Helia acts as an enabling infrastructure
We support local movements and organisations by holding risk, managing complexity, and ensuring that funds can move safely across borders.
Our reach is global and we adhere to strict due diligence and international financial compliance standards.
Fiscal sponsorship & incubation
We provide mission support to philanthropic initiatives through grant management, financial and human resources oversight, and administrative services that strengthen capacities and impact.
Helia provides tailored mentorship, capacity development, networking, and operational assistance to enable new initiatives to meet their full potential.
Donor engagement & advising
Building on decades of experience in philanthropy, Helia provides high quality technical support and grantmaking services for funders. This includes advising on strategies, identifying potential grantee partners, and creating funds to move resources.
These funds provide donors with flexibility and efficiency in disbursing resources in accordance with their programmatic, strategic, and geographic priorities. Helia offers a tailored approach for each individual donor in order to help them maximise their intended impact.
Helia can also support funders to create participatory grantmaking programmes, launch initiatives that strengthen movements, and design governance structures that ensure frontline actors are informing grantmaking priorities.
Donor collaboratives
Helia enables individual or institutional funders to pool their resources to amplify their value and reach. This provides more streamlined processes for partners and increases financial sustainability by diversifying the sources of income that comprise the fund. Helia can also advise donors about different governance and operational models for collaborative funds.
Innovative finance for gender justice movements
Helia works to diversify and expand the gender justice funding ecosystem beyond traditional funding models. Recent changes in both the philanthropic and bilateral funding ecosystems have shifted funding away from the gender justice sector, especially strategies focused on systems change and movement building.
Thus, Helia serves as a home for experimentation and innovation in financing these organizations and movements. We seek to engage with new actors and new financing models, to learn from what has worked in other sectors and to build our collective imagination to shine a light on these new pathways towards a brighter collective future of dignity, equality and justice.