The Loom: Our Feminist Advocacy Lab
A hub for feminist policy expertise, caucus-building, and strategic advocacy across global governance.
A hub for feminist policy expertise, caucus-building, and strategic advocacy across global governance.
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Looking Ahead
The transformations seeded through the Lab are designed to outgrow the structures that first held them. Our aim is not to occupy space indefinitely, but to build conditions where feminist leadership, care, and justice are no longer exceptional, but foundational.
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Donate TodayA loom is a place where many threads are brought together to create something strong, patterned, and enduring. It reflects how feminist change actually happens.
Global systems such as climate governance, environmental policy, and economic decision-making are the warp (vertical stationary threads in a loom). They are rigid, inherited, and often unjust. Feminist advocacy is the weft (crosswise woven threads on a loom). It is intentional, relational, and capable of reshaping the whole structure from within.
A loom is not decorative. It is infrastructure. Historically, looms were sites of women’s skilled labor, central to economic systems and deeply tied to trade, value, and power. Textiles functioned as currency, as political leverage, and as foundations of wealth. To invoke a loom is to name women’s labor as system-making labor. That is an explicitly feminist claim.
Through The Loom, we do not add gender as an afterthought. We reject approaches that treat gender as a checklist or an ornament. Gender equality is architecture.
Through The Loom, we weave feminist analysis into the fabric of global decision-making itself, changing patterns, redistributing tension, and strengthening the whole.
Like a loom, our Feminist Advocacy Lab brings together technical expertise, institutional knowledge, and movement strategy to support feminist and frontline actors to influence global policy processes.
Through the Lab, we provide feminist policy analysis across climate, environment, and economic governance. We support coalitions to build shared agendas, develop negotiation strategies, and intervene effectively in complex institutional spaces. We translate policy into accessible insights and tools, and we offer real-time analytical and strategic support during global negotiations.
This work underpins our long-standing role in caucus-building. We create spaces inside policy processes where feminists and women’s rights advocates can align priorities, map entry points, and act collectively. This work strengthens continuity, builds institutional memory, and ensures movements can build on past gains rather than starting from scratch.
The institutions that shape climate policy, environmental governance, and economic decision-making are highly technical and politically constrained. Feminist and frontline advocates often face steep barriers to influencing these spaces, even when decisions made there have direct consequences for their lives and livelihoods.
Without access to technical expertise, institutional knowledge, and strategic coordination, participation is often symbolic rather than transformative.
Our advocacy exists to change that. It ensures feminist movements are equipped not only with moral authority, but with the policy fluency, strategic clarity, and collective power needed to shape outcomes.
Through our Feminist Advocacy Lab, we engage in sustained, hands-on advocacy across global governance systems.
We conduct technical policy analysis across finance, adaptation, mitigation, just transition, technology, capacity-building, and loss and damage. We develop policy briefs, submissions, talking points, and interventions that support coordinated advocacy.
We provide real-time negotiation support during meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, biodiversity and disaster risk reduction processes, and climate finance institutions. This includes rapid analysis, what’s at stake explainers, and coordinated responses to emerging developments.
We deliver trainings on global governance systems, negotiation dynamics, and thematic policy areas to support advocates, negotiators, and coalition members to engage with confidence.
We engage directly with governance bodies, including long-term roles such as the Global Active Observer to the Green Climate Fund Board, allowing us to monitor decisions, intervene strategically, and share insights with movements and partners.
We have helped translate feminist advocacy into concrete shifts in global policy, institutions, and practice.
This work has contributed to gender equality being embedded in the formal architecture of global environmental governance, including the adoption of Gender Action Plans across all three Rio Conventions and the creation of recognized spaces for women’s rights organizing within them.
It has supported the development and adoption of gender policies and accountability mechanisms across climate finance institutions, helping shift how finance is designed, delivered, and monitored.
It has helped move global climate policy beyond treating women solely as a vulnerable group toward recognizing gender equality as a condition for effective climate action.
It has strengthened feminist influence within global negotiations through sustained caucus-building, coordinated advocacy, and shared technical strategy.
These changes are the result of long-term, collective advocacy. Our advocacy functions as the infrastructure that allows feminist movements to intervene strategically, respond to political moments, and build durable power over time.
We apply feminist analysis and advocacy across interconnected policy areas. These areas reflect where we concentrate our expertise and how we engage with global governance systems. They are not silos. Each informs and reinforces the others, including the economic systems such as tax, trade, and debt that shape environmental outcomes.
Just Transition
Care, energy, and economic justice as sites for transformation.
We work to ensure just transition frameworks move beyond narrow definitions of jobs and decarbonization to address care, energy access, and the economic systems that shape inequality. This includes engaging questions of fiscal policy, debt, trade, and public investment that determine whose lives and livelihoods are protected in transition.
Our work advances care as a foundation of climate and environmental resilience, integrates energy justice into global debates, and supports partners to translate economic and climate research into coordinated advocacy.
Climate Finance
Transforming how resources are governed and distributed.
We advocate for climate finance systems that are accessible, accountable, and aligned with human rights and gender justice. Our work interrogates how finance is raised, governed, and delivered, including the role of debt, conditionality, and macroeconomic constraints that shape countries’ ability to respond to climate impacts.
This includes technical engagement with climate finance institutions, feminist analysis of funding quality and fiscal space, and collective advocacy to shift global finance norms.
Adaptation and Resilience
Grounding climate responses in lived realities.
We shape adaptation policy that reflects local knowledge, care economies, and the differentiated impacts of climate change. Our advocacy supports approaches that strengthen resilience while addressing inequality and rights.
This work links community-led solutions and data to global adaptation frameworks and supports feminist engagement in adaptation negotiations.
Biodiversity
Protecting ecosystems while advancing rights and justice.
We bring feminist and rights-based analysis into biodiversity policy, recognizing the links between land, livelihoods, food systems, care, and environmental protection.
Our work supports gender-responsive biodiversity policies and coalition engagement in global biodiversity processes.
Health and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
Environmental justice depends on bodily autonomy and access to care.
We ensure health and sexual and reproductive health and rights are recognized as integral to climate resilience, adaptation, and disaster response, particularly for women, girls, and marginalized communities.
This includes convening cross-movement coalitions, advancing shared advocacy strategies, and shifting narratives at the climate, health, and rights nexus.
Disaster Risk Reduction
Reducing risk through equity and preparedness.
We integrate gender, care, and rights into disaster preparedness, response, and recovery frameworks, emphasizing community leadership and accountability.
Our work engages global disaster risk reduction processes and aligns climate, development, and humanitarian approaches.
The Feminist Advocacy Lab underpins and connects our initiatives and partnerships.
It informs coalition advocacy strategies and negotiation engagement. It strengthens leadership development efforts such as the Women Delegates Fund. It grounds tools like the Gender Climate Tracker in real policy dynamics. It supports funding mechanisms like the Gender-Just Climate Solutions Scale Fund by linking solutions to systems change.
This is where our work to move power, money, and minds comes together.
