La Soeur Fund was born from a simple yet urgent conviction: that women’s rights and feminist organizations on the frontlines of crisis must have direct access to the resources they need. The Fund emerged from years of collective experience among feminist activists, humanitarian practitioners, and advocates who witnessed the persistent underfunding and sidelining of women-led responses during emergencies. Despite their critical role in protecting and rebuilding communities, women’s organizations continue to receive only a fraction of humanitarian and development funding. La Soeur Fund seeks to change that reality.
The idea for the Fund began to take shape through conversations between feminist leaders, networks, and organizations across humanitarian and development systems. These exchanges highlighted a recurring challenge – that while global actors increasingly recognize the importance of local leadership, the funding architecture remains centralized, rigid, and inaccessible to many of the organizations doing the most transformative work. There are large portions of funding going to the overhead of oftentimes multiple intermediary organizations, and only a trickle normally makes its way to these organizations. We aime to change that, with a laser sharp focus on tackling violence against women and girls.
