This chapter details a case study of a place-based model of funded feminist leadership in one city, in Northern England. Feminists recognise that traditional and historical models of leadership have often excluded women because economic, social and political power has been male dominated (Batliwala, 2021). For the purposes of this chapter feminist leadership is viewed as a transformative space where women can, and do, lead in counter-traditional ways. Using data from a 3-year qualitative longitudinal evaluation, this chapter assesses the contributions and challenges of a collective feminist partnership involving eleven organisations of varied sizes. Partners joined together to secure Big Lottery funding, from the Women and Girls Initiative. Frontline services focused upon project delivery, using specialist workers to support women with complex needs (mental health, sex workers, domestic abuse survivors, newly arrived migrant women, and women who had children removed), awareness raising in community settings via educational sessions, and spaces for women to contribute to strategic decision making via hubs. Intended outcomes were to improve and extended access for vulnerable women and girls the services and support they wanted, when they chose; to create a holistic response to ensure that women’s complex and multiple needs were better supported, and to empower women and girls to support their peers and influence service delivery, development and design across the city. A model of feminist collective, relational leadership was implemented in geographical place to deliver these gender-specific services, create evidence of gendered need, advocate for women and secure further funding. These achievements were based on local city knowledge, historical work by voluntary and community sector organisations (VCSOs), integration with the statutory sector, and feminist commitment to making gender specific improvements.
This chapter discusses the model of leadership, outlines the external successful impacts arising from feminist leadership in place and, using a feminist lens, offers critical analysis of internal power dynamics within the leadership team. Positive impact masked multifaceted internal disagreements and tensions, challenging leadership spaces, and barriers to an equal collective. Attempts were made to resolve these issues with varying degrees of success. Feminist values were applied to collective leadership to support partner organisations smaller in size, with limited access to resources and mechanisms of local power. However, despite commitments from all involved to centre women’s issues in place, the internal leadership dynamics reflected wider societal power relations and hidden hierarchies, underpinned by a neo-liberal competitive funding environment. Our critical analysis shows that internally within the partnership, white, predominantly middle-class women led on everything. This book chapter discusses feminist place-based leadership in practice and its role in promoting justice and equality, considering issues of ethnicity, class, and other characteristics, and concludes by outlining lessons for the Voluntary and Community Sector as well as recommendations for partnership leaders and areas for future research.
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CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)