Gender-focused grantmaking has a long history — women's foundations, feminist funds, and community trusts with women's wellbeing objectives have funded organisations serving women and girls for decades. In recent years, gender-responsive and feminist approaches to grantmaking have become more prominent across the sector, including among funders who don't define themselves as women-focused. Running grants programmes that are genuinely responsive to gender requires understanding both the specific funding landscape and the principles that distinguish effective gender-responsive grantmaking from tokenistic approaches.
Government funding through the Ministry for Women and other agencies funds some gender equity work, but most community-based services for women are funded through a mix of government contracts (for domestic violence services, for example) and philanthropic grants.
Community trusts are significant funders of women's wellbeing, including domestic violence services, sexual violence support, women's health, and women's community organisations. Most community trust funding guidelines include women's wellbeing as a priority area.
Women's foundations and gender-focused funds provide dedicated funding for women and girls, often using participatory and feminist grantmaking approaches. In New Zealand, the Aotearoa Women's Fund and similar organisations model feminist grantmaking practice.
Gaming trusts fund community organisations including women's groups, sports clubs for women and girls, and community services.
Corporate giving programmes increasingly include gender equity as a focus, reflecting both business values and obligations under the gender pay gap reporting and workforce diversity frameworks.
The range of activities funded through women's grants is broad:
Feminist grantmaking goes beyond simply funding organisations that work with women. It involves examining and challenging the power dynamics within the grantmaking relationship itself:
Trust-based approaches. Feminist grantmakers often adopt trust-based practices — multi-year unrestricted grants, simplified reporting, and genuine relationships with grantees. These approaches recognise that the organisations doing the hardest work (often feminist grassroots groups led by women with lived experience) are frequently underresourced and overburdened by conventional grant requirements.
Funding core costs. Women's organisations — particularly advocacy organisations, rape crisis services, and domestic violence organisations — carry significant infrastructure costs that project-only funding doesn't cover. Feminist grantmakers prioritise core funding alongside project grants.
Participatory approaches. Involving women with lived experience in grant assessment and programme design, not just as service recipients. Survivor-led organisations and women with experience of the issues being addressed bring essential expertise.
Intersectional analysis. Women are not a homogeneous group. Māori women, Pacific women, disabled women, refugee women, and LGBTQIA+ women experience overlapping forms of disadvantage. Gender-responsive grantmaking requires attention to intersectionality — the combined effects of gender, race, disability, and other axes of inequality.
Addressing structural causes. The most effective women's grantmaking funds both direct services and structural change — advocacy, policy work, and systemic reform alongside crisis response.
Accessible language and process. Application forms for women's organisations should use plain language and avoid jargon. Processes should not disadvantage grassroots groups with limited administrative capacity.
Recognition of lived experience expertise. Application assessment should value organisations led by or strongly connected to the communities they serve — survivor-led rape crisis services, women-of-colour-led community organisations. This expertise is not always reflected in conventional indicators like governance credentials.
Trauma-informed assessment. Assessors reviewing applications from organisations working with survivors of trauma should approach assessment with sensitivity. Requiring detailed case studies or victim narratives in applications can be re-traumatising.
Flexibility on timelines. Women's organisations often operate in crisis environments. Application and reporting processes should have flexibility for organisations responding to acute community need.
Gender-responsive reporting goes beyond counting service users:
Gender-disaggregated data. Reporting should capture the gender of people served, recognising that non-binary and transgender women may not be captured in binary categories. Reporting frameworks should be designed inclusively.
Safety and wellbeing outcomes. For domestic violence and sexual violence programmes, reporting should capture safety outcomes (safety planning completed, children safe, risk assessed) alongside service statistics.
Economic outcomes. For economic empowerment programmes, reporting on income changes, employment status, and financial capability matters more than training attendance.
Voice of the women served. Reports that include perspectives from women who have used services are more compelling and more useful than purely statistical reporting.
Long-term impact. Many women's programmes produce outcomes over years — escaping domestic violence, rebuilding economic independence, recovering from trauma. Reporting frameworks that acknowledge this longer timeframe produce more accurate pictures of impact.
Tahua supports women's foundations and gender-focused funders with configurable grant programmes, participatory assessment tools, and outcome reporting frameworks designed for the diversity of work in this sector.