Building Feminist Futures
About
By training an inclusive innovator cohort for transformational leadership, we will strengthen gender-responsive and feminist leadership approaches capable of addressing today’s challenges and building sustainable feminist futures.
Goals
This partnered research training and talent initiative will build equity-focused and resilient leadership skills among an inclusive innovator cohort—including domestic and international students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career practitioners—through a training-of-trainers model. It will deliver cutting-edge training focused on practical strategies to respond to growing backlash against gender equality and women’s human rights. Specifically, we will focus on skills-building and training to advance strategies for feminist research and practice that tackles power structures, confronts oppressive practices, supports inclusivity, and enhances interdisciplinarity.
Objectives
1. Develop and provide new leadership training and mentorship opportunities. Practical training will ensure skills-building in women's leadership including: planning, team building, financial management, EDI and human rights inclusion skills, complex negotiation, conflict resolution, coalition building, crisis response, feminist diplomacy, adaptability and resilience.
2. Deliver effective research training for skills development in research, analysis, documentation, and evaluating impacts of training. Specific skills development will focus on: digital literacy, ethics in research, qualitative and quantitative data collection, data analysis, feminist evaluation, and knowledge mobilization.
3. Training future leaders for managing a globally accessible knowledge mobilization hub. Designed to enable cross-border and intergenerational learning, the hub will allow knowledge, tools, and training materials to be shared across regions and sustained over time, supporting multi-directional exchange between students, practitioners, and employers through professional skills workshops and other web tools to support career-readiness.
Building Feminist Futures was created in response to a growing global leadership crisis. Around the world, backlash against gender equality and rising gender-based violence, is deterring women from entering physical spaces and online platforms. These trends threaten the future of leadership across politics, peacebuilding, research, business, and education.
Inclusive innovators remain underrepresented in decision-making roles and face persistent barriers to leadership. At the same time, democratic backsliding, economic and environmental instability, increases in violence and insecurity and resurgent patriarchal norms are reversing progress on gender equality and inclusion.
Our partnership seeks to reverse this leadership crisis. By focusing on peace, justice, and sustainable economies, Building Feminist Futures works to strengthen feminist, inclusive leadership. We support the next generation of leaders with the skills, networks, and confidence needed to challenge inequality, respond to backlash, and build more just and resilient futures.
