Dear community,

We close this year with many feelings – gratitude and joy for being able to have been in community with many of our partners, nodes and constellations of activists at different spaces throughout the year; grave reflection on the many ways that technology is implicated in how we are experiencing the surfacing of deep, protracted and interconnected crises; strengthened shared commitment in the need to weave our activism across movements, territories and spaces of organising to meet this moment.

As we take a break to prepare for the upcoming year, we invite you to read our co-lead and co-founder, Jac sm Kee, closing remarks at the 15th AWID Forum “Feminist tech: the live tissues between tech & our justice struggles. Closing remarks at the 15th AWID Forum”, and we would like to share with you some of Numun’s work and engagement in 2024:

Resourcing feminist engagement with technology – Seed, Grow and Sustain (SGS) Grant, core, flexible funding.

• Launched the 2nd cycle of SGS in August 2024, supporting support 13 new Grow and 3 new Sustain nodes working in 21 countries, and renewing 13 Grow and 8 Sustain nodes from SGS 1.0 working in 30 countries. In total, mobilising $2.35 million USD for 2 years. More info here
• We also launched the Community and Network Plugin which are additional small grants to support collaboration, exchange and learnings between SGS nodes as part of our community strengthening strategy.
• Supported by the core flexible grants, groups were able to reach young indigenous communities in Guatemala to prevent online violence, support women to access safe abortion info and services in Rwanda, assess digital safety needs of sex workers in Central Asia, strengthen community-knowledge projects on local health practices and movement organising history in India, SWANA, and more. Find out more about the work of nodes here.

Feminist tech infrastructures – context, crisis and learning

• Feminist tech activists were often at the forefront of organising to support to needs of their communities at peak moments of crises, and we were able to provide support to our partners at some of these moments and contexts through a Context and Contingency fund, as well as sharing resources and networks where relevant.
• Feminist crises response relies on strong networks of trust and collaboration across the ecosystem – this includes us partnering with feminist and women’s funds and digital rights networks in our our support work and shared learnings.
• The importance of preparedness and the ability to communicate and share information led us to focus the launch of the second Feminist Tech Playground (FTP) on Connectivity and Crises. FTPs are exploratory learning small grants that supports experimentation and shared learning in community.

Bridging technology, feminism and justice – spaces to meet, analyse, seed ideas and organise

• Disinformation Collaboration Lab: This is a pooled fund mechanism to bring together activists from digital rights, media and journalism, women’s rights and LGBTQI+ movements addressing the issue of disinformation from different perspectives into one conversation. The idea is to deepen learning and support new questions, ideas and approaches for addressing the issue through cross movement conversations. The first Lab was held in May 2024, with a focus on Asia.
• Trueque: This is a space for peer exchange and learning between feminist and women’s funds and activists they support on how technology is impacting on their communities and work. The 2nd Trueque took place just before the AWID Forum in Bangkok, growing from (check number of funds rather than people from funds) to 12 funds, with more than 50 participants discussing issues from tech and pleasure, designing inclusive tech, to the role of tech in supporting women in times of crisis and genocide, among many others.
• The Feminist Tech Gardens (FTG): In collaboration with APC, Whose Knowledge? and AWID, technology was woven throughout the 15th AWID Forum. The FTG became spaces to meet others in the feminist tech community, and further explore the intersections between technology and feminist organising – from building and caring for autonomous infrastructures, to playing with alternative economic models to resource our movements, decolonial perspectives of archiving, and more.
• Supporting convenings: Recognising convenings as a critical component of movement organising, we were able to contribute to the first Southeast Asia convening on addressing tech-facilitated gender based violence, co-organised by several of our nodes, as well as contributing to the participation of more Larger Majority World feminist tech activists to tech x rights events such as the Global Gathering and Global Voices as partners.

It has never been clearer that we need to fund and resource activism at the intersections, and a feminist engagement with technology as a political site that centres communities who are most affected is critical to meet the current moment.

Specially as we are leaving 2024 with a sense of uncertainty in the resourcing landscape, the need for collective re-commitment and re-imagination on how the work of social justice and transformation powered by movements will be resourced.

We look forward to opening the next year in continued collaboration and community with you as part of this critical change work. For now, rest is resistance.

In deep appreciation and solidarity,

Numun Fund team