When Women Change the Rules: Rethinking Power in Philanthropy

Philanthropy presents itself as a mechanism for solving inequality. But the structure through which philanthropic money moves can reproduce a familiar hierarchy: People with resources decide which problems deserve attention, organizations compete for funding according to those priorities, and communities affected by the resulting decisions are asked to prove that they can deliver someone else’s definition of impact.

While the problem is often framed in terms of who gets funded and who doesn’t, a growing group of feminist funds and women-led philanthropic organizations argue that this is not simply a funding gap. It is a power gap, and closing it requires changing not just what gets funded, but who decides.

That is the thesis this essay sets out to test: Across four organizations—two in the United States, one global, and one multilateral—feminist philanthropy has treated “who decides” as a design question, not a courtesy. A courtesy is something a funder extends at their own discretion and can withdraw. By attending to design, the decision structure itself is built to share power. What follows is a look at what happens once that question moves from a mission statement into an operating system.

Feminist organizing has long challenged the assumption that authority and expertise should belong primarily to people who already hold institutional power.

Participatory grantmaking is one expression of that shift. The Women’s Funding Network describes it as an approach that brings the communities a funder serves directly into grantmaking decisions. In its 2025 member survey, 51 percent of responding women’s funds reported using a participatory framework, up from 38 percent in 2022; another 23 percent said they were strongly interested in adopting one.

The growth of these practices raises a harder question: Why have women’s funds and feminist organizations been especially willing to experiment with redistributing institutional power?

The answer is not that women are naturally better collaborators or more empathetic leaders; that would turn a political and historical phenomenon into a stereotype. The more useful explanation is that feminist organizing has long challenged the assumption that authority and expertise should belong primarily to people who already hold institutional power. Feminist movements built practices around collective decision-making, lived experience, and accountability precisely because the people inside them were often excluded from formal power to begin with.

None of the four cases below produces a perfect alternative to hierarchy. What they show is something more useful: what happens when an institution tries to make power-sharing an actual operating system, rather than a line in a mission statement.

Boston: When Community Members Become Grantmakers

The Boston Women’s Fund‘s Allocations Committee is one of the clearest US examples of this shift in practice. Rather than leaving grant decisions entirely to professional staff, the fund convenes community members—including people from both inside and outside philanthropy—to decide directly which organizations receive funding. No prior grantmaking experience is required. Members research nominated organizations, speak with their leaders and the people they serve, prepare grant proposals, and take part in a mandatory consensus session to select recipients. The process currently runs 40 to 45 hours, for which members receive a modest stipend.

The significance is not simply that more people get a say. It changes the definition of expertise itself. In conventional philanthropy, professional experience often stands in for knowing which organizations are effective. Boston’s model starts from a different premise: People who live in and understand the communities a grant is meant to reach can hold knowledge that never appears in a proposal or a balance sheet.

This has a longer intellectual history. Sociologist Susan Ostrander’s study of the Boston Women’s Fund, published in Gender & Society, found that efforts to build less hierarchical relationships with grantees changed the fund’s own guidelines and expanded its recognition of community-organizing methods. Ostrander’s underlying diagnosis is blunt: Philanthropic relationships are structurally unequal because funders control resources that grantees need.

The feminist intervention, then, is not simply installing women in positions previously held by men. It is questioning why the position itself carries so much unilateral authority. That distinction matters in practice, not just in theory: A woman running a conventional foundation can still operate a strictly top-down model, while a participatory structure can redistribute authority without requiring every decision-maker in the room to be a woman. Boston’s case is useful precisely because it makes the distribution of power, not the gender of who holds it, the object of scrutiny.

New York: Turning Participation Into an Institutional Practice

The New York Women’s Foundation‘s model shows what happens when the same principle scales into a much larger institution. The foundation says its grantmaking is rooted in gender, racial, and economic justice, and that it practices participatory grantmaking explicitly: Guidance comes from the communities it supports and is shaped by a Grants Advisory Committee. It pairs that with long-term relationships, multi-year support and trust-based practices, and states plainly that it seeks to cede decision-making power over grants to the communities affected by its funding.

That is a different relationship than the conventional one. In a standard model, an organization gets money for a project shaped by a foundation’s priorities, complies with reporting requirements, and competes again next cycle. In a trust-based model, the funder hands the organization real discretion over how it does its work.

The distinction between the two matters because they are related but not identical. Participatory grantmaking is about who makes funding decisions. Trust-based philanthropy is about how the funding relationship itself is built through multi-year unrestricted support, lighter reporting, and fewer administrative hoops. The Women’s Funding Network’s 2025 survey found the second practice spreading fast too, with 69 percent of respondents reporting that they practice trust-based philanthropy, up from 39 percent in 2022.

For a grantee, the practical difference shows up before the money does. A participatory process usually means being interviewed by—and sometimes voted on by—peers, rather than a program officer alone. A trust-based one means a single multi-year check with a short report, instead of an annual reapplication with line-item receipts. Organizations weighing which funders to approach can reasonably ask, up front, which of the two a prospective funder actually practices (or whether they practice both), rather than assuming the language on a website matches the paperwork that follows.

What looks like a technical adjustment therefore carries a political consequence: it moves decision-making power closer to the people who live with the results of that decision.

 FRIDA: Letting the Movement Decide

If Boston and New York demonstrate participatory philanthropy within the US nonprofit system, FRIDA | Young Feminist Fund shows what happens when the principle is built into a fund’s identity from day one.

FRIDA grew out of a shared conviction among feminist activists that young feminist organizers should not simply be recipients of philanthropic decisions, they should help make them. Its model is explicit: Young feminist communities take part in deciding which groups receive funding, on the premise that this changes the traditional power relationship between funder and grantee by centering the knowledge of young feminists working on the ground.

The scale has grown accordingly. In its first three grantmaking cycles (2012–2014), FRIDA distributed $437,000 to 57 young feminist organizations. By 2024, it reported supporting 203 grantee partners across six regions and 103 countries, with more than $2.97 million in direct grantmaking.

The more revealing part of FRIDA’s story, though, is not its growth, it’s the fund’s willingness to examine its own model’s weaknesses. Through its multi-year Resourcing Connections process, FRIDA examined its own participatory system: its politics, its values, and its limits. The evaluation found that the model does produce more horizontal relationships and participants described feeling trusted, in contrast to the control over outcomes and compliance that is often the norm elsewhere in philanthropy. But it also found that participation creates its own difficulties: Someone still has to make hard calls when there are more deserving applicants than money, and meaningful participation itself takes time, coordination and infrastructure that not every applicant can spare.

Equal representation at the table does not automatically produce equal power at the table.

FRIDA’s own research therefore rejects the idea that participatory grantmaking is a finished formula. Its process has been repeatedly revised in response to feedback from applicants, grantee partners, and advisors, a distinctly feminist organizational habit: keeping the system itself accountable to the people it’s meant to serve.

Fenomenal Funds: Can Funders Actually Share Power?

The most ambitious of these four experiments may be Fenomenal Funds, which went beyond participatory grant review into shared governance between funders and the organizations they fund. Fenomenal Funds brought together four private foundations and four women’s funds within the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds, giving both sides shared authority over strategy and resource distribution. Its steering committee included representatives of both private foundations and women’s funds; an advisory committee supporting the participatory grantmaking work was majority composed of women’s funds. New Venture Fund’s account of the model describes a structure in which four funders, four women’s funds and a representative of Prospera INWF participated with equal voice and decision-making power.

The significance is straightforward: The organizations receiving philanthropic resources were not consulted about strategy after the fact. They were part of the structure that set it. That required real infrastructure and dedicated staff for program management, learning and evaluation, communications, and engagement, while a fiscal sponsor handled HR, finance, and legal support underneath it.

The experiment paired that governance model with non-competitive, multi-year core funding. A KIT Institute evaluation of the initiative found that the combination strengthened organizational resilience and deepened collaboration among the participating women’s funds, identifying pooled resources, shared decision-making and flexible core funding as the load-bearing elements of the model.

None of these models eliminates hierarchy outright. What they challenge is the assumption that hierarchy is the only workable way to organize money, expertise, and accountability.

But Fenomenal Funds also shows why sharing power is hard. Equal representation at the table does not automatically produce equal power at the table. People arrive with different institutional resources, different financial security, different relationships to donors, and different fluency in the language and pace of philanthropic process, all of which can quietly determine whose voice carries more weight even inside a formally equal structure.

That gap points to a distinction worth naming plainly: putting a community representative on a committee changes who is present. Changing who controls the money changes who has power. The second is a far bigger ask than the first, and conflating them is one of the more common ways “participation” ends up meaning less than it sounds like.

Why Women?

None of these four cases shows that women possess some innate organizational talent that makes them uniquely suited to participatory leadership. They show something else.

Feminist movements have historically had to build political and organizational practice under conditions where formal authority was largely unavailable to them. This is why feminist theory has paid unusual attention to the relationship between power, voice, lived experience and institutions that present themselves as neutral.

Elizabeth Gillespie’s research on more than 200 US women’s foundations and funds found that these organizations have built ideas of feminist empowerment into both their grantmaking and their internal practices, while also documenting real tension between feminist ideals and institutional constraints. That helps explain why women’s funds have so often been early adopters of participatory models.

The more useful question, then, is not how do women become more powerful within existing institutions? It is what should power look like inside an institution in the first place? That reframes the conversation away from representation alone. An organization can have women throughout its senior leadership and still run on restrictive grants, top-down priorities, and opaque decisions. Conversely, an organization can start dismantling those structures by recognizing community knowledge and making funders answerable to the people whose work they finance, regardless of who sits in the corner office.

The Cost of Giving Up Control

There’s a real temptation to present participatory philanthropy as a simple fix: Give communities a voice, make funding more flexible, and the power imbalance disappears. The four cases here argue otherwise.

Power does not disappear because an organization adopts a participatory structure. It has to be continuously negotiated, and that negotiation costs something concrete. Committees need recruitment, training, compensation, and facilitation. Consensus takes longer than a program officer’s sign-off. Flexible funding asks funders to sit with more uncertainty than they’re used to. And participation itself can become its own kind of exclusion if only people with enough time, digital access, language fluency, or institutional confidence are able to take part.

Research increasingly bears this out. A study of participatory philanthropy in sub-Saharan Africa found that while these models can shift visible forms of power, unequal resources, and back-donor requirements continue to shape the relationships operating underneath them.

That may be the most useful lesson feminist philanthropy has to offer: the goal is not an organization with no power in it. It’s an organization where power is visible, shared, and answerable to the people who live with its consequences.

What that means for someone reading this from outside philanthropy is fairly concrete. If you sit on a nonprofit board, it’s a short list of questions worth asking your own funders. Who actually decides where this money goes? How long is the reporting leash? What happens if the theory of change we proposed turns out to be wrong in practice? If you’re a funder, it’s an invitation to treat those same questions as design choices rather than as risks to be managed away. And if you’re neither, perhaps someone who gives, it’s a reason to ask a favorite cause not only what it does with a donation, but who gets a say in deciding.

Boston Women’s Fund changes who evaluates and recommends grants. New York Women’s Foundation has folded community-informed decision-making into a broader trust-based funding model. FRIDA has built young feminist participation into the grantmaking process itself and kept redesigning that process in response to community feedback. Fenomenal Funds went furthest, placing funders and women’s funds inside one shared governance structure. None of these models eliminates hierarchy outright. What they challenge is the assumption that hierarchy is the only workable way to organize money, expertise, and accountability.

That is the real significance of women in this story—not that women lead differently by nature, but that feminist movements have spent decades asking a question philanthropy at large is only now beginning to ask at scale: What happens when the people most affected by an institution’s decisions stop being treated as beneficiaries of those decisions, and start being treated as people with the authority to make them?

The answer on offer here isn’t a perfect organization. It’s a different distribution of power and, as these four cases show, a considerably more expensive one to build than to announce.