A Recap of FLAC’s 2023 Milestones
Join us as we take stock of all the things FLAC members have worked toward and achieved this year!
Grounding FLAC’s Collective Vision
FLAC is built on three years of coming together as the Funder Learning Community to better understand the linkages between gender, environmental, and climate justice work and how to resource this intersection. In 2023, motivated by the exigent need to transform philanthropic funding, FLAC is growing into a larger community of human rights, gender, feminist, environmental, and climate justice funders, as well as intermediaries, activists, thinkers, and practitioners—all organizing to move more and better resources to the nexus of gender, environmental, and climate justice.
In 2023, FLAC members grounded the collective vision that drives this Co-lab’s effort:
Sharing and Shifting Power: Create a unique, more equal decision-making structure where power is shared between activists and funders.
Practice Transformative Learning (and Unlearning): Build a community where dynamic learning processes foster collaboration and relationship building between “co-laborators” (including grantee partners from environmental and gender justice movements) and inform funding decisions and strategies.
Challenge the Philanthropic Status Quo: Offer and advocate for alternatives to historically oppressive philanthropic practices by promoting intersectional and participatory grantmaking for supporting gender-just, climate, and environmental action.
Ways of Working
At the end of 2022, the Coordination Team in collaboration with FLAC members outlined and implemented a new way to organize the Co-laboratory’s areas of emergent work. The new year thus began with three standing Working Groups whose purpose was to think strategically about and reify FLAC’s vision through group monthly meetings and individual work. The Working Groups are a tool for engagement of diverse FLAC members and crucial spaces for co-creation. Here’s what they have achieved since their inception:
The Governance, Culture, and Care Working Group has driven the identification of the principles and values that guide FLAC’s work. The GCCWG also began brainstorming definitions of collective care that align with the FLAC, and it articulated the Governance Guidelines on Participation, Accountability, and Transparency. The group is also interested in building a decentralized and inclusive governance structure for FLAC, looking into the uses of power in climate and gender justice philanthropy, and working to realize FLAC's active aspiration to share with and shift power to feminist climate justice movements.
The Transformative Learning Working Group explored different learning approaches being used by FLAC members in their organizations; they also collated readings and interviews from relevant actors regarding learning frameworks and the nexus between climate, environmental, and gender justice; and they carried out a series of learning sessions with inspirational people whose transformative learning models inform FLAC. Crucially, the TLWG penned a blog entry about FLAC’s approach to intersectionality. This Working Group is interested in developing a learning framework for FLAC and its members which centers feminist climate justice movements’ experiences, needs, and expertise.
For its part, the Donor Advocacy Working Group focused on the onboarding process of new FLAC members and worked diligently to resource FLAC’s operations. The DAWG is working diligently to build an advocacy learning program to push the limits of traditional philanthropy toward a more equitable, just, and inclusive sector.
Growth and Expansion
In addition, FLAC grew by welcoming new women’s funds: Rabiatou Ahmadou and Margarita Antonio from FIMI/Indigenous Women’s Fund, Anuja Shrestha from TEWA Fund for Women, Deepthy Menon from Urgent Action Fund Asia and Pacific, Yasmin Masidi from Women’s Fund Asia, and Rada Elenkova and Nadejda Dermendijeva from Bulgarian Fund for Women. Likewise, we were joined by new accomplices: Clara Desalvo from FRIDA, the Young Feminist Fund, Deborah Philbrick from the MacArthur Foundation, and Daniela Pedraza from Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
And of course, FLAC expanded to include a Design Team. The Design Team is made up of people who are both equal thought partners and FLAC members as well as active constituents in the lab’s processes of co-construction. FLAC, which up until recently was a funder-only space, is changing to include, for the first time and as part of the Design Team, members who do not work for philanthropic funds or foundations, and who come with deep knowledge and experience in the nexus between gender, feminist, and climate justice organizing. Maytik is now joined by dipti, Sostine, Majandra, and Trimita. The hope is that, by providing opportunities to co-create radical and progressive philanthropic practices, FLAC members will learn together how to disrupt the grantee/funder power dynamic. The Design Team will co-design the FLAC's pilot round of grantmaking in collaboration with FLAC members.
Unfortunately, Noelene, who was originally part of the team, has stepped down from her role because of the compounding effect of her demanding schedule and FLAC’s difficulty in responding quickly enough to the demands of new time zones. Mindful and appreciative of her engagement with FLAC, the Coordination Team reached out to Noelene to close her brief but meaningful engagement and integrate the lessons learned from this experience. There is currently an effort to select a new, fifth Design Team member from Prospera INWF to join the Team in January 2024.
In-person Meetings and Key Advocacy Events
FLAC members also met in person in Serbia for a retreat that allowed us to strengthen FLAC’s vision, align work priorities, learn about feminist climate justice analysis, and build community.
The Coordination Team met three times this year: Colombia in March, Serbia in August, and Turkey in November, which gave us a chance to find alignment across Working Groups and continue to work toward FLAC’s vision.
As part of its philanthropic advocacy work, members of the Coordination Team also participated in meetings with other climate donors, for example at the Global South Climate Regranters Convening led by the Climate Justice, Just Transition Donor Collaborative in Germany. During New York Climate week, some Coordination Team members also met with FLAC members to develop strategies to be used in other donor spaces, such as subsequent meetings with the Ban Ki Moon Foundation, JPB Foundation, Oceans’ Foundation, and the Nia Tero Foundation.
Emergent Collaborations
Last but not least, FLAC and CLUA have begun exploring and seeding an unprecedented collaboration to accompany CLUA’s development of a new learning framework that includes a gender-just focus across its programmatic and regional areas of work.. This collaboration is a unique opportunity to practice cross-movement, cross-sectorial exchanges among philanthropic alliances. We are eager to continue working together next year.
We are overjoyed that 2023 was a year fueled by hard work and so many accomplishments by and for the Co-laboratory! We can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve in 2024!