Collaboration over Duplication

The women’s sector doesn’t need more duplication. It needs more resources, better collaboration and longer-term, core funding. 

That’s why the Women’s Forever Fund (FF) is exploring how it can work with established women’s funds and trusted funding partners, rather than building every part of its grant-making infrastructure from scratch.

Organisations such as Rosa, Smallwood Trust and UK Community Foundations have developed valuable expertise, relationships and approaches to supporting women’s organisations. By working with partners like these, the Women's Forever Fund will build on existing knowledge, systems and networks, ensuring funds reach organisations quickly that might otherwise struggle to access it.

But this is about more than just efficiency. It’s about recognising the expertise that already exists across the women’s funding landscape, learning from one another and making the most of the resources available to us as a sector. Working collaboratively will also reduce unnecessary administrative burdens and avoid asking organisations to navigate multiple, overlapping funding processes.

Arrangements with other funders will be developed jointly, respecting partners’ existing expertise and approaches. This will be baked into our governance procedures from the start.

While trusted partners support the practical delivery of grants based on their own programe criteria, the Women's Forever Fund, having their own strategy and ecosystem overview approach, would then be able to directly fund organisations where the gaps exist.

We know there are gaps in longer-term development and capacity funding for women’s organisations. Many don’t own their own buildings, and some are considered too large for certain funding opportunities, while others are too small. There's also limited funding available for staff training and development, and for strengthening the internal systems and infrastructure that organisations need to thrive.

We want the Forever Fund to address these gaps, and more, by fostering greater collaboration and tackling the decades-long trend towards increasingly siloed working – not just within the voluntary sector, but across society more broadly.

The idea is for us all to work together with one common goal: to make our sector more financially resilient. 

Our ambition is to create something that adds to the strength of the women’s sector, not another institution working alongside it in isolation. Our unique role as a non-issue-based infrastructure organisation for the women's sector puts us in a good position to be able to intervene with our future grant-making in the most strategic ways.

By building on what already exists and working together, the Women’s Forever Fund aims to help create a stronger, more connected and sustainable funding ecosystem for women’s organisations for generations to come.

You can support us right now by:

• donating to our Just Giving page - if all women's organisations gave just £10 each, we'd reach our funding goal easily

• signing our petition for independent sustainble funding for the women's sector

• writing to your MP to ask them to support dormant assets allocation towards the Forever Fund 

• following us on Instagram and like and share our posts