Executive Summary
This case study documents progress through July 2025 in an ongoing experiment exploring Web3 technologies for feminist grant-making. Equality Fund partnered with Women Win and SuperBenefit through the Reimagining Power Project to test whether blockchain could reduce transaction costs and increase accessibility for organizations in politically restricted contexts.
The discovery phase examined five potential Web3 applications before narrowing to grant disbursement infrastructure. The team designed a methodology to compare traditional banking with blockchain solutions, planning small-scale experiments with real money. However, initial findings challenged core assumptions. Transaction costs between Equality Fund and Women Win proved minimal, contradicting the hypothesis that fees were a primary barrier. The real friction emerged at the last mile of delivery, where local banking systems, political restrictions, and infrastructure limitations created obstacles.
The experiment revealed that innovation work cannot succeed as an add-on to operational responsibilities. All participating staff balanced experimental activities with full-time operational duties, leading to starts and stops that limited progress. Direct engagement with grant recipients remained minimal due to safety and regulatory constraints. While technical implementation was limited, the experiment generated valuable insights about prerequisites for blockchain adoption, including the need for hyper-local infrastructure understanding and dedicated innovation resources. The work continues beyond this documentation period, building on these foundational learnings.
Context
Equality Fund, a Canadian women’s fund that grew from 20 million in grant-making over three years, operates across 85 countries supporting women’s organizations. Their Prepare funding stream manages CAD 7 million, selecting 6-7 grants from approximately 1,000 applications annually.
The organization faced systemic challenges in moving funds internationally. Transaction fees, currency conversions, and intermediary charges created financial barriers. In some jurisdictions, banking systems obstructed funding flows to human rights organizations. Gender justice activists faced closing civic space globally, with financial systems often excluding or scrutinizing organizations working on sensitive issues. Additionally, participatory approaches that worked at smaller scale showed strain at larger scales, pointing to the need for new patterns of participatory governance.
In July 2023, Sue Snider presented a vision based on the DisCo pattern (Distributed Cooperative Organization) encompassing resource exchange, governance compensation, and grant distribution. When the Reimagining Power Project opportunity emerged in October 2024, it created a pathway to explore Web3 solutions. The partnership brought together Equality Fund’s grant-making expertise, Women Win’s operational knowledge as fiscal sponsor, and SuperBenefit’s Web3 technical capabilities.
Ontario Trillium Foundation provided funding through July 2025. The experiment aimed to test whether blockchain could reduce financial barriers and increase accessibility in restricted contexts. Initial constraints included limited Web3 expertise across partner organizations, regulatory uncertainties for charitable organizations using cryptocurrency, and the need to maintain normal operations while experimenting. The team recognized early that any solution would need to work within existing operational realities rather than requiring wholesale system replacement.
Approach
The discovery phase evaluated five potential Web3 applications before narrowing to two specific barriers: financial costs and accessibility challenges. This prioritization reflected recognition that taking an approach of creating small focused experiments would generate more actionable insights, as an alternative to engaging in broad organizational-wide transformation attempts.
Three key patterns and approaches guided the experiment design:
Peer to peer payments aimed to test whether blockchain-based transfers could reduce transaction fees and provide censorship resistance. The approach would compare costs, settlement times, and accessibility between traditional banking and blockchain infrastructure while maintaining compliance standards. The team recognized early that privacy payments patterns would be essential for protecting recipient identities in sensitive contexts.
Participatory governance reflected Equality Fund’s commitment to involving stakeholders in decision-making processes. The experiment design sought to include grant recipients’ perspectives while navigating safety constraints and fiduciary responsibilities that limited direct engagement.
Impact Attestations would enable transparent tracking of grant outcomes while protecting sensitive information about recipients and their work. This pattern aligned with the broader need for accountability in international development funding.
The experiment operated entirely through part-time staff contributions. Sue Snider (Equality Fund), Women Win’s 6-7 person Finance team, and SuperBenefit advisors balanced experimental work with full operational responsibilities. No dedicated innovation team existed. While OTF funding supported coordination, it couldn’t contribute funds for experiments in crypto currency distribution or fund dedicated technical development. The partnership combined complementary expertise, though direct input from grant recipients remained difficult due to safety constraints - a challenge for implementing true participatory governance.
The team developed a comparative testing methodology to ensure learning value even with limited implementation. Historical transaction data would establish baselines, while controlled Web3 transactions would generate comparative data using approximately $100 in actual funds. Real money testing would reveal regulatory hurdles, user experience challenges, and operational integration requirements that theoretical testing would miss.
What Happened
Discovery Phase (October 2024 - January 2025)
The systematic discovery process examined five potential Web3 applications, generating a Discovery report. The team found that many possibilities required years of additional development, regulatory barriers limited charity participation, and partner readiness varied significantly. After analysis, they concluded: “while many identified opportunities require further technological maturation, two patterns emerged as immediately viable for experimentation.” The focus narrowed to grant disbursement through peer to peer payments, specifically addressing transaction costs and accessibility barriers.
Planning Phase (February - May 2025)
The March 2025 partner meeting established key parameters: focus solely on grant-making flows, use real money (~30 million annually dealt with bounced payments, varying bank requirements, and cumbersome internal processes.
A critical insight emerged about organizational dynamics: “Director Grantmaking Operations is the leverage point in this experiment not the Finance team.” This identified who could actually drive implementation rather than just provide input. The team also recognized that innovation work competed with daily operational demands, as no one had dedicated time for experimentation. This highlighted the importance of the DisCo pattern’s emphasis on dedicated resources for collective innovation.
Implementation Attempt (May - July 2025)
The July 2025 reflection meeting revealed why full implementation hadn’t occurred. Sue Snider noted: “personally I heard a lot about how expensive it is to move money around world, surprise… was not surprising that EF/WW move money without fees.” The assumed problem—high transaction costs between major organizations—didn’t exist. The real friction occurred in last-mile delivery to recipients, where privacy payments patterns would be most valuable.
The team discovered that country-level analysis was insufficient: “More hyper local context is really important, went in assuming that country level was enough info… needs to go to city or community.” While some Ukrainian cities had sophisticated crypto infrastructure, other locations lacked basic banking reliability.
Organizational constraints proved decisive. Team changes disrupted continuity. Work kept “starting and stopping” as operational priorities took precedence. The reflection that they “would have done this as a Design Sprint from WW and EF and Dalan Fund and grant recipients in one week” captured a key learning: innovation requires concentrated effort, not distributed partial attention. This insight reinforced the need for participatory governance approaches that could maintain momentum despite organizational changes.
Insights & Implications
Key Discoveries
The experiment’s quantitative outcomes diverged from targets but provided valuable data:
| Metric | Target | Achieved | Learning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web3 transactions | Test implementation | 0 completed | Prerequisites not met |
| Scope | 5 areas | 2 areas | Focus proved essential |
| Timeline | 3 months | 9+ months | Innovation requires patience |
| Direct recipient engagement | Multiple partners | Limited due to safety | Need new engagement models |
More significant were the conceptual shifts. The assumption that transaction costs were the primary barrier proved incorrect for major organizational transfers. The real challenges emerged at the last mile—political restrictions, local banking limitations, and infrastructure gaps. This finding challenges the blockchain sector’s emphasis on cost reduction as the primary value proposition for peer to peer payments.
The experiment revealed that context varies dramatically at hyper-local levels. Infrastructure differences exist not just between countries but between cities and neighborhoods. Some Ukrainian cities have established crypto exchanges and local expertise, while nearby locations lack basic banking reliability. This granular variation was invisible in country-level analysis and highlighted the importance of privacy payments patterns for protecting vulnerable recipients.
Partnership complexity grew geometrically with each organization involved. Coordinating across Equality Fund, Women Win, and SuperBenefit created coordination friction that slowed progress. Different risk tolerances, urgency levels, and organizational priorities required frequent negotiation. The absence of dedicated innovation resources meant experimental work consistently lost priority to operational demands. This experience validated the DisCo pattern’s emphasis on creating dedicated structures for collective work.
Pattern Performance
The patterns guiding the experiment generated valuable insights despite limited technical implementation:
Peer to peer payments planning revealed that existing banking relationships between Equality Fund and Women Win already minimized costs. The opportunity lay in last-mile delivery, but this required extensive infrastructure—privacy technologies, local exchanges, regulatory compliance—that didn’t exist in most contexts.
Privacy payments emerged as essential for protecting recipient identities in politically sensitive contexts. The planning process exposed how traditional financial systems create data trails that can endanger activists, reinforcing the need for privacy-preserving alternatives.
Participatory governance faced practical barriers in implementation. Privacy concerns limited direct engagement with recipients, yet their input proved essential for understanding real barriers. The experiment highlighted the tension between meaningful participation and operational safety.
Impact Attestations remained conceptually important but practically challenging. The need to track grant outcomes while protecting sensitive information about recipients’ work created design challenges that the limited experiment couldn’t fully address.
The comparative testing methodology validated its premise through planning alone. The process exposed regulatory complexities and safety considerations that sandbox testing would have missed, demonstrating the value of real-world experimentation even at small scale.
Implications for Future Work
The experiment suggests several considerations for organizations exploring similar innovations:
Organizations benefit from assessing whether they have dedicated innovation resources rather than expecting additional duties from operational staff. The experiment showed that organizational champions need authority to implement changes, not just advocate for them. Intensive, focused efforts like Design Sprints may generate better results than extended partial engagement. The DisCo pattern offers one model for structuring such dedicated innovation capacity.
For international innovations, hyper-local infrastructure mapping proves more valuable than regional analysis. Political and regulatory environments change rapidly. Informal systems often matter more than official infrastructure. Understanding these variations requires local partners and sustained engagement through participatory governance approaches.
The experiment’s value lay in discovering prerequisites rather than implementing solutions. This approach—using limited experiments to reveal requirements—offers a risk-managed path for innovation in uncertain domains. Rather than assuming technology solves systemic challenges, organizations might first understand what makes solutions viable in specific contexts.
Next Steps
This progress report captures learnings through July 2025, with the experiment continuing beyond the OTF grant period. The team plans to meet with Dalan Fund before month end to gather recipient perspectives, even without completed technical testing. Sue Snider and Nicole Matuska will use structured interviews to understand barriers at the partner level, implementing participatory governance principles within safety constraints.
The core discovery—that transaction costs aren’t the primary barrier—redirects future efforts toward addressing last-mile delivery challenges through privacy payments patterns and building organizational innovation capacity through DisCo pattern principles. The partnership will explore how to create dedicated innovation resources and test concentrated approaches like Design Sprints.
Several questions guide continued exploration: What percentage of Equality Fund’s portfolio faces significant transaction barriers requiring peer to peer payments solutions? How do specific political environments affect crypto accessibility and the need for privacy payments? What organizational structures best support financial innovation in the nonprofit sector while maintaining participatory governance?
The experiment didn’t move money via blockchain, but it moved understanding forward. By revealing that assumed problems didn’t exist while identifying real barriers, the work prevents larger failures and points toward productive paths. The learnings about hyper-local context, innovation resource requirements, and prerequisite discovery provide foundation for future phases that might implement Impact Attestations and other patterns.
The team invites others exploring Web3 for social benefit to build on these insights. Sometimes the most valuable experiments are those that reveal what we need to build before arriving at our intended destination.
This progress report documents learnings through July 2025 in an ongoing experiment exploring decentralized coordination patterns for social benefit. The work continues beyond this documentation period. We invite readers to adapt these insights for their own contexts and share their experiences to further collective learning.