Women’s Resource Centre and Black Training and Enterprise Group awarded Comic Relief’s Global Majority Fund

Women’s Resource Centre (WRC) is thrilled to announce that together with the Black Training and Enterprise Group (BTEG), we have been awarded Comic Relief’s Global Majority Fund.

With the Global Majority Fund, WRC and BTEG will support small, grassroots organisations, led by and for Black and minoritised women that provide life-changing and often life-saving services. These specialist organisations are best placed to meet the needs of the women they exist to support. 

Covid-19 has had a devastating and disproportionate effect on Black and minoritised women and the organisations who support them. Public Health England found Black women are: diagnosed at over twice the rate of white women; 5 times more likely to be hospitalised; over 3 times more likely to die in hospital. In addition to existing health inequalities, Black and minoritised women are over-exposed and under-protected from Covid-19. It is specialist, led by and for women’s organisations that continue to protect these women and that work to end the structural inequality and discrimination they face.

Why WRC and BTEG?

WRC is the leading national umbrella organisation for the women’s sector. As a specialist infrastructure organisation, WRC is unique in that it is non-issue based. This means that rather than being focussed on a single issue, we have a birds-eye view on women’s equality, which includes all aspects of women’s rights from personal to structural levels. This places WRC in a distinctive and valuable position to be able to consider and analyse all aspects of women’s lives, from economics, health and policy to VAWG, leadership and movement building.

Through strategic advocacy, campaigning, training, events and by creating and maintaining successful partnerships and collaborations, WRC aims to be a voice to the most marginalised and disadvantaged organisations and is working towards transformational and substantive equality for women.

WRC is a leader in collaborative work in the women’s sector and constantly works to build collaboration and a collective voice with the sector. WRC understand that the women’s sector is not just one size fits all. Rather, that there is a whole range of organisations working within different communities of women, and therefore WRC supports the capacity of those organisations to be independent and their ability to represent some of the very specific needs of the communities of women they work with.

Supporting and facilitating the London VAWG Consortium is a corner-stone of WRC’s work, and epitomises the organisation’s approach to partnerships and collaboration. In its third year, WRC’s hugely popular Feminist Leadership programme continues to bring women from across the sector and across the country together to explore what it means to be a leader. WRC has also created the Network for Black Women Leaders, a space that encourages and empowers women of the African diaspora and women of African descent who aspire to grow and strengthen their individual distinctive leadership style.

For decades, WRC has been coordinating the production of the CEDAW Shadow Report, through consultation with 100s of women’s organisations and other women’s human rights defenders across the UK. The report provides an accurate and true account of the status of women’s rights in the UK and is submitted to the monitoring body (the Committee) to CEDAW. The CEDAW Committee use the Shadow Report for evidence in their examination of the UK Government.

WRC consistently advocate for the specialist women’s sector to be properly funded and in 2019/20, ran the #PayBackTheTamponTax campaign with the core aim of seeing a spending review referring to ring-fenced funding for women’s specialist charities as promised.

Dionne Nelson, Deputy CEO of WRC says:

“We’re thrilled to be able to support the Black and minoritised led-by and for women’s sector (charities and groups predominately working with women) who have been disproportionately impacted by Covid-19, particularly at a time when their services are in greatest demand. Assisting organisations to retain staff is crucial for them to deliver critical services”

BTEG is a national charity based in London, working across the public, private and voluntary sectors to champion national and local action to reduce racial inequalities for ethnic minority young people for the past 25 years. BTEG has considerable experience of developing and delivering grant distribution schemes that are robust, fair and equitable.

WRC’s broad network and deep insight into women’s needs together with BTEG’s grant-making experience with a race equity lens, ideally places us to deliver this work.

Applications for this grant programme will open in June. Please sign up to WRC’s newsletter for updates.

The Global Majority Fund is a partnership between Comic Relief, the National Emergencies Trust, The Clothworkers' Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn and Barclays, dedicated to furthering Covid-19 response work with communities experiencing racial inequality.

10 specialist charities have been awarded a share of a new £2.8million fund which is set to help hundreds of smaller grass roots projects across the UK that provide vital services to diverse communities at the greatest risk of Covid-19.