Q&A with Artemisa Castro Félix, executive director of the Fund for Solidarity in Action (FASOL) and the chair of the Alliance of Funds, a collective of fully independent grantmaking organizations around the world. Global Greengrants, the International Network of Women’s Funds, and the Alliance of Funds are co-hosting a Summit on Women & Climate this August. The Summit will bring together environmental and women’s movement leaders from around the world to share approaches women are using to combat climate change in their communities, and to strategize ways to increase funding to women-led climate action.
Why focus on supporting grassroots-led change?
What FASOL is looking to do is to strengthen what we call in Spanish the sujeto social, which translates roughly to a grassroots force that can take action and define its priorities. So we make small grants to grassroots groups and people working on social and environmental issues.
We aim to provide financial support to groups that are not able to get funds from anywhere else. We are convinced that the stronger they are and the more tools they have, the more opportunities they will have to defend their rights. Funding small grants is the strategy we use in order to reach our social objectives. The average size of the grants we’re making is around $3,000.
But we’ve identified that besides money, groups need other kinds of support. That doesn’t mean FASOL has to look for another way to bring more concrete support to the grassroots. No. We make alliances with grassroots grantmakers that can provide capacity building in order to increase organizations’ opportunities to protect natural resources and their rights.
What kind of impacts are you seeing as a result of your support at the grassroots level?
It’s very important that communities are aware of what’s going on, and they need to have guidance by mentors, which is what FASOL calls our grant advisors. I think that’s really critical. You don’t need piles and piles of money to do something. You just need to be clear about the steps you need to take. The mentor needs to be very involved in the process connected to larger networks so he or she can guide the process—not just recommend we make the grant to the community.
Do you actively seek out women-led groups to support?
We realize that it’s really important to have a gender perspective in our work, and we’ve been giving a lot of grants to women’s groups. It’s actually happened quite naturally—and there’s a reason for that.
In this country right now, political conditions, economic conditions, and violence are the worst they’ve ever been. Young men are migrating to the United States and other places to find better economic opportunities. The worst part of the story is that, in many cases, they don’t come back to their communities. So women are left behind with all the responsibility for taking care of what’s left. Many are trying to defend their territory. They are always looking for different ways to make an income in order to have some money for the family to survive. Most of the groups we support are in rural areas in Mexico where this migration is a serious problem.
FASOL, an environmental fund, is now partnering with a women’s fund, Semillas, to support environmental action led by women. What does your partnership look like?
Semillas is a women’s fund that has never had an environmental focus. It supports a different level of grassroots group than we do. It works with groups that are more developed, and it can make larger grants for capacity building.
The first time we talked was to share experiences that we both have as grantmakers. But our partnership has evolved. So now, if FASOL has a group we’ve been supporting that is ready to go to the next step, we talk with Semillas about whether it wants to direct funding to the group. I use this analogy: FASOL supports kindergarteners and Semillas supports middle schoolers.
What’s the next step for FASOL and Semillas?
Now we are thinking beyond this. How can we work together on joint proposals to the institutions that fund us as a way to bring together the social, environmental, and gender perspectives? It’s a way to start formalizing alliances, which we think there’s a lot of potential for.
Another thing: We have the support of the grassroots—they’re the ones at the front lines. It’s not the larger organizations. It’s the grassroots people who are defending their resources and territories, and they need a lot of support.
How have funders reacted?
These alliances have been very interesting to funders. We have already sent a letter to a Mexican donor and we are working on two new proposals for international funders. We see that women’s groups are facing threats because they are defending their resources. So there’s been great momentum because every day it’s growing increasingly obvious that you can’t ignore the environmental or the gender perspective. Both are important.
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