2025 Outcome Evaluation – Blueprints for Resilience
Across the globe, women-led organizations are confronting shrinking civic space, rising authoritarianism, and intensifying backlash against gender equality. These challenges are real and growing — yet so is something else: the extraordinary resilience, creativity, and leadership of women organizers who continue to meet their communities’ needs, innovate in the face of crisis, and advance justice against the odds.
WomenStrong International’s 2025 outcome evaluation, Blueprints for Resilience, shines a light on what enables these organizations not only to persist, but to thrive. Through an independent evaluation led by Ignited Word, we asked our grantee partners — women-led, grassroots organizations across 17 countries — to share their most pressing needs, how they define resilience, and how WomenStrong’s support has shaped their work. These partners span movements for climate and environmental justice, economic security, women’s health, girls’ education, and gender-based violence prevention, offering a diverse and powerful window into what resilience looks like in practice.
What We Learned
The evaluation provides clear evidence that women-led organizations flourish when they are trusted to lead and resourced for strength, not just survival. Partners reported that WomenStrong’s model, built on flexible funding, tailored organizational support, and a vibrant peer learning network, gave them the stability and confidence to chart their own paths forward.
Three elements stood out consistently across organizations and contexts:
- Flexible, unrestricted funding fuels autonomy and innovation.
When women leaders can allocate funds where they are most needed, whether to pay staff, upgrade technology, launch a strategic planning process, or weather an unexpected challenge, they gain the freedom to act boldly and adapt quickly. - Tailored organizational strengthening builds long-term capacity.
Coaching, mentorship, and partner-driven organizational strengthening efforts helped organizations develop systems, diversify their funding, institutionalize learning, and build the foundations required for long-term impact. - A peer learning network transforms isolation into collective power.
Through WomenStrong’s Learning Lab, partners exchanged support and built solidarity across borders. These connections reduced burnout, encouraged innovation, and helped organizations see themselves as part of a larger movement.
What You’ll Find Inside the Report
The full Blueprints for Resilience evaluation is rich with data, stories, and practical insights from women-led organizations working on the frontlines of change.
Inside, you’ll find:
- Concrete partner outcomes — from formalizing fundraising strategies and deepening advocacy networks to reimagining organizational models and investing in staff wellbeing.
- Examples of trust-based support in action, such as partners using flexible funding to strengthen operations, develop multiyear strategies, or stabilize after sudden shocks.
- Reflections on the practice of building resilience, and why supporting core organizational strength — rather than short-term projects — leads to more innovative, adaptive, and community-grounded organizations.
The report underscores a critical shift: resilience is not reactive. It cannot be built in the middle of a crisis alone. Women-led organizations are showing what’s possible when they have the resources, trust, and autonomy to plan proactively, invest in their people, and shape their own futures.
Why This Matters for Philanthropy
In a philanthropic landscape where many funding models still default to short-term, project-based support, Blueprints for Resilience offers compelling evidence for another way.
WomenStrong’s partners demonstrate that when funders invest in core strength — people, systems, leadership, strategy — organizations grow more sustainable, more ambitious, and more impactful. They secure new resources, scale their ideas, and deliver deeper, longer-lasting impact for women and communities worldwide.
Resilience, in this context, becomes a design — not a reaction.
- Download the Executive Summary
- Download the Full Report
- Explore Impact in Action — Stories behind the data
What’s Possible: Shifting from Scarcity to Strength
For funders seeking to help women-led organizations move from surviving to thriving, we invite you to explore our companion resource:
