#77: Strength Is the Strategy: A Conversation on Movement‑Led Finance
What happens when feminist movements stop asking permission and start acting as asset owners?
In this episode, Joy Anderson is joined by Giselle Carino and Meradith Leebrick of Fòs Feminista to explore how movement‑led organizations are building financial tools, institutions, and enterprises that sustain reproductive justice over the long term.
In this conversation, they reflect on why organizational strength (governance, reserves, and financial discipline) is not separate from movement work but essential to it; how Fòs Feminista was deliberately designed by and for organizations in the Global South; and what it looks like to act as a financial intermediary without training wheels. They trace Fòs Feminista’s long history with innovative finance, dig into the creation and scaling of INNOVA Health Supplies as a feminist social enterprise, and challenge conventional assumptions about risk, collateral, and repayment, arguing instead for designing capital that matches the realities, time horizons, and power dynamics of real change.
00:00 - Introductios Fòs Feminista and Its Mission
02:50 - The Concept of 'Fòs' and Its Origins
05:40 - Building a Strong Ecosystem for Reproductive Justice
08:01 - Organizational Stability and Movement Leadership
14:18 - Innovative Finance Strategies in Reproductive Health
17:33 - Collaborative Solutions for Sexual and Reproductive Health
22:15 - Acting as Asset Owners in the Movement
30:11 - Scaling Impact and Future Directions
Feminist Impact Fund (Fòs Feminista)
Introducing Standards of Practice for Gender Lens Investing
Process Metrics that Analyze Power Dynamics in Investing
Disrupting Fields: Addressing Power Dynamics in the Fields of Climate Finance and Gender Lens Investing
Fostering a Feminist Financial Imagination
#74: No Permission Required: Volunteerism as a Power Shift
#72: From Add-on to Operating System: Rethinking the Role of Services in Local Value Creation
#73: Search Funds Reframed: Expanding Access to Business Ownership
#20: Shifting Power in Investment Practice: The Costs of Doing Business
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The Blueprints demonstrate how a variety of social change organizations can design strategies that use systems of finance as tools to create positive social change.
These roadmaps lay out insights for how finance can be used to address gender-based violence in a range of sectors, asset classes, geographies, and investor types.
The TOOLKIT is designed to support your journey as you explore how finance can be used as a tool to create social change.
1K Churches was launched in 2012 to galvanize a movement in the faith-based community and engage US churches to invest in the local economy.
These gender-based violence due diligence tools analyze existing due diligence categories – including political, regulatory, operational, and reputational risks – and show how they can be affected by gender-based violence.
Gender-based violence is ubiquitous. More than 1 in 3 women worldwide experiences physical or sexual violence, and millions of men, boys, and gender-diverse individuals are affected by physical, sexual, and emotional abuse daily.