Applications are now open for the Feminist Review Trust's Grant Program to support projects that transform the lives of women.

Set up in 2001, the Trust was funded by Feminist Review. Run as a collective since its inception in 1979, the voluntary work of  Feminist Review’s editorial teams over the years has provided the means for the Trust to share the success of the journal with groups of women throughout the world similarly working for change.

The Feminist Review Trust will fund:

• Hard to fund projects. Some types of projects are difficult to fund. Typically these projects have no other obvious sources of funding. This might mean, for example, that traditional academic sources are either not interested in the area or that it is an activist project or that it is too feminist for most conventional funding sources. For example the Trust supported the writing and publication of the history of Rape Crisis in Scotland and the translation and updating sections of ‘Women and Their Bodies’ into Arabic and Hebrew.
• Pump priming activities. This means that they will provide a small amount of funding to help start an activity in the hope that it will then be able attract sufficient funding to continue. For example they funded a project in Argentina to strengthen the capacity of organisations promoting women’s rights and a project to provide audio visual equipment for a feminist social centre in Madrid. In each case these projects have hopefully helped to create a sustainable activity.
• Interventionist projects which support feminist values. It is often difficult for projects around core feminist concerns such as abortion rights and domestic violence to find funding. For example the Trust has supported Asylum Aid (an independent charity workshop with asylum seekers in the UK) to promote its ‘Charter of Rights’ for Women Seeking Asylum. They supported the 40th Anniversary Campaign of Abortion Rights in the UK, a documentary about abortion in Trinidad and Tobago and a feminist art studio in Tbilisi, Georgia.
• Training and development projects: they will fund projects which provide training in relevant areas. For example, the Trust has funded English lessons for sex workers in London; leadership skills training for women in the voluntary sector. and volunteer training as Glasgow Women’s Library.
• One off events: they supported Cine25 as part of the celebrations of 25 years of Women’s Studies at the University of York (UK); a seminar for the Lileth Project (a violence against women housing related project), and a workshop on the gender dimensions of Bulgarian Immigration Policy.
• Dissemination: they will fund the production and distribution of relevant material. Too often wonderful work has had a more limited impact than it should because it was not well of fully distributed The Trust will fund dissemination. . For example they have supported the production of a booklet on Asian women’s experiences of higher education in the UK and the distribution of publications by the Rights of Women (a non-profit UK group)
• Core funding: they realise that many groups struggle to raise core funding. The Trustees are willing to offer core funding to cover staff costs, accommodation etc., except in instances where applicants are seeking core funding to replace funding lost as a result of public sector cuts.
• Other projects: if your application does not easily fit into any of the above categories they may still support it. For example, the Trust has funded a project to capture oral histories of women’s experience of the menopause.

Funding Information

The maximum value of any individual award is UK £15,000 (or its equivalent).

The Feminist Review Trust will not  fund the following types of applications:

• Applications from students to support them on courses of any kind. This includes sub-degree, Bachelors, Masters and Doctorates. Nor will they fund doctoral fieldwork.
• Applications from academics to fund work which could be funded by more traditional sources of funding. This means that they are very unlikely to fund summer projects for US academics.
• Where they do fund academics they will not fund overheads, teaching buy-outs or equivalent.
• Applications to continue doctoral studies. Post-docs can be funded from more conventional sources.
• Applications from religious groups.
• Applications from UK organisations for core funding that has been lost or reduced due to statutory bodies’ spending cuts.

For more information, visit Feminist Review Trust.