The Equality Fund is one of the world’s most ambitious initiatives to provide sustainable, flexible funding to feminist movements and women’s rights organisations worldwide, particularly in lower and middle-income countries. It stands on the shoulders of the MATCH International Women’s Fund - a feminist institution dating back to 1976 - and formally emerged in 2019 amid a politically turbulent moment for women’s rights organisations in Canada.
Today, the Equality Fund supports partners in over 100 countries - from underground, unregistered groups working in some of the world’s most dangerous environments to large organisations shaping national and global policy. According to CEO Jess Tomlin, the fund blends patient capital with high-risk catalytic funding, allowing bold ideas to emerge, grow, and evolve. .
“From the beginning, we wanted to build wealth in a way that was going to advance gender equality objectives,” she says. “When we started five years ago, we had no idea how important this liberated capital would be or how critical this funding would become.”
Jess Tomlin:
It started with a desire to build a sustainable funding mechanism for women's rights movements around the world and followed a politically dark time for women’s movements in Canada. When Prime Minister Trudeau - an self-proclaimed feminist - was elected, we pressed his government to walk the talk. The government responded with a historic $300 million contribution, the largest ever given to a feminist entity. That contribution proved incredibly catalytic in unlocking new funding and we used that energy and momentum to engage feminist movements around the world. And because the level of ambition was so high, two other G7 countries have since joined the fund along with major institutional philanthropy and high net worth individuals - all galvanised by the momentum of what was possible.
We knew that we needed to build wealth for these movements because the old pattern of being dependent on progressive governments and philanthropic trends wasn’t serving anyone. When you’re talking about movement work, especially for big issues, it involves change across behaviour, policy and systems - that’s a lifetime’s worth of work. We wanted to create a fund that will bankroll women's movements for decades, possibly even centuries. We want to be an insurance policy- to be a steady drumbeat of financial resources for the movements doing transformative work to hold ground and break new ground in the fight for equality.
Jess Tomlin:
We created a 100% gender lens impact investment portfolio that has deep intersectional guidelines across all asset classes from public to private. Our screening process for companies is incredibly robust - we only invest in companies that are progressive in terms of gender equality, human rights and climate change, and we invest in projects that are values aligned – for example, inflatable incubators in Gaza or health technologies that are giving women in rural parts of the world access to critical sexual health services and reproductive rights. These are the kinds of things we couldn’t do with grant capital.
In terms of investors, anybody can come in through the investment door – but how they use the fund will depend on the impact they want to have and the timeframe. There's a layer of risk tolerance applied across all our investments and then it's about individuals, organisations or governments coming into the fund in a way that makes the most sense in terms of their risk tolerance and scale of their investments. Across the continuum, we make long-term bets while also deploying high-risk capital — the kind that lets movements pursue big ideas, experiment, and ultimately jump the S-curve.
Jess Tomlin:
We’ve raised over half a billion dollars and moved $100 million to 1,800 partners in 100 countries - all through decentralised decision-making. We’ve invested $296 million into our investment portfolio, with a 100% gender-lens impact, and we’re wealthier now than we were five years ago. Our approach spans the entire ecosystem: we’re supporting underground, unregistered, undocumented organisations that cannot safely operate in the daylight but are doing critical movement work, and we’re also investing in official infrastructure and trying to build connective tissue between the two ends of that spectrum.
Jess Tomlin:
When we started, we had to build partnerships across different sectors and across the entire capital continuum and it was amazing to discover that there are feminists everywhere- they’re in big banks, investment houses, and you’ll find them in every type of government. That initial investment was a big price tag and that came with a lot of challenges – there were times when it was hard to stay steady and to stay in grace, but it was an extraordinary adventure.
For me as a leader, it’s about managing change fatigue, especially with a team that's constantly trying to stay relevant and evolve. How do you honour that fatigue while recognising that old models won't serve us anymore? How do you build innovation into the DNA of an organisation? These are questions I’ve sat with a lot. Because when you’re the first in any space, everything you do — every new partnership or project - you’re doing it for the first time. But we keep going because our job is to keep busting through those red lines and breaking down traditional ways of working so we can empower the change that’s most needed.
Jess Tomlin:
My vision is to unlock the whole continuum of capital and then deploy it to where it’s most needed. Fundamentally, all the issues the world is facing are gender issues - whether it’s climate, access to safe water, housing, or refugees. We're not a thematic funder - we fund proximate leaders- their ideas and needs. But once you understand, for example, that rape increases by 30% during a heat wave, it adds another layer to those broader issues.
I think there’s a collective rage in the world right now that’s very powerful — especially when it comes to ending gender-based violence. I want women to leverage this wealth transfer and use their outrage to fight for change. We need to remember that we're all on the same side of the table.
