Strategic Approach

Since 2006, Channel has sought to identify and provide grants to organizations or projects that specifically champion women's rights. The type of work we endeavor to sustain includes legal, legislative and policy advocacy; capacity, network and coalition building; human rights education, training and leadership development; and other innovative strategies.

Our overall strategy also includes the following goals:

• Participate in international, regional, and national networks of women's human rights activists and funders to make informed, collaborative, and strategic funding decisions.
• Promote exchange between Global South activists, educators and community leaders.
• Increase support for global women's human rights in the U.S. to encourage a connected and engaged citizenry and a stronger global movement.
• Ensure inclusion of women from historically marginalized communities on staff, board, and advisory networks of groups we support.

"[S]mall, localized and isolated efforts that cannot be scaled up to mobilize a larger number of women and their communities against gender discrimination, are not sustainable: we cannot rest content with small islands of change in a sea of oppressive patriarchal cultures.  We also know that going to scale by merely converting millions of women into project “beneficiaries” rather than agents of change, is also not a transformative strategy – so conscious and systematic movement building, by empowering women to become conscious actors in a social change process, is vital.”

- Srilatha Batliwala, Association for Women’s Rights in Development, in "A Transformative Strategy: The True Value of Investing in Women's Rights," in Open Democracy

 

Areas of Interest

In order to strengthen the global movement for women's human rights, we currently focus on the following seven areas of interest:

• Ensuring Women's Participation in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding
• Advancing Indigenous Women's Rights and Leadership
• Securing Reproductive Rights/Justice
• Overcoming Legal Inequality (Including Inheritance and Resource Rights)
• Ending Violence Against Women and Protecting Women Human Rights Defenders
• Promoting Media Reform and Gender Equality
• Women's Leadership and Human Rights Institutes

For more information about our grants in these areas please see our Grantee Partners webpage.

 

Monitoring, Evaluation & Long Term Goals

Channel strives to document the ways women's organizations are achieving social change. Have they created a shift in how a problem is defined? Enabled community behavioral change? Engaged the wider public? Shifted policy or changed an institution? Have they managed to maintain rights in the face of opposition?   Most importantly, are they embodying the change they hope to promote?

Channel is inspired by the new report from the Association for Women's Rights in Development, "Capturing Change in Women's Realities: A Critical Overview of Current Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks and Approaches," which identifies feminist practices for engaging in M&E to strengthen organizational learning and more readily capture the complex changes that women’s empowerment and gender equality work seek.

 

What We Do Not Fund

The Channel Foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals. New proposals are considered by invitation only.

In addition, we do not fund the following:

• Individuals
• Service delivery projects
• Programs that promote religious beliefs
• Capital campaigns or electoral campaigns

 

Photos courtesy of the Channel Foundation.