Case study of a successful application to the Anchor Programme

It is important that applicants to the Anchor Programme can show that their work meets certain criteria. This case study shows how an organisation met some of the different criteria. For further explanations of key words (marked in bold in the text below) please see our glossary.

In the first round of the Anchor Programme, City Bridge Foundation funded an organisation called End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW). 

The organisation met the programme’s second-tier criteria as it is a membership organisation supporting 155 specialist women’s support services, researchers and human rights and social justice organisations operating in the Violence Against Women and Girls sector.

As a second-tier organisation, EVAW drives social change through policy influence and shaping, ensuring that the Violence Against Women and Girls sector’s experiences and asks reach key decision makers. It also researches and shares the views and opinions of its members through its communications and published reports to influence policy makers.

The organisation could demonstrate it was user-led as it is 100% women-led, with board members elected by and from its membership.

In terms of intersectionality, the organisation was able to demonstrate a deep understanding of the impact of overlapping structural inequalities and was able to highlight that women’s and girls’ experience of inequality are not single-issues or homogenous. EVAW’s work is based on the lived experience and practice-based knowledge of its membership, with member organisations providing specialist support services for women experiencing intersecting inequalities, as well as members doing survivor-centred academic and legal work.

The organisation could demonstrate that equity is embedded in the way it works as its governance and organisational practices are rooted in demonstrable anti-racism and feminist leadership principles. EVAW centres the needs of minoritised and marginalised women in its campaigns and policy solutions.

In terms of systems change work, the organisation’s vision is to build a united movement to collectively disrupt oppressive structures and influence the political, economic and social changes necessary to end violence against women and girls. The organisation does this by ensuring law, policy and practice reflect the complexity of women’s lived realities.

It aims to address systemic discrimination by shifting social norms, by changing attitudes towards women, and by holding those in power accountable for advancing policy and law change with an intersectional, survivor-led approach.

The organisation’s aim is for society to experience a shift away from the normalisation and minimisation of violence against women and girls and victim-blaming, to perpetrator accountability and prevention, therefore enabling women and girls to live lives freely without violence and the threat of it.