The Global Resilience Fund for Girls and Young Women: Collective Response to the COVID-19 Crisis

The Global Resilience Fund supports girl, young women and gender non conforming, trans and intersex activists at this watershed moment, with fully flexible rapid response grants of up to $5,000. Applications for the fund are now open!

Grants are fully flexible, to support your work, as you define it. In the application, they will ask you to share a little bit about how you expect to use the funds, to understand more about your activism and the needs of girls and young women like you at this time.

Looking for fully-funded opportunities, install the Youth Opportunities Android or iOS App here.

The Global Resilience Fund is a partnership between social justice funders committed to resourcing girls’ and young women’s activism through the COVID-19 crisis. New partners will be joining the fund as it evolves and grows.

The fund is housed at and facilitated by Purposeful, a feminist movement building hub for adolescent girls headquartered in Sierra Leone and working around the world. Purposeful is meeting the administrative costs of the fund from its own core resources as an act of solidarity with activist communities in this moment.

The fund was conceived in deep partnership with Women Win, who are co-leading outreach and fundraising.

As wave after wave of the coronavirus infection spreads across the globe, communities already living and fighting on the frontlines of oppression will be the worst affected. As social justice funders, advocates and activists we know all too painfully the ways in which crises compound the everyday experiences of violence, gendered poverty and isolation for adolescent girls and young women. COVID-19, like any other crisis, is exposing and exacerbating all of the existing systemic oppression and violence that positions girls as particularly vulnerable – especially girls who face multiple forms of oppression.

Public health, the economy and girls’ safety and bodily autonomy are inextricably linked. All over the world — across countries and context — girls play the role of primary caregivers for so many in the community. In a health crisis, this care-giving burden increases dramatically. In the absence of functioning health and social care services in so many places, girls become frontline health responders. Girls also face huge cultural pressures to provide for their families, even though they are the most likely to be distanced from assets like money, goods, services, transportation and so on. Closing of schools and other learning settings not only limit girls’ access to education but further isolate them from communities of other girls. When girls and young women are removed from their peers, we know rates of violence, teenage pregnancy and forced marriage soar.

The cruel irony is that despite this intense pressure that girls face, the response during crisis at best ignores girls’ unique needs and at worst shuts them out. Inequalities in health and in the economy are products of a patriarchal system that devalues and exploits girls. We have an opportunity to ensure girls and young women are front and centre in response and recovery efforts.

In these challenging times, there is still hope. Across the world, local communities are organising and collectivising at an unprecedented scale. Never has there been a truer example of citizen organising power, and of the deep transnational bonds that connect us all as humans. Whether they know it or not, these communities are using the very organising tools that girl activists and their feminist allies have been using for decades in their struggles for justice. Indeed, it has never been more important to learn from the leadership of the girls and young women who live through lock-downs, political uncertainty and economic instability every day.

As in any crisis, we know many efforts to organise in the context of COVID-19 are being led by girls and young women, but as usual they will not be resourced or recognised for their work. We will need the creativity, the spirit, the sheer resilience of girl and young women activists more and more as these days unfold.