WomenStrong International

WomenStrong International seeks to help community-based, urban, women-led organizations have greater strength, resources, and voice to support women and girls’ access to health, protection from violence, education, decent work, and economic opportunity. We envision a world in which women and girls have equal rights and access to health, education, decent work opportunity, and are able to live free of violence.

Through our trust-based grantmaking and capacity strengthening work with our grantee partners, WomenStrong International aspires to contribute to transforming the lives of women, girls and their communities and influencing the philanthropy sector.

WomenStrong International finds, funds, and strengthens women-led organizations to develop, test, refine, and share community-based solutions to critical challenges facing women in urban communities across the globe.

We identify and vet small women’s organizations, in the U.S. and globally, that listen to urban women and implement effective solutions to help women and girls thrive. These organizations are meeting the most critical needs of women and girls in their communities: keeping girls in school, accessing lifesaving reproductive health care, addressing the epidemic of gender-based violence, and creating pathways to financial security.

We fund these organizations to develop and refine their promising solutions, provide technical support and capacity strengthening to help each organization further improve their effectiveness and sustainability, and then we convene our grantees in our WomenStrong Learning Lab, to share their findings and best practices with other organizations worldwide – thus amplifying the impact of our funding beyond the organizations we support directly.

WomenStrong's Founder spent more than a decade leading Columbia University’s Millennium Cities Initiative, an eight-country effort to help sub-Saharan cities chart their own path out of extreme urban poverty. There, she saw very clearly that the best ideas were those developed by women and girls.

WomenStrong provides unrestricted grants. We have no geographic limitations to where we fund.

WomenStrong is passionate about investing in organizations with an entrepreneurial spirit that need support to validate or advance their early-stage, non-traditional ideas for tackling the greatest challenges facing women and girls. We want to fund organizations where a small investment will have a large impact.

We ask that our grantee partners join the WomenStrong Learning Lab. The Learning Lab is a (mostly) virtual community that brings our partners together to share, learn, and disseminate findings that can advance the evidence base for what works, to improve the lives of women and girls.

Our Learning Lab is a platform where women’s organizations can learn together, share what’s working, and improve their own effectiveness in serving the girls and women in their communities. By sharing proven resources, and through a combination of peer-, staff-, and consultant- led conversations, WomenStrong is able to offer tailored technical assistance and strengthen organizational effectiveness in such areas as monitoring and evaluation, fundraising, communications, leadership training, and self-care.

WomenStrong provides additional resources and opportunities specifically focused on capacity strengthening for our grantee partners.

WomenStrong is currently employs 11 fulltime staff who work individually and collectively to support our grantee partners. We also contract with several subject-matter experts based in Lower and Middle Income Counties with experience implementing international development projects to provide technical assistance and guidance to our partner organizations.

WomenStrong measures our success by the value we bring to our grantee partners, including whether and how we have strengthened their work to help women and girls thrive.

We also seek to build a community of collaborative learners and to amplify their solutions more broadly, deepening the field’s understanding of how best to address gender inequality, further social progress, and contribute to equitable, sustainable human development.

But how do we know we are making progress?

In an external evaluation conducted in 2020, our partners told interviewers that the flexible funding, tailored technical assistance, and capacity-strengthening we have provided have helped meet their organizational needs, generated trust and risk-taking, and engendered a shared interest in peer learning across our Learning Lab. To-date, they have also shared their solutions beyond their Lab partners, with thousands of other women’s organizations and development practitioners, through events, publications, and the media.