Women of Camden

Last night, our partners Moonbug hosted an event with our grantee Joana Monterio to celebrate the women of Camden as part of Joana’s plan to create a giant quilt of 500 Camden women. And what women they are! Relentlessly holding communities together, setting up mutual aid groups during lockdown, bouncing babies while awarding grants with us, taking on caring responsibilities and in Joana’s case, brining together the women of Somers Town to become designers.

Women have always stepped forward at Camden Giving; for a long time we struggled to find many men who wanted to help us award funding, but the women have always been there. Our work has become better for having people of all genders in our staff team, our community panels, and Camden benefits from community projects that are led by people of all genders. I’m really proud that men under 25 from the global majority are the fastest growing group of people receiving funding from us. I’m also proud that our larger grants going to women-led projects in 20203 all went to organisations run by women of colour.

Perhaps because women have always been part of the social landscape of community work, or perhaps because society rarely puts money behind women’s dreams, we receive fewer large funding applications from women and, in turn we give less large grants to women. Last year male-led projects received more than twice as many large grants from us as women-led projects. All Camdenites are missing out when womens’ ideas aren’t supported to grow. So here’s what we’re doing abut it:

Creating Spaces For Women

This month we’ll run our first women-only funding advice session to provide tailored advice to anyone who identifies as a woman and would like to receive funding advice from us. Thanks to our friends at Old Diorama Arts Centre for hosting this on the 21st March 9:30-11:30am. Caring responsibilities are often a reason that women struggle to attend events, so this is a baby and child friendly event. Find out more.

Supporting Women to Access Tailored Training

The good news is that we give a lot of small grants to women, but they aren’t applying to us for larger grants. We’ve been working with Google for the last year to develop a tailored mentoring and training for a small group of Camden leaders with great ideas to grow. This year we want to make sure that the group contains loads of Camden’s brilliant women, so they are supported to be ready to apply for larger grants.

Naming the problem

In part because we are a women-led organisation, we don’t talk about gender equality enough. If a woman is leading Camden Giving, then surely there isn’t a problem? There are women-led organisations in Camden, but when I look for organisations led by queer women, or women of colour, the numbers drop off even more. Some women rising is not a sign that all women are rising and we want to talk about that an awful lot more than we currently do.

Last night was the start of a new commitment that Camden Giving is making to women in Camden, that we are here to help women rise to the top of the social-good sector, not just prop it up from the bottom.