Laura Carter

The Feminist Review Trust was founded in 2001. The Feminist Review, an academic journal, was making a profit: the Trust was a way for a small group of socialist feminists to redistribute those profits into feminist projects worldwide. Over two decades, the Trust distributed over half a million pounds to nearly 200 projects, across five continents.

I became a Trustee in 2017. The Trust never had any paid staff: it was the job of the Trustees to review the hundreds of grant applications we received each round, and then, three times a year, to meet to deliberate over which ones we could fund. Each funding round, I sat with my colleagues—feminists from different generations, backgrounds and experiences to me—as we deliberated over which projects to fund.

It wasn’t ever an easy process. We never had enough money to fund everything that we wanted to. We prioritised projects that we thought would struggle to find support elsewhere, and feminists in countries with less infrastructural support. We didn’t look for scalability, or even always ongoing work: we wanted to fund transformative change, and that didn’t always mean big projects. We trusted that our grantees knew what was needed in different contexts, and tried not to burden them with too many reporting requirements.

We didn’t always get it right. Occasionally, grantees would vanish after receiving the funds (but not nearly as often as we might have feared). Sometimes they wouldn’t be able to deliver on the project that they proposed, but almost always they’d come back with justifications for the delay, or reasons why they wanted to reallocate our funding. We almost always said yes.

When the Trust closed its doors, we commissioned two reports. One looking backwards: a history of the Trust. And one looking forwards: an evaluation of what we did and what we learned from it, in the hope that it might be useful to other (and future) feminist funding. There is more support for feminist organising now, and different models of funding: but still not nearly enough.

I'm proud to have been a Trustee. I learned an enormous amount from my fellow Trustees, and from the feminists that we funded over the years. I'll miss our meetings and my colleagues, and I'll miss finding out about the amazing work that feminists around the world were able to do with the (really, quite tiny amounts of) money that we were able to send to them.

Our papers are archived at LSE, and copies of both reports are at the Copyright Libraries. When we finished the winding down of the Trust, we had a small amount of money left over. In our final political feminist act, we donated it to Medical Aid for Palestinians.