🕯️ A process of organisational transformation and anti-racist collaboration
What does it mean to be a feminist organisation today? How does one exercise truly collective, horizontal and transformative leadership? What does it mean to engage in decolonial philanthropy from the Global North?
Between 2022 and 2024, Calala Women's Fund embarked on a process of collaboration with our partners in the Mediterranean Fund. We did so with a central question in mind: how to build together a feminist, anti-racist and coherent leadership with the principles of social justice?
Over the course of three meetings - face-to-face and virtual - we weaved deep relationships, questioned our ways of doing things, shared knowledge and moved towards more horizontal and sustainable ways of organising ourselves.
Encounters that transform 👩🏽🤝👩🏾 ✨
In 2022, we found ourselves in the Occitania region in the south of France. Surrounded by nature and accompanied by simple and delicious food, we began to get to know each other with the help of great translators and friends. We work, share and ask ourselves how to transform our organisations so that they are coherent with the feminist and decolonial values we hold.
In 2023, it was our turn to welcome our Mediterranean Fund colleagues to Catalonia. We met in Tarragona, amid rituals, dances and deep conversations, to delve into the internal processes that underlie our forms of leadership. We thought together about how to build feminist power without replicating hierarchies and verticalities.
And we also did it through enjoyment, laughter and the body. Because to imagine a just and loving future is also to allow ourselves to feel it.
Results: towards more horizontal and coherent women's funds 💜.
This collaboration left real traces in our ways of doing things. At Calala, we took on the challenge of becoming an organisation that is sociocratic, where power is distributed as in a beehive. We co-lead processes, we prioritise care, communication and relational agreements as pillars of collective work.
Today we continue to collaborate, with more trust, more closeness and with the certainty that shared learning strengthens our processes. As women's funds that share objectives - although we start from different realities - we reaffirm that philanthropy must be decolonial, and that public funding must also be transformed.
Although that horizon has not yet materialised, we continue to walk together to make it possible.
You can read more about this process in the reports we produced, available at Spanish French e English
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