In August 2018 Open Heroines received a grant of $100,000 from The Hewlett Foundation to support our work over two years. This funding was a pivotal moment for our community — previously, our only resource was voluntary time.
In this blog post you’ll find information about how we managed and used the grant, what we’ve learned about our community, and where we think we’ll be going next.
In August 2018 Open Heroines received a grant of $100,000 from The Hewlett Foundation to support our work over two years. This funding was a pivotal moment for our community — previously, our only resource was voluntary time.
We believe in practicing what we preach — so we’re sharing how we used the grant and what we’ve learned about our community. We’ve also made the narrative reports we provided to The Hewlett Foundation in 2019 and 2020 available for transparency, reflection, and accountability.
In this blog post you’ll find information about how we managed and used the grant, what we’ve learned about our community, and where we think we’ll be going next.
Our grant was divided as follows:
- $70,000 for our Travel Grant Scheme, to help women who have never attended global open data/civic tech/open government conferences participate.
- $20,000 to research the blockers and challenges for women in the open data, open government, and civic tech spaces and possible solutions.
- $10,000 to Development Gateway, the organisation that managed our grant. This allowed us to accept the funding without establishing a legal entity, giving us time to explore options for our governance structure.
Travel Grants
$70,000 of the grant was allocated to our Travel Grant Scheme. The scheme covered expenses for flights and accommodation to help women and non-binary people who have never participated in global open+ conferences to attend.
International Open Data Conference 2018, Buenos Aires
Our first round of travel grants was for the International Open Data Conference (IODC), held in Buenos Aires, Argentina in September 2018. As we received the final agreement of our grant in mid-August, time was short — which we knew would impact the number of places we were able to offer to women who needed visas.
In the space of two weeks, we received 233 applications, and were ultimately able to fund sixteen places to IODC: eight from Latin America, three from Sub Saharan Africa, three from Europe, one from South East Asia, and one from the Middle East and North Africa.
Open Government Partnership Summit 2019, Ottawa
For our second round of funding, we received 203 applications from 25 countries to attend the Open Government Partnership Summit. This time around, we created a methodology for our selection process.
Using the methodology, we were able to fund eleven women to attend the conference through Open Heroines funding, alongside two additional grants provided by the Open Government Partnership (OGP). Grantees who attended were from Argentina, Brazil, Panama, Senegal, Armenia, Kenya, Mexico and Tunisia.
Even though we had more time for this second round of grants, visas remained an issue. The Canadian immigration system places restrictions on young women who are not married arriving from certain countries. As a consequence of this policy, three of our grantees from Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Kyrgyzstan had their visas rejected.
We hosted a number of events at the OGP Summit, including a pre-event Open Gender Monologues session, Feminist Open Government Day, Feminist Skillshare, and representation for Open Heroines during the main plenaries.
Visas and freedom of movement
Despite our best efforts, we found that visas were a major issue for people trying to to attend events from the global south. Even with the assistance of the Government of Argentina and the Open Government Partnership in Canada, we found that visa processes of host countries discriminated against people from the Global South, especially unmarried young women. This challenge showed that border restrictions are a key issue preventing women in the Global South engaging in open+ events.
In addition, we found that heroines working for international NGOs asked for a grant as their organisation prioritised sending a man. This points to need to continue to work with organisations to explain why women and non-binary people need to be represented at international events.
Community Events
The problems with visas outlined above meant that we had around $6000 leftover from travel grant money to spend.
Our travel grantees had the idea to use these funds to host events on gender and data locally to help build networks of like minded women in their community. We created a pot of money for members of the Open Heroines community to apply for up to $500 to run local events. The community events grants were based on a first-come, first served basis.
There were two rounds of funding, one for events held between October and December 2019, and one in March 2020 for Open Data Day. In the first round we had seven applications, and six events that took place. In the second round we had 14 applications for funding, but a number of events had to be cancelled due to COVID-19.
We’ve covered events in Armenia, Cambodia, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria (Ibadan) (Lokoja), Serbia, Sierra Leone and Uganda on our blog.
Community Research
£20,000 of our grant was allocated to conduct research on the barriers and challenges women face in their career path in open data, open government, and civic tech.
In 2020, we hired the consultants at Agency to help us better understand our community. The research was conducted in collaboration with our Governance Council, a group of dedicated volunteers who are eager to drive Open Heroines forward, and clusters of Open Heroines from across the globe.
The research asked the following questions:
- Where are our members from?
- Who is engaging?
- Why do they or don’t they engage?
- How can we support our community better?
We’ll be sharing the results of this research, alongside it’s recommendations and what we’ve learnt about the challenges Open Heroines face as a community next month — watch this space!
