Our mission is to help women and women’s organizations to play an active role in the process of building gender democracy. We support the active participation of women and women’s organizations in the development of social-just society that guarantees women’s rights, strengthens their role in the community and promotes women at all levels and in all fields.

Our goals are to:

In 1998, our team was offered to head the Network Women’s Program of the Open Society Institute in Russia as we had been recommended by our colleague, Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, who referred to us as a team capable of carrying out the women’s agenda in Russia under this program. In 2001-2002, however, the Open Society Institute started to pursue an exit strategy which envisioned independent operation of all Institutes’ programs after 2002. Therefore, the ISGP Foundation was formally registered only in 2002. Seeking to obtain a status that would permit us to focus on carrying out grant-making and fundraising activities in a free and unencumbered manner, the ISGP Foundation is undergoing a transformation process which began in 2002 till 2004, when we had to finalize and implement our commitments as a former Network Women’s Program, specifically in regards to grant monitoring activities and implementation of operational programs.

In 2004 we started new program “Women’s foundation” to reach the objective which appears to be the most crucial one for the Russian women’s movement today – to leverage more resources to support women’s initiatives aimed at protecting women’s rights. Our studies have shown that in a country where female population exceeds 77 million people there is not a single women’s foundation to accumulate resources for the development of the women’s movement as well to advocacy women's agenda in donor's community. After the Open Society Institute terminated its activities in Russia, the financing of women’s initiatives decreased dramatically to an extent that it is almost non-existent today. Many Russian women’s NGOs were invited and took part in developing a women’s foundation concept, including representatives from large networking and resource women’s NGOs. In the process of working out the concept, the Concept Development Team has studies the Smart Growth Manual developed by the Women’s Funding Network and other experience on creating women’s funds in Eastern Europe such as Ukrainian Women’s Fund etc.