Apply Now: Mama Cash Solidarity Fund | Up to €30,000
If you lead or work within a women’s fund anywhere in the world, this is news worth stopping for. Applications for the Mama Cash Solidarity Fund are open for the 2026 cycle, and this is one of the most meaningful funding opportunities available specifically to women’s funds operating from a feminist, self-led perspective. With grants ranging from €30,000 to €40,000, and a process that is genuinely designed with peer organizations in mind, the Solidarity Fund stands apart from most other grant programs in the global philanthropic space.
This article covers everything you need to know, including what the Solidarity Fund is, who is eligible to apply, how the application process works, what the money can be used for, and how to put together a strong application. Whether you are already familiar with Mama Cash or are hearing about this opportunity for the first time, you will find everything you need here to decide whether to apply and how to get started.
What Is Mama Cash?
Mama Cash is the world’s first international women’s fund. It was founded in 1983 in the Netherlands and has spent over four decades channeling resources to feminist organizations and movements worldwide. Based in Amsterdam, Mama Cash operates as a grantmaking organization with a mission to support women, girls, and trans and intersex people in their fight for their rights.
What makes Mama Cash distinctive in the global philanthropy landscape is its deep commitment to participatory grantmaking. Rather than relying solely on foundation staff to decide who receives funding, Mama Cash has built systems where the communities it supports are actively involved in making those funding decisions. This model is grounded in the belief that the people closest to the issues are best positioned to identify what support is actually needed.
Each year, Mama Cash makes more than 200 grants to feminist partners across the globe. Its grantmaking portfolio includes multiple funds, each with a specific focus and set of criteria. The Solidarity Fund is one of these, and it is the only one designed exclusively for other women’s funds, not for individual organizations or grassroots groups working directly with communities.
What Is the Mama Cash Solidarity Fund?
The Solidarity Fund was launched by Mama Cash in early 2020. It was created with a clear and specific purpose: to strengthen women’s funds themselves. The fund is a dedicated pot of resources intended to support the organizational health and resilience of women’s funds around the world.
The thinking behind this is simple but important. Women’s funds are a critical part of the infrastructure that makes feminist movements possible. They channel money, offer accompaniment, build networks, and provide flexible support to grassroots groups that would otherwise have very limited access to resources. But women’s funds themselves often operate with tight budgets and limited capacity for their own organizational development. The Solidarity Fund was created to address exactly that gap.
As Mama Cash describes it, the fund was designed by women’s funds, for women’s funds. The participatory structure is built into its DNA. Women’s funds that apply are also invited to participate in reviewing other applications, which means peer organizations are genuinely co-creating the outcomes of the fund, not just receiving funding from it.
The Solidarity Fund is not the largest program in Mama Cash’s portfolio, but it is arguably one of the most thoughtfully designed. It reflects a real commitment to horizontal solidarity and collective strengthening within the feminist funding ecosystem.
Key Details for the 2026 Application Cycle
Here is a quick snapshot of the most important facts about the 2026 Solidarity Fund application cycle:
- Grant amount: €30,000 to €40,000 for one year
- Applications open: April 1, 2026
- Applications close: April 30, 2026
- Who can apply: Autonomous, feminist women’s funds worldwide
- Application method: Email submission of application form and budget form
- Languages accepted: English, Spanish, and French (other languages available upon request)
- Prospera membership required: No
- Regranting permitted: No
The application window is short, running for just one month in April. This is important to keep in mind. If you are leading a women’s fund that may be eligible, do not wait until the last week of April to start putting your application together. The process requires thought, a clearly articulated organizational need, and a realistic budget, all of which take time to prepare well.
To begin your application or check for any updates on the 2026 cycle, visit the Mama Cash Solidarity Fund official page.
Who Is Eligible to Apply?
Eligibility for the Solidarity Fund is clearly defined, and it is narrower than most people expect. This fund is not open to general feminist organizations or grassroots collectives. It is specifically for women’s funds. Here is a breakdown of what that means in practice.
You Must Be a Women’s Fund
A women’s fund, in Mama Cash’s definition, is an organization that both mobilizes resources and provides grants to groups, collectives, and individuals working on the rights of women, girls, trans people, and intersex people. If your organization does advocacy, service delivery, or community organizing but does not make grants to others, you are not a women’s fund in this context and would need to look at a different Mama Cash fund, such as the Resilience Fund.
Your Fund Must Be Self-Led
Mama Cash requires that eligible women’s funds be led by the populations they seek to support. This means that the people directly affected by the issues your fund addresses must be meaningfully involved in the fund’s leadership and decision-making structures. A women’s fund run primarily by donors or outside experts without real participation from the communities it serves would not meet this criterion.
Your Fund Must Be Feminist
Your fund’s primary mission must be to support women’s, girls’, trans and intersex people’s rights. This needs to be the core of what your organization does, not just one component of a broader program portfolio. Your fund must also demonstrate a vision and strategy that actively challenges and seeks to transform unjust power structures. Feminist values are not just a nice-to-have for Mama Cash; they are a baseline requirement.
Your Fund Must Be Autonomous
Mama Cash will only fund women’s funds that are not a program of a larger entity. Your fund must have independent decision-making power over both its grantmaking and its resource mobilization activities. If you are currently embedded within a larger organization but have concrete plans to become autonomous in the short to medium term, you may still be eligible. However, funds that operate under the full governance and control of a parent institution would generally not qualify.
Your Fund Must Be Active in Both Grantmaking and Resource Mobilization
Eligible women’s funds must be actively engaged in two core activities: raising funds (resource mobilization) and distributing grants to groups working on feminist human rights issues. Both of these need to be active parts of your organization’s work, not just stated intentions or historical activities.
Membership in Prospera Is Not Required
Prospera is the International Network of Women’s Funds, and while many eligible women’s funds are members, Mama Cash does not require membership in Prospera as a condition for applying. If your fund meets all the other criteria, you are welcome to apply regardless of whether you are part of that network.
What Can a Solidarity Fund Grant Be Used For?
One of the most practical and important questions any fund manager will have is: what can we actually spend this money on? The Solidarity Fund is intended to support organizational strengthening, and Mama Cash gives applicants significant flexibility in identifying their own needs within that broad framing.
Past recipients have used Solidarity Fund grants for a wide range of organizational development activities. Examples of how the grant has been used include supporting leadership transitions when key staff members are moving on, strengthening internal learning and evaluation systems, providing collective care and wellbeing support for staff who work in difficult and often emotionally demanding environments, developing financial resilience strategies to reduce dependency on a small number of donors, and improving digital security to protect sensitive information about grantees and communities.
This list is not exhaustive. The point is that the fund is designed to be flexible and responsive to the specific organizational needs that women’s funds themselves identify as priorities. Mama Cash is not telling you what your organization needs; it is inviting you to name it honestly and make a case for why that support will strengthen your fund’s capacity to serve feminist movements.
There is one clear restriction worth repeating: the Solidarity Fund cannot be used for regranting. Distributing funds to other groups or organizations is explicitly not permitted under this grant. That activity belongs under Mama Cash’s Resilience Fund, which is a separate program with its own eligibility criteria and application process.
What Activities and Organizations Does Mama Cash Not Support?
Mama Cash is explicit about the kinds of work and organizations it will not fund through the Solidarity Fund. The foundation will not support work that actively seeks to deny the rights of women, girls, trans people, or intersex people. It will not fund anti-sex work activities or campaigns. It will not support individuals, political parties, government agencies, or religious institutions.
These exclusions reflect Mama Cash’s core values and its understanding that feminist work must be genuinely inclusive and rights-affirming. If your organization holds positions that restrict the rights of any subgroup within the women and gender-diverse communities, your application is unlikely to be considered.
How Does the Application Process Work?
The Solidarity Fund application process is designed to be participatory at every stage, which makes it genuinely different from most grant programs. Here is how it works from start to finish.
Step 1: Submit Your Application by Email
During the application window (April 1 to April 30, 2026), eligible women’s funds submit their application directly by email. You will need to complete a grant application form and a budget form, both of which are available on the Mama Cash website in English, Spanish, and French. If you would prefer to write your application in a different language and need translation support, you can reach out to Mama Cash at solidarityfund@mamacash.org before submitting.
Applications can be submitted as a filled-in written form or as a video recording, giving organizations that may find written applications harder to access an alternative format. This is a genuinely thoughtful accommodation that reflects Mama Cash’s awareness of the diversity of organizations it works with globally.
Step 2: Indicate Interest in Participating as a Reviewer
Any women’s fund that is eligible for a Solidarity Fund grant is also eligible to participate in reviewing the applications submitted by other organizations. This is the participatory grantmaking component of the fund in action. If you want to participate as a reviewer, you need to indicate that interest before the end of the application window, which means by April 30, 2026.
This peer review structure is one of the most interesting aspects of the Solidarity Fund. It means that the organizations making decisions about who receives grants are themselves part of the same community of women’s funds. They understand the challenges, the organizational dynamics, and the real meaning of the work in a way that outside reviewers simply cannot.
Step 3: Peer Review of Applications
After the application window closes, participating women’s funds review a set of applications. Each reviewing fund commits to reading at least 10 applications, each of which is approximately two pages long. Reviewers assess the applications based on the Solidarity Fund’s eligibility criteria and funding priorities.
This step is significant because it means your application will be read primarily by your peers in the women’s fund community, not by a panel of foundation staff sitting in an office in Amsterdam. The knowledge and context those reviewers bring to the process is qualitatively different, and that matters for how applications are evaluated.
Step 4: Final Decisions and Notification
Following the peer review, final funding decisions are made based on the assessments provided by the reviewing women’s funds. Successful applicants are notified and grants are disbursed for the one-year grant period. Because the Solidarity Fund is a one-year grant, previous recipients are welcome to apply again in future cycles if they have ongoing or new organizational strengthening needs.
The Broader Mama Cash Grantmaking Ecosystem in 2026
To understand the Solidarity Fund fully, it helps to understand where it sits within Mama Cash’s broader funding portfolio. Mama Cash currently operates several distinct grant programs, and understanding the differences between them will help you identify which one is the right fit for your organization.
The Resilience Fund is Mama Cash’s largest program and provides core, flexible, long-term support to self-led feminist organizations and initiatives working directly with communities. It is not restricted to women’s funds and covers a wide range of feminist movements globally. However, for 2026, Mama Cash announced that the Resilience Fund will not be accepting new applications from organizations that are not already funded. This decision was made to allow the foundation to provide existing grantee-partners with larger, multi-year grants and more intensive accompaniment support during a period of heightened repression and backlash against feminist movements worldwide.
The Spark Fund supports feminist initiatives in the Netherlands and on the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, and Sint Maarten. It is geographically limited and is designed for smaller, informal, or newly formed groups.
The Revolution Fund supports one-off initiatives that respond to specific political opportunities or urgent needs in the gender rights landscape. Grants go up to $10,000 and are typically shorter in duration.
The Radical Love Fund provides one to two-year grants for feminist organizations working on novel or experimental projects, from political work to documentation and storytelling.
The Solidarity Fund, as described throughout this article, is the only one exclusively targeting women’s funds for organizational strengthening purposes. For women’s funds specifically, the Solidarity Fund and the Resilience Fund are the two most relevant programs, and in 2026 the Solidarity Fund is the one actively accepting new applications.
Why the Solidarity Fund Matters Right Now
The global context for feminist work in 2026 is genuinely difficult. Mama Cash has itself acknowledged in its 2026 grantmaking update that feminist organizations worldwide are facing heightened repression, increased state persecution, and growing political backlash against gender rights. In many regions, the space for civil society is shrinking, funding is drying up, and organizations that were already running lean are being stretched further.
In this environment, the organizational resilience of women’s funds is not just an internal management concern. It is a survival issue with direct consequences for the feminist movements those funds support. A women’s fund that is struggling through a leadership transition, dealing with insecure digital infrastructure, or unable to sustain its staff through the emotional weight of the work cannot effectively serve the activists and communities depending on it.
The Solidarity Fund exists precisely to address these kinds of organizational vulnerabilities before they become crises. By investing in the institutional strength of women’s funds, Mama Cash is investing in the durability of the entire feminist funding infrastructure. That is why this fund matters, and why applying for it, if you are eligible, is worth the effort.
Tips for Writing a Strong Solidarity Fund Application
The application itself is relatively short, approximately two pages of written content plus a budget. But a short format does not mean an easy one. Here is how to make the most of the space you have.
Be Specific About Your Organizational Need
The Solidarity Fund is not looking for a general statement about how important feminist funding is. It wants to understand a specific organizational challenge or gap that your women’s fund is facing right now. Name it clearly. What is the problem or opportunity? Why does it matter for your fund’s ability to do its work? What would change if you had the resources to address it?
Connect the Organizational Need to Your Fund’s Feminist Mission
Your application will be stronger if you explain how addressing this organizational need directly serves your fund’s ability to advance feminist change. For example, if you are asking for support for a leadership transition, explain how ensuring a smooth handover will maintain your fund’s credibility and relationships with grantee-partners. If you are asking for digital security support, explain what risks your grantees face if your systems are compromised. Make the connection between organizational health and feminist impact explicit.
Be Honest About Constraints and Challenges
Mama Cash operates from a place of radical trust. The peer reviewers reading your application are women’s fund leaders themselves who understand what running a small feminist fund actually looks like. You do not need to present a polished, everything-is-fine version of your organization. Honest applications that acknowledge real challenges alongside real plans to address them will generally land better than applications that oversell organizational strength.
Prepare a Realistic Budget
The budget form is a required part of the application. Make sure your budget is realistic and clearly connected to the activities you are describing. Do not pad the budget with items that are not directly related to the organizational strengthening work you have outlined. The grant range is €30,000 to €40,000, and reviewers will be looking to see that you have thought carefully about how the money will be used and can account for it responsibly.
Submit Early If Possible
Even though the deadline is April 30, there is no advantage to waiting. Submitting early gives you time to address any technical issues with the submission process and allows you to reach out to Mama Cash if you have questions about eligibility or the application format. Email solidarityfund@mamacash.org if you need clarification before submitting.
Consider Participating as a Reviewer
Even if you are uncertain whether your application will be successful, consider indicating your interest in participating as a peer reviewer. Reviewing other applications is not only a meaningful contribution to the feminist funding ecosystem; it also deepens your understanding of how the fund operates and what kinds of applications are compelling. You will be a better applicant in future cycles because of that exposure.
How to Apply for the Mama Cash Solidarity Fund
The application process is entirely online and email-based. To access the application form and budget form, and to get the most up-to-date information on the 2026 cycle, go directly to the Mama Cash Solidarity Fund page on the official Mama Cash website.
From that page you can download the application form and budget form in your preferred language (English, Spanish, or French), review the full eligibility criteria, read the frequently asked questions, and find the submission email address for your completed application.
If you have specific questions about whether your women’s fund is eligible, or if you need support submitting in a language other than the three listed, reach out directly to the Solidarity Fund team at solidarityfund@mamacash.org. Mama Cash has consistently shown a willingness to engage with potential applicants who need clarification, and that openness is worth taking advantage of.
You can also explore Mama Cash’s full range of funding opportunities by visiting the Mama Cash Apply for a Grant page, which lists all active funds and their current status.
A Note on Mama Cash’s 2026 Grantmaking Context
It is worth being clear about one important development in Mama Cash’s 2026 grantmaking landscape. As announced in February 2026, the Resilience Fund is not accepting new applications from organizations that are not already funded this year. This is a significant change that affects many feminist organizations globally who may have been planning to apply through that program.
The good news is that the Solidarity Fund and Spark Fund are both open for new applications in 2026, as confirmed in Mama Cash’s official grantmaking update. For women’s funds specifically, the Solidarity Fund represents one of the clearest and most accessible paths to new funding from Mama Cash this year. If your organization qualifies, this is the window to pursue.
Mama Cash has been transparent about the reasoning behind pausing the Resilience Fund’s new application window, citing a need to direct more substantial, multi-year support to existing partners during a period of intensified challenges for feminist movements. This reflects a considered strategic choice rather than a reduction in overall commitment, and the foundation has reaffirmed its dedication to supporting self-led feminist organizations through all of its active programs.
Final Thoughts
The Mama Cash Solidarity Fund is a rare and genuinely valuable resource for women’s funds that are doing the hard, important work of sustaining feminist movements at the grassroots level. The grants are not enormous, but €30,000 to €40,000 directed at a specific organizational need can make a real and lasting difference in the capacity of a women’s fund to serve its community.
What makes this fund worth your time is not just the money. It is the model. The participatory peer review structure, the flexibility in how funds can be used, the openness to multiple languages and formats, and the genuine respect for organizational self-determination all add up to a funding experience that is meaningfully different from most grant programs out there.
If your women’s fund is self-led, feminist, autonomous, and actively engaged in both grantmaking and resource mobilization, the April 2026 application window is your opportunity. Start preparing now, be specific about your organizational needs, and take full advantage of the peer review structure by considering participation as a reviewer alongside your own application.
To apply or learn more, visit the official Mama Cash Solidarity Fund page and download the application materials. The window closes April 30, 2026, and early submission is always the better path.
