Equality Fund: Activate Report
What does it look like when typical grantmaking models rooted in scarcity and competition are replaced with a non-competitive grantmaking model rooted in feminist values of collaboration, community, and solidarity?
A powerful community of 23 feminist funds working across five continents are the newest recipients of flexible funding from the Equality Fund. The grants are the first from Equality Fund's Activate grantmaking stream, designed to support feminist funds fuelling grassroots change in the Global South and beyond. The Activate report tells the journey of reimagining traditional competitive grantmaking models. Rather than fostering a competitive process, Activate seeks to build a non-competitive grantmaking model that is founded upon feminist values: collaboration, solidarity, and community. This model is called Step Up / Step Back.
For this project, I was tasked with doing the graphic design for the Activate report - a 26-page document with English, French, and Spanish translations. I began the process by developing two distinct design directions for the client to choose from. While both directions are based off of Equality Fund's branding, each direction explores different colour palettes, different use of brand elements, and different layout styles. I designed six pages in each style so that the client could get enough of an idea of how each style would be flowed while not getting too deep into either direction.
Click through the slides below to see my presentation to the Equality Fund team.
The client was happy with both directions and ended up choosing to run with the second option for its interpretation of the Equality Fund "icons", the unique treatment of the Equality Fund portal, and its warm and inviting colour palette.
After determining the desired look, the next step was to flow the rest of the report with one more round of revisions from the Equality Fund team. Because the report was going to be translated into French and Spanish as well, and these languages tend to have a much higher character count than English, I made sure that each page had enough space to accommodate additional text.
Read the full report here.
