What happens when feminist funds rooted in the Global South come together—not just to exchange knowledge, but to radically reimagine how it is created, valued, and used for accountability and learning?

We dream of eliminating reporting structures to funders and instead building relationships of mutual trust. At the 2025 EDGE Funders Conference in Bogotá, Fenomenal Funds, Urgent Action Fund Latin America and the Caribbean, and Fondo Semillas co-hosted a session to explore just that.

Titled ‘Cross-pollinating Knowledge: A Decolonial Feminist Practice in Philanthropy,’ the session invited funders and movement allies into a multilingual, participatory space of reflection, dreaming, and co-creation. Together, we challenged extractive models of monitoring and evaluation and reclaimed Feminist Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (FMEAL) as a liberatory, relational practice.

This article emerges from that gathering and the journeys that led us there. It asks: What does it mean to shift power through learning? How do we center care, complexity, and relationships over compliance? How can accountability serve liberation—not bureaucracy, white saviorism, surveillance or control?

A Journey of Becoming: Feminist Funds Reimagine Learning and Power Literacy

In the spirit of cross-pollination, what follows is both a critique and an offering: a critique of dominant philanthropic knowledge systems and an invitation to co-create alternatives rooted in feminist values, Southern knowledges, and the political practice of care. These are our reflections—as Learning and Impact strategists and facilitators at Fenomenal Funds, Fondo Semillas, and UAF-LAC—on the winding, emergent paths we are walking to embody feminist MEAL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning) in practice.

We begin by sharing how each of our institutions is navigating this journey, before turning to the collective insights that emerged from our time together at the EDGE Funders Conference.

1. Fenomenal Funds: Power Literacy and Collective Meaning-Making

At Fenomenal Funds, our feminist learning journey has been anything but linear. As a collaborative that brings together women’s funds and four private philanthropic foundations, we knew early on that conventional approaches wouldn’t serve us. So we formed the Learning & Evaluation Working Group (L&EWG), a space of shared governance and co-learning, where we’ve been meeting monthly—often without ever having met in person.

Read the full article about reimagining accountability by Shama Dossa, Erix Cortés, and Diana Medina González at Alliance Magazine.