Announcing the Prepare Advisory Group
We are thrilled to announce the Prepare Advisory Group, six deeply experienced feminist leaders who will support the Equality Fund in its inaugural open call designed to support grassroots feminist movements in crisis preparation and response.
The Equality Fund recently launched Prepare to support initiatives that are contextually relevant, collaborative, and sustainable, ensuring that the solutions extend far beyond immediate needs.
Our approach to working alongside an external advisory body is committed to shifting power, to help ensure our funding decisions are grounded in the realities and priorities of feminist movements.
This group of inspiring leaders comprises feminist and queer activists, resource mobilizers, academics, lawyers and community connectors bringing a diversity of perspectives and expertise from movements globally, including Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, and Central America.
As part of the Equality Fund’s continued commitment to participatory grantmaking and the framing of the Prepare call, we used direct outreach to create the Advisory Group – drawing from our deep connections to feminist activists and allies directly across our network with extensive experience working on crisis from a feminist lens crisis response, and from different disciplines in various contexts, from regional to global.
Working alongside the Prepare Advisory Group is a crucial stepping stone to build upon our grantmaking journey that continues to be informed by, and accountable to, feminist movements. We recognize the many power dynamics present in grantmaking, including the Equality Fund being a Global North-based organization. Through our grantmaking, we aim to shift power and resources to women’s rights and feminist organizations to advance their own priorities and agendas.
Crises like climate emergencies, conflicts, war, and gender-based violence are escalating, and anti-gender narratives and actors are on the rise. Feminist activists and organizations need robust support to prepare and build resilience. Since the Equality Fund launched in 2019, we’ve been committed to supporting feminist organizations and funds that are responding to and working in crisis contexts. To date, we have funded approximately $10 million CAD to emerging and evolving responses globally addressing disasters, armed conflict, and war, as well as other crises in fragile contexts.
We invite you to learn more about the members of the Prepare Advisory Group:
Abigail Erikson is the Chief of the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women and a licensed clinical social worker who has dedicated her professional career towards improving the lives of women and girls. Abigail has over 20 years of leadership experience, advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights; promoting gender equality and strengthening efforts to prevent violence against women and girls (VAWG), in diverse development and humanitarian settings.
Abigail previously served as UN Women’s lead technical expert on ending VAWG based in the Fiji Multi Country Office, providing substantive leadership on policy and programme development to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls in the Pacific. She works closely alongside Pacific experts and government partners to advance innovative and effective policies and programmes to promote gender equality and stop violence against women and girls.
Prior to coming to UN Women, Abigail was the Acting Director and Senior Technical Director for the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) Women’s Protection and Empowerment Unit. In this role, Abigail was responsible for providing technical leadership and representation on women and girls’ empowerment, gender equality, and violence against women and girls’ response and prevention programming across 28 humanitarian contexts. Previously, Abigail worked with IRC overseeing a comprehensive program to respond and prevent gender-based violence in the Burmese refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border.
Abigail is global technical advisor on addressing the needs of children affected by sexual violence, and has led global trainings on best practices for caring for children and is the principle author of the joint IRC/UNICEF psychosocial guidelines Caring for Child Survivors of Sexual Abuse in Humanitarian Settings (http://gbvresponders.org/response/caring-child-survivors/).
Prior to her international work, Abigail worked domestically in the United States in rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters, LGBTQ counselling centres, and for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, managing family planning clinics in rural America and leading on state policies to ensure women and girls have access to a full range of reproductive rights and health care.
Amanda Lewis-Adderley is a Caribbean Development professional, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, who currently lives in Nassau, The Bahamas. Although initially intending to study psychology, Amanda ended up studying sociology, political science and Caribbean studies, which started her down her path of Development work focused on the Caribbean region. With a passion for public health, Amanda began working with The Bahamas Red Cross on a local HIV prevention project, and subsequently took up a position with the American Red Cross supporting a regional HIV prevention project where she worked for 3 years. The Caribbean has the highest incidence rate of reported AIDS cases in the Americas, which made this work both timely and impactful.
After working with The Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, specifically focused on regional Health, Disaster, and Resilience Building projects, as well as on emergency/crisis response operations such as the 2019 Hurricane Dorian Response in The Bahamas, Amanda has since transitioned to independent consulting and recently launched her own Development consulting firm – The Pelagic Group www.thepelagicgroup.com (http://www.thepelagicgroup.com/), where she serves as the Co-Founder and Principal Consultant.
With over a decade of experience in the development and emergency/crisis field, Amanda has worked diligently to ensure the integration of gender equality throughout each of the projects or programs she has developed. From ensuring there is balanced gender representation on target populations at the project level, to working carefully to report out on progress against outputs and outcomes with clear gender markers to ensure that the project team can understand the impact of the work on all participants (and adjust accordingly), the promotion of women and girls rights and inclusion has been at the forefront of her work. Most notably, Amanda led the call on the need for a revamped participatory assessment to inform the design of a multi-year regional resilience building project, one which allowed for more accurate and disaggregated data collection, and nuanced analysis for non-traditional communities of interest, such as female sex workers in the interiors of Guyana, to ensure that their needs and strengths are utilized to inform project design.
As a mother of young and very active twins, spare time is limited, but when she does have a moment, Amanda enjoys reading, making collages, going to the beach and being creative.
Kavita Naidu (she/her) is a feminist climate activist and international human rights lawyer from Fiji-Australia specialising in climate justice for grassroots women in all their diversity in Asia and the Pacific. Kavita is recognised as a leading voice on feminist climate demands, feminist participatory action research and brings a keen analysis of the intersectional gendered impacts of the climate crisis through her numerous published writings. Kavita is infamous as a troublemaker who leaves no opportunity to challenge white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. She grew up in Fiji working closely with feminist movements including with the Fiji Womens’ Rights Movement, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Asia Pacific Transgender Network before moving to Thailand to join the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development. Now based in Australia, Kavita works as a consultant on gender and womens’ rights, climate justice, human rights and feminist climate movement building across the region and internationally. She also serves as an Emeritus Council Member for Progressive International and volunteers in climate advisory committees for the Global Just Transitions Project, ESCR-Net and occasionally with the UNFCCC Women & Gender Constituency. Kavita loves masala chai and beach walks with her dog, hosting dinners for her friends and family talking politics and collecting books she never finds the time to read.
Lydia Alpizar Duran is a Costa Rican-Mexican feminist activist and the Co-Executive Director of IM-Defensoras, a unique local-to-regional alliance of women human rights defenders (WHRDs), organizations, multiple social movements and national WHRD networks from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. IM- Defensoras works collaboratively to advance strategies of feminist holistic protection for WHRDs in order to sustain their struggles in favor of human rights in Mesoamerica and towards their security, wellbeing, leadership and autonomy. IM- Defensoras contributes effective responses to the deepening trends of authoritarianism and closing democratic-civic spaces, inequality, organized crime, violence presence, militarization and repression in the Mesoamerican region through its strategies of building collective protection capacity via national WHRDs networks supporting frontline activists; safe-houses; accompaniment of WHRDs at risk; self- care, collective care, wellness and healing from stress and trauma; advocacy from local, regional to international levels; strategic communications and systematic registry of attacks against WHRDs.
Lydia served for a decade as Executive Director of the global feminist organization the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID); she is currently Board Chair of the Urgent Action Fund Latin America (FAU- LAC). She is also a Board member of the Southern feminists’ organization DAWN. Lydia is a graduate from the Human Rights Advocacy Training Program from Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights. She has extensive experience in advocacy and training on women’s human rights, particularly in sexual and reproductive rights, financing for development, feminist resource mobilization, violence against women and feminist holistic protection for WHRDs at risk.
Nadia Ahidjo is a Pan-African feminist storyteller and development professional, based in Cameroon. Her work leverages partnerships, workshop facilitation, and philanthropy to amplify African feminist voices, and resource African feminist and women’s rights movements. She is currently the Director of Partnerships and Philanthropy at the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) and a Senior Advisor for the Black Feminist Fund’s network of Black Feminists in Philanthropy. She’s also a member of FEMWISE, the African Union’s Network of African Women in Conflict Prevention and Mediation.
She frequently provides expertise to non-profit organizations and institutions using philanthropy, advocacy, and program initiatives to drive gender justice. Her experience includes grant and partnership management, program and project design and management, strategy development and implementation, resource mobilization, and writing and communications centering Black and African women and girls in all their diversities.
In her free time, Nadia loves writing feminist reflections, short-story fiction, and children’s stories. Her work has been published by Afreada, African Feminisms, the African Security Review Journal, Bakwa Magazine, Catalyst Press, the Institute for Security Studies, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, the Moongirls Comic, the Nawi – Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective, and Short Story Day Africa. Her children’s books are distributed by the African Books Collective, and her stories are available at www.nadiahidjo.com.
Senda Ben Jebara is a queer feminist originally from Tunisia, now residing in Montreal, QC, Canada. With over a decade of experience in feminist and queer activism, she has made significant contributions to movements in Tunisia and across the SouthWest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, particularly through her involvement with Chouf and Mawjoudin. Transitioning into philanthropy, Senda first served as a Program Officer at the FRIDA Feminist Fund. She then moved to the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, where she currently oversees the Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, and SouthWest Asia portfolio. Her role encompasses grantmaking, capacity strengthening, accompaniment, philanthropic advocacy, and project management. Additionally, Senda is a board member of the Doria Feminist Fund, where she continues to engage with and support feminist movements in the SWANA region. In her free time, Senda loves learning new languages and enjoying karaoke nights with friends.
Learn more about Prepare here
Learn more about our crisis work: Unfolding the Tapestry: Weaving Themes and Strategies of Feminist Crisis Response here
