Magdalena Pocheć

Many people, especially from marginalized communities, remain excluded from changemaking due to a lack of networks, resources, and opportunities. To redress these deficiencies, Magda implemented a participatory funding mechanism as a key to unlock community solidarity and individual agency, from which new understanding, changemaking tools and initiatives are nurtured and deployed. This effort is reaching new populations who haven’t been involved in changemaking before, aiding them to develop and shape their changemaking agency. 

Magda is catalyzing a changemaking ethos and practice in communities overlooked by traditional public and private philanthropic and other social institutions. Through the participatory grantmaking process of FemFund, which targets marginalized communities, she is upending traditional philanthropic practices, turning grant seekers into co-creators and decision-makers, and fostering solidarity among women of all ages across multiple social divides, who gain agency and voice in solving problems confronting their communities and geographies. Magda and FemFund build spaces where diverse individuals—from rural housewives to queer youth—collaborate, learn from each other, and expand their understanding of collective challenges. Instead of focusing solely on their individual projects, participants are invited into a broader community of mutual support, ultimately shifting how they approach changemaking itself and building community.  

FemFund’s model challenges traditional grantmaking frameworks, which often rely on rigid, top-down processes that prioritize the funder’s expectations over the needs of communities. By extending decision-making into the hands of applicants, Magda transforms a static philanthropic procedure into an empowering, democratic tool rather than a bureaucratic exercise. Participatory grantmaking is an approach that actively involves communities in the decision-making process about where and how funds are allocated, transforming applicants into co-creators and decision-makers. This model not only empowers marginalized communities by giving them a voice and agency but also fosters community building and solidarity by encouraging collaboration and mutual support among diverse groups. By aligning funding decisions with the actual needs and priorities of the communities, participatory grantmaking strengthens social bonds and creates a more inclusive and resilient ecosystem for sustainable change. 

Magda’s approach is the first successful participatory model in Poland. Its targeted outreach to communities most often excluded, such as marginalized rural communities and informal groups, is one of its defining features. These individuals and groups become active agents in resource allocation based on the principle of solidarity. By not focusing on narrow topics or subsets of grantee partners, FemFund’s allows it to break down societal barriers by connecting seemingly disparate groups, fostering unexpected solidarity and mutual reinforcement. These connections also challenge social polarization, proving that rural housewives and refugees can find common ground through the shared drive to create societal change. 

What elevates Magda’s work even further is its adaptability. The principles driving FemFund—solidarity, inclusivity, and collaboration—are universal, making the model applicable to various contexts. The adaptability of its processes and procedures are also allowing it to spread its impact, as emerging funds in Poland and beyond have already replicated its success, signaling that this specific form of participatory philanthropy holds transformative potential for changemakers—regardless of geography: Poland, Turkey, UK, Hungary or identity: refugees, queer, women. 

Despite tremendous progress in citizen engagement in Poland’s post-Communist history, over 60% of Poles say that "people like them" don’t have any influence on "how things are in their country" (CBOS, 2021). This sense of marginalization and neglect leaves many groups and individuals distanced from the practice of changemaking. These attitudes are particularly prevalent outside of major urban centers, where there is a deficit of changemaking role models offering inspiration, guidance and collaboration, as well as formal and informal institutions and networks that assist aspiring citizens to initiate and sustain meaningful change within their communities. Magda and FemFund seek to redress these deficits, recognizing both the diversity and commonality of groups as seemingly disparate as elderly women, youth, caregivers, sex workers, queer communities, rural women’s clubs (known as “House Wife’s Circles”), members of the deaf community, ex-nuns, people with physical and mental disabilities, and neurodiverse people.  

The challenges these groups, and others like them face are compounded by insufficient state support, as newly formed organizations and informal groups are excluded from grant opportunities or burdened by bureaucratic constraints that hinder their ability to address genuine community needs. The civil society infrastructure that does exist in areas outside of major urban centers is generally weaker, with organizations possessing smaller budgets, limited access to resources, and fewer development opportunities compared to their urban counterparts.  

This lack of robust civic structures leaves nascent and aspiring changemakers struggling to form coalitions and amplify their efforts, often forcing them to work in silos. Consequently, changemaking in rural areas and among marginalized communities becomes even more challenging, with many individuals feeling isolated, burned out, or unable to achieve their goals.  

Moreover, the grant-giving system in Poland presents significant systemic challenges for changemakers due to severely limited funding and restrictive grant structures. The average nonprofit budget is just 26,000 PLN (6,300 USD), with 17% of organizations operating on less than 1,000 PLN ($220 USD), leaving many initiatives underfunded or unable to function. Funding mechanisms primarily rely on government and EU sources, prioritizing pre-defined objectives and forcing changemakers to align their missions with funder expectations rather than responding to real and urgent community needs. Strict limitations on administrative costs and bureaucratic grant application processes create additional barriers for smaller organizations, making it difficult to secure and effectively utilize funding.  

What’s more, recent years have shown that, depending on the political winds, certain initiatives can be cut off from public funding. This rigid and centralized system often leads to financial instability, short-term planning, and a troubling loss of autonomy for changemakers, stifling their capacity to foster sustainable and meaningful social change. 

Without an eco-system that offers more robust support, all these barriers will continue to stifle the potential for transformative impact in the communities that need it most. In these resource-limited environments, changemakers are often focused intensely on their specific cause, sometimes leading to a narrowed perspective and lack of synergies with related efforts. Their work remains isolated, reducing impact, fragmenting efforts, and marginalizing the issue. By forming alliances, changemakers can frame problems as collective concerns, amplify their efforts, and drive broader, more inclusive change.

Magda and FemFund employ a solidarity-driven strategy that emphasizes peer-to-peer learning, collaboration, and mutual support, addressing many of the systemic barriers changemakers face in under-resourced and underserved communities. The design of its participatory grant-giving model and the funds that Magda collects globally and from individual Polish micro-donors make it a powerful community-building tool, increasing the social capital in communities they serve by ensuring that human, information, and financial resources are accessible to all, whether formal organizations or informal groups, regardless of size, location, or financial capacity. Most participants who join the FemFund process become connected to a multi-year effort and network that provides mutually beneficial support relationships. Over 700 groups have participated in FemFund’s initiatives, many receiving financial support and all accessing networks, building agency, and gaining valuable decision-making experience. 337 groups across 115 locations have received 5,000,000 PLN in funding and, more importantly, a model of collaboration that turns isolation into collective strength. 

Minigrants, Empowerment Grants and Emergency Fund, are FemFund’s three complementary grant programs which are central to its approach. Through its flagship MiniGrants program, FemFund integrates applicants in a collective decision-making process after an initial review. After FemFund’s core team screens all applications to ensure a common level of quality, individual groups of applicants discuss and rank subsets of 99 proposals. Nearly a dozen of these groups work in parallel, reviewing proposals other than their own, to evaluate them in a process that will determine which will receive funding. This unique approach fosters community-building on the one hand and stimulates a peer learning process through information sharing, of both issues confronting their communities and strategies and tactics for addressing them, as applicants from diverse identities, geographies, and lived experiences assess applications. This model applies to 80% of the funding, while the remaining 20% is decided by representation of grantee partners from previous editions who proved to play a pivotal role in the community, to ensure that those on the outskirts, or those working on controversial topics, such as sex workers, have a fair chance. To date, over 700 groups of grantees have gone through this process, for most of whom it has an educational opportunity, reframing perceptions and laying the groundwork for alliances—such as elderly women learning about queer communities or marginalized groups sharing insights on pressing societal challenges. 

Beyond financial aid, this process and the follow-on engagement with grant applicants and recipients help nurture the habit and systems to support changemaking by creating spaces for inspiration, empathy, idea exchange, and collaboration. For example, participants have expanded their understanding of challenges facing others from outside their immediate communities, as well as unexpected commonalities among them, and have been inspired to support other groups, such as stepping down to make space for those, whose need for resources seems more dire. After the initial decision-making process, FemFund sponsors and convenes initiatives for evaluation and reporting through in-person meetings with all grantees from a given year and open discussions. Through these, FemFund fosters a horizontal culture of mutual learning instead of top-down accountability. This process of in-person reporting meetings builds trust and drives deeper engagement from grantee partners as active contributors to the movement. FemFund’s model ensures financial support and the capacity for changemakers to grow their networks, explore new perspectives, and amplify their impact in their communities.  

FemFund’s approach simultaneously addresses a major barrier to changemaking in under-served areas, the financial precarity of local initiatives. With more than 80% of applicants operating on annual budgets under 10,000 PLN ($2,400 USD), its grantees often rely on barter systems or personal resources for activism. MiniGrants prioritize grassroots efforts (which most of Poland’s private philanthropies and state support have traditionally overlooked), offering crucial first-stage financial assistance to groups that are otherwise excluded from traditional grant mechanisms. One-time MiniGrants, for 70% of grantees, are renewed for three years.  

In addition, high-impact organizations with strong drive can also benefit from larger Enpowerment Grants—institutional grants that support their core, yet often underfunded activities. The Pink Box initiative started as an informal group of three whose trajectory has tapped into the whole range of FemFund’s financial support and community benefits. They have raised awareness about menstrual poverty and created over 10K boxes with free hygiene products throughout Poland in schools, clerk offices, and courts, and are currently piloting a program against menstrual poverty with the Ministry of Education. Through FemFund's participatory grantmaking process, the Pink Box initiative, initially an informal group, received increasing funding that reflected growing trust and empowered them as co-creators and decision-makers, fostering community solidarity and effectively combating menstrual poverty across Poland. 



The third funding program is the Emergency Fund, which provides aid for urgent crises, where decisions are made and money is transferred as quickly as within 72 hours. It’s based on the recognition that there are cases where timing, not big sums of money, is essential. For example, in the case of a grant for legal and psychological counseling for flood victims in the region or the purchase of security systems for the property near the Polish-Belarus border where the collective supporting refugees was stationed and attacked. Together, these programs create a financial and human infrastructure that values care, trust, and adaptability over rigid control and are designed to be catalytic tools for community building for local changemakers. FemFund is now recognized as a resource about local changemaking in Poland’s broader eco-system, as they collect and publish insights and valuable information from grantees and applicants to see the sector's development and continuously map needs and solutions. 

FemFund’s reputation for pioneering participatory grantmaking strategies that foster eco-systems of changemaking across under-resourced and underserved communities has grown substantially. They have advised and assisted two newly formed organizations in Poland to adopt the model for supporting vulnerable groups, including the For a Change Fund supporting the LGBTQ+ community and the Refugee Fund. Magda and FemFund’s support ranges from strategic advice to sharing their document templates and legal procedures to give money to informal groups, as well as new language that they use to make grant making less scary to encourage individuals and groups who may be wary of grant structures to apply and other tips to increase diversity. By documenting its work and sharing its participatory solidarity models, the organization has supported the creation of similar initiatives across several countries, including Hungary, Turkey, and Italy.  

FemFund’s influence can also be seen in its impact on traditional grant makers and corporate donors like the Batory Foundation (the Polish chapter of Open Society Foundation) that has adopted solidarity-driven practices inspired by FemFund’s framework. Moreover, as an active member of the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds, FemFund advocates globally for transforming philanthropy, integrating new models that successfully adopt inclusive practices and a feminist vision that empowers marginalized voices in international policymaking. Magda has already co-created other participatory models for FundAction, Fenomenal Funds and the Solidarity Fund at MamaCash. 

Looking ahead, FemFund plans to deepen its mission of spreading its solidarity-based philanthropy. FemFund aims to strengthen community-based changemaking at a local and global level by providing ongoing resources and guidance to newly formed organizations. Internally, it is undertaking a significant effort to expand its share of funds sourced from individual donors, aiming to create a self-sustaining movement fund that reflects the community's participation and values. Magda and FemFund envision a future where solidarity-based grantmaking is not the exception but the norm—centering on marginalized voices and transferring decision-making power, and through this, enabling changemakers at the grassroots to address the diversity of challenges in their communities. To achieve this, Magda also strives to leverage international instruments, as the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, in its 30th anniversary, to strengthen and support policymakers; that is why Magda cooperates closely and advocates with decision-makers such as the Office of the Minister for Equality, ODHIR and the UN.

Magda was born in Baghdad in 1983 to parents who lived across cultures. She grew up with a complex identity and a natural affinity for understanding marginalized perspectives. Her childhood in Poland was formative—opting out of Catholic religion lessons at school (which was not the norm in her environment). She witnessed injustice in the history of her family and close environment, including classmates with Down syndrome and girls being socialized to fit certain gender roles, both of which left her deeply attuned to inequality. These early experiences sparked in her a lifelong drive to challenge systemic injustices and act together with those who are affected the most.  

Her academic path in Cross-Cultural and Gender Psychology allowed Magda to focus on systemic injustices. As a student, she co-authored an alternative report on Poland’s implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, presenting it at the United Nations in New York. This pivotal experience exposed her to the power of advocacy, solidifying her commitment to feminist activism. Despite plans to pursue a doctorate, Magda chose action over theory, joining NGOs like the Federation for Women and Family Planning, ASTRA Network and KARAT Coalition. However, restrictive donor requirements and rigid funding structures disillusioned her, as organizations she worked with were forced to align to external priorities rather than real community needs. 

Frustrated by the sector’s rigidity, Magda envisioned a new, trust-based approach to philanthropy. This vision crystallized during her work with FRIDA: The Young Feminist Fund, where she saw how solidarity-driven funding could transform changemaking. In 2018, Magda invited two co-founders (Justyna Frydrych and Marta Rawłuszko), and together, they launched FemFund, a participatory fund empowering grassroots movements, prioritizing collaboration and community-building over hierarchies. 

Today, Magda continues to expand FemFund’s impact, advocating for solidarity-based grantmaking globally and fostering ecosystems that empower changemakers to create lasting, inclusive social change.