growing digital misogyny and abuse require cross-funder investment into feminist tech, digital safety, and platform accountability initiatives.
– Gender justice and criminal justice/migration/racial justice: Justice reforms need to address the needs of Black, minoritised, and migrant women.
– Gender justice and arts/ culture/narrative change: To counter well-funded misogynistic ecosystems, funders can co-invest in creative, cultural, and narrative work at a scale not possible individually.
• Strengthening infrastructure and ecosystem resilience: Deeper partnerships are essential to protect the infrastructure and ecosystems of the gender justice sector. Funders must collaborate to address endemic issues such as burnout, poor pay, and funding insecurity. This requires offering robust support through funding-plus models that provide wellbeing resources, crisis management, protection against media backlash and litigation. Collaboration is also necessary for navigating complex internal sector conflicts. Funders should work together to hold space to address difficult internal sector disagreements, specifically those concerning trans inclusion, to build understanding and trust within the sector.
• Silent Funding: For groups to protect them from hyperlocal opposition and personal safety threats. This will require educating the organisation about the need to prioritise discretion over celebrating public success.
Conclusion
The external context for this work acts as a powerful blocker to progress, shifting the sector’s focus toward retaining existing rights rather than advancing new ones, and creating safety concerns for gender justice organisations.
Despite this challenging environment, the review validates Esmée’s strategic choices and data shows that the funding portfolio has a positive impact on funded organisations and their ability to achieve change.
There are several struggles including the difficulty in translating policy victories into consistent, intersectional improvements; an under resourced sector and a rollback in rights.
Analysis suggests that while the portfolio has successfully focused on formal and systemic approaches (visible power, such as policy wins), the current closed political environment necessitates a strategic shift to incorporate informal, individual, and counter power responses (invisible power).
As one of the larger and more influential funders in the gender justice space, Esmée occupies a highly strategic position. The greatest potential for future impact lies in leveraging this influence to coordinate funder action and proactively addressing critical gaps through intersectional approaches.
Recommendations
The primary recommendation is to keep doing what is being done. The approach is proportionate and well aligned with the external context.
To further strengthen the gender justice sector, Esmée and other gender justice funders should consider investing in:
• Support to communities with increasing threats to safety by providing funding for strategic litigation. Esmée may not want to publicly identify these organisations (to ensure their safety).
• Finding ways to reach smaller organisations who have a high degree of credibility within communities. Potentially through re-granters.
• Supporting counter narratives and crisis communication to counter far right ideology.
• Understanding and building invisible power, counter power, movement building and allyship.
• Actively pursuing grant opportunities in devolved nations.
• Wellbeing and care to prevent burn out and a loss of vital sector capacity.
• Leveraging the impact of social and impact investing to support gender justice aims.
Funders should also work collectively to:
• Advocate for equitable funding structures
• Find ways to share evidence (of front-line experiences) across the sector
• Support organisations with conflict resolution. This will include discussions on threats to the philanthropy space.
• Consider joint investments on key issues such as gender justice and technology; gender justice and the arts; and gender justice and climate.
• Be more vocal externally, particularly on trans and non-binary rights.
• More actively share insights and evidence on the external context, with existing funded organisations.
