The Girls & Women Strategy team at the UN Foundation engages with the UN and civil society to ensure that gender equality remains a top priority of the UN agenda and that the global ecosystem is positioned to further and protect the gender equality agenda. Our work is anchored in a convening and networked approach that leans on open and honest dialogue rooted in trust. We serve as a reliable bridge within the broader global ecosystem of stakeholders working on gender equality at the UN, including the UN System, Member States, civil society and youth stakeholders and philanthropies. As an intermediary funder, the Girls & Women Strategy team also supports strategic and catalytic funding for civil society and youth through feminist resourcing mechanisms.
The Nest is an invitation-only “network of networks,” focused on connecting diverse groups of women and youth leaders from government, feminist civil society, business, philanthropy, and media, as well as key allies and male champions. It serves as an information and intel-sharing portal for broadly coordinated advocacy and communications, with the goal of bringing influential leadership groups and networks into the global and regional multilateral processes, including those that operate beyond the routine reach of the UN/development community.
The United Nations Foundation convenes the Nest to share updates, information and foster collaboration between members through a range of activities, including regular calls and in-person “Nest Hubs” to build connective tissue between member networks. Nest networks currently have reach in more than 161 countries, with more almost 77,000 individuals (champions, leaders, philanthropists, activists, and CEOs) and NGOs within member networks.
The Girls & Women Strategy team, together with UN Women, Girl Up, and Women Win, organize Bridge-Building Workshops with the goal of creating a space for discussions on fostering more meaningful and effective youth engagement in multilateral gender equality spaces. The workshops center youth activists in dialogue with other key stakeholders and power-holders in the gender equality field (i.e., representatives of civil society, philanthropies, UN agencies, the private sector, and UN member states) with a focus on healing, listening, and authenticity and an emphasis on participatory, feminist trust-building methodologies. A pilot, global Bridge-Building Workshop was held in New York City in September of 2022, followed by an Africa regional workshop co-organized with Urgent Action Fund Africa in Kigali in July of 2023, and a Latin America and Caribbean regional workshop co-organized with La Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora in Mexico City in November 2023. UN Foundation also mobilized funding for each workshop’s youth cohort to design their own fund to sustain youth advocacy in multilateral gender equality spaces.
The United Nations Foundation launched a retrospective five-decade review to document the rich history of the relationship between the United Nations and women’s movements around the world and analyze how these movements have both been influenced by and influenced progress at the UN. A key hypothesis of the research was that the processes set in motion by the international convenings called by the UN fostered broader movement-building that, in turn, strengthened the multilateral system by increasing its relevance and making it more accessible and accountable to diverse stakeholders. A series of three papers that will celebrate this history, provide context for current advocacy in the multilateral space and, most importantly, inform forward-looking advocacy, will be released in time for the 30th anniversary of the landmark Beijing Conference on Women.
