In 2023, at a World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) Congress event her organisation hosted in Kenya, Aska Josephine (she/her), Founder of the Federation of Deaf Women Empowerment Network (FEDWEN), looked out across a room of delegates gathered from around the world and asked them a simple question: Had anyone there ever seen a deaf woman lead in her own community? 

Almost no hands went up.

The gathering was a pre-conference event that FEDWEN had spent months developing in partnership with the WFD. It was intended as a proof of concept: a space for deaf women to hold conversations about the issues that affect them in leadership, in community, and in policy. Instead, the event brought something else to the surface. In a room of more than 150 delegates, the representation of Black African women was discouragingly low, and some countries had even sent men to a convening specifically designed for women.

For Aska, the moment reinforced what she had long known, that deaf women, and particularly deaf African women, remained underrepresented not only in politics or public life, but even within movements that seek to advance disability and gender justice. It also affirmed the necessity of FEDWEN’s work: applying Black feminist principles to create safe spaces for deaf women and children; building a network of policy advocates for deaf people across Eastern and Southern Africa; addressing the pervasiveness of gender-based violence, particularly as it affects deaf women and girls; and creating avenues for economic empowerment for deaf women in Kenya.

FEDWEN’s work spans multiple thematic areas, partners with constituencies across national borders, and responds in real time to the needs of its communities during extreme climate events and incidents of violence. It runs clubs for deaf adolescent girls and boys, supplying the learning materials to support them. It trains parents in sign language, so that they can be their children’s first advocates; it partners with schools and healthcare workers, and, perhaps most significantly, it works with the justice system itself. FEDWEN trains prosecutors and probation officers so that when deaf women and girls enter a courtroom, they are able to communicate, participate, and seek justice rather than being excluded by inaccessible systems.

The breadth of this work is far too expansive to fit neatly within a project scope, making FEDWEN precisely the kind of organisation for which traditional philanthropic norms of short-term, project-specific funding present a significant obstacle. When the Black Feminist Fund partnered with FEDWEN, providing a core, eight-year flexible grant, it modelled the kind of philanthropic intervention that grassroots organisations actually need: rather than funding a specific project, it funded the organization behind it. 

“Flexible funding has helped us to work without limits. It has also enabled FEDWEN to have an office and to hire competent staff because we are committed to paying our staff well. Most other projects have fixed budgets for indirect costs, so now we don’t have to worry about such issues,” shares Aska. To describe what the funding changed, Aska reaches for a striking metaphor. “If your breath was taken away and then somebody released you, that’s how it felt when we got funding from the Black Feminist Fund.”

After years of uncertainty, moving from one short-term grant to the next, FEDWEN is now able to focus on its long-term strategy. “It helps us to dream about the future, to think further ahead, because now we are thinking about sustainability, and that comes with funding flexibility,” explains Pamela (she/her), Program Coordinator. Reflecting on the broader philanthropic sector, she adds, “I wish we would get more long-term funding because it helps sustain the work you do and allows you to realise the impact of that work.”

For years, FEDWEN’s future depended on whether the next grant arrived. Today, it owns the land where its permanent office will stand. It is a milestone that represents something much larger: the opportunity to build an institution that will outlast any single grant or funding cycle. “You would almost never get support to purchase land from a donor partner,” Pamela says. A safe house for survivors of gender-based violence remains next on FEDWEN’s agenda. The team points to a shrinking funding pool for gender-based violence work more broadly, which, for now, keeps the project as a future aspiration.

The partnership with the Black Feminist Fund has extended well beyond financial support. It demonstrates how philanthropy can strengthen movements not only by providing financial resources, but also investing in relationships, confidence, and collective power. For FEDWEN, those investments have been just as meaningful as the grant itself. “We feel like we’re part of a family. We attended a conference they hosted in Barbados, where we interacted with their staff, and I felt free. I felt like I belonged, like I had known them for years. It helped build my confidence. They also supported us to attend the AWID conference in Thailand,” Aska describes. Those opportunities, among others, have connected FEDWEN with other organisations and movements, expanding its networks while increasing the visibility and credibility of its work.  

What the Black Feminist Fund has modelled, in practice, is funding that trusts an organisation to understand its own community’s needs, funding that treats a deaf, African woman-led organisation as central to the feminist movement rather than adjacent to it. As Pamela puts it: “I don’t think we get that enough, particularly Black women from Africa. You get projects that center youth… but not many that center Black women.”

For FEDWEN’s team, building Black feminist worlds is inseparable from disability justice. For Pamela, it means “having diversity in feminism, not having one type of person dominating the feminist movement.” For Aska, it means “a world where people are equal without racial discrimination, where policy applies to all, and where we have platforms to articulate what we feel without feeling like we’re being underrated; where sign language is recognised as a language equal to spoken language, where everybody is catered for equally without being left out because of disability, race, or poverty.”

The barriers Aska describes remain deeply entrenched. Organizations like FEDWEN are still too often treated as peripheral rather than essential by the philanthropic sector. But FEDWEN’s story offers another possibility: what becomes possible when an organisation is trusted with the time, flexibility, and resources to fully execute its vision. The question Aska posed to that room of delegates in Kenya still lingers: Had anyone ever seen a deaf woman lead in her own community? FEDWEN is working to ensure that, one day, they will.