Mama Cash

Mama Cash is a Dutch feminist fund established in 1983 in Amsterdam by five Dutch feminist activists — Marjan Sax, Dorelies Kraakman, Patti Slegers, Tania Leon, and Lida van den Broek — and described by the organisation itself as "the first international women's fund in the world". The startup capital was a $1.25 million ten-year loan from co-founder Marjan Sax — wealth she had inherited and chose to use as feminist movement seed money under the framing that "money and ideals go together." Former Executive Director Zohra Moosa (2013–2022) captured the origin in shorthand: "Five women got together around a kitchen table to invent a new way to support other women, across national borders. It had never been done, so they did it." The Foundation is headquartered at Eerste Helmersstraat 17-III, 1054 CX Amsterdam, holds ANBI public-benefit-organisation designation and CBF certification, and was a founding member of the International Network of Women's Funds in 2000.

Grantmaking model — participatory by design

Mama Cash distributes more than 200 grants annually to grassroots feminist groups in over 60 countries, and its 2021 annual report stated cumulative grantmaking since 1983 of €84,174,383. Current grantmaking flows through five distinct funds. The Resilience Fund provides long-term flexible core support to feminist groups working toward structural change, with grants of €5,000–€50,000 annually (average €35,000) and a prioritised eligibility ceiling of grantee annual budgets under €200,000; the Spark Fund supports younger or newer collectives; the Solidarity Fund supports peer women's funds; the Revolution Fund is a participatory grantmaking vehicle for requests outside the other funds' criteria; and the Radical Love Fund, launched in August 2022, is Mama Cash's participatory grantmaking fund for individual feminist activists rather than groups.

The most distinctive feature of the model is who makes funding decisions. Resilience Fund decisions are made not by Mama Cash staff but by a Community Committee (COM COM) of eleven feminist activists who review applications screened by staff, receive third-party endorsements, and make final deliberations by late July of each grant cycle. The broader organisation has transitioned to a participatory grantmaking model in which "communities most impacted make the funding decisions through rotating regional advisory committees composed of activists and community leaders," with a six-month process to onboard new advisors across all five funds. The principle is stated plainly: "those most affected by injustice should have the power to decide how funding is allocated." The Foundation's stated governance value of "power-sharing in our decision-making" is the institutional name for this commitment.

A May 2025 announcement by Deputy Director of Programmes Vanina Serra that Mama Cash would remove the public grantee-partner list from its website signals a second design choice that distinguishes the Foundation from peer funders: "the most important thing is making sure that the need for visibility and transparency don't jeopardise the safety of our grantee-partners". Safety is treated as a binding upstream constraint on the transparency conventions other foundations adopt by default.

AI-and-society footprint — through feminist-tech infrastructure

Mama Cash does not run an AI-named programme line; its corpus footprint runs through grantmaking that resources feminist-tech infrastructure as a movement-infrastructure category, and through the Foundation's own framing of digital security and digital rights as a single feminist-tech programme area. The most direct connection in the field is to the Numun Fund, described by Mama Cash as "the first dedicated fund for feminist tech based in, led by, and serving feminist movements in the Global South". Numun was seeded by a partnership of women's funds of which Mama Cash is one, and runs a three-tier Seed / Grow / Sustain grant structure for what it calls "nodes of organisers" — its first grantmaking cycle drew 800 applications and awarded 43 grants. Mama Cash's involvement is therefore the corpus's first observable example of an established feminist fund seeding a dedicated feminist-tech re-granting vehicle as movement infrastructure.

The May 2025 Serra essay makes the AI-and-rights framing explicit at the organisation level: "Creating safer digital spaces for feminist activists involves both digital security, which protects data and online activity, and digital rights advocacy, which addresses how technology reinforces discrimination". This combined framing — digital security and digital rights as a single feminist-tech programme area rather than separate concerns — is the corpus's first articulation of that fused register from inside a funder rather than from inside an advocacy organisation.

Position in the corpus funder slice

Mama Cash is the corpus's first feminist fund of any kind. The existing funder slice contains generalist civil-society and democracy funders (Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Omidyar Network, Democracy Fund, Luminate, Stiftung Mercator, Adessium Foundation), digital-rights and racial-equity-in-tech funders (Kapor Foundation, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Nuffield Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust), pooled vehicles (European AI & Society Fund, African Digital Rights Fund), regional or family foundations (McConnell Foundation, Minderoo Foundation, Fundación Avina), and an individual-fellowship model (Shuttleworth Foundation) — but no fund whose grantee selection criterion is specifically women's, girls', and trans and intersex people's rights and self-led feminist organising. Mama Cash fills that register.

Mama Cash is also the corpus's first activist-led participatory-grantmaking funder. Other funders in the slice make their grantmaking decisions through programme officers, internal staff committees, or board approval against staff recommendations. Mama Cash makes its Resilience Fund decisions through an eleven-person Community Committee of feminist activists external to the staff, and is in the middle of extending that model across all five of its funds via rotating regional advisory committees. This is a structurally distinct grantmaking architecture, and Mama Cash is the corpus's principal example of it.

Mama Cash is, finally, the second Dutch funder in the corpus, joining Adessium Foundation — but in a register Adessium does not occupy. Adessium is an invite-only, multi-year, endowment-anchored family foundation with a three-pillar programme architecture (Informed Society, Just and Equitable Society, Nature and Living Environment) that runs grantmaking decisions internally. Mama Cash is an open-application, participatory-grantmaking feminist fund whose decisions are made by external activist committees. Together the two Dutch entries give the corpus a contrasting pair of Continental European funding models — one philanthropist-set, one movement-set — rather than a single Netherlands register.

Where the existing funder slice gives the corpus windows onto US-fortune-anchored, UK-fortune-anchored, German-foundation, Belgian-pooled, Canadian-family-foundation, Australian-mining-fortune-anchored, Latin American–coordinated, South African–individual-fellowship, Dutch-family-foundation, and pan-African pooled philanthropy, Mama Cash is the corpus's principal window onto a feminist fund operating an activist-led participatory grantmaking model from Amsterdam — the oldest international women's fund in the world, and the first in the corpus to make grantmaking decisions through committees of the activists the fund exists to support.