EMpower’s Support for Girls’ Inclusion and Collective Impact in Türkiye: Suna’s Daughters

EMpower’s Shifting the Narrative series is grounded in a few key principles—two of which are highlighted in this short read:

1. Philanthropy’s greatest impact lies in co-creating equitable systems with youth, not just for them.
2. Creating inclusive spaces for young people often requires a collective impact approach, where multiple stakeholders align around shared values and outcomes, to drive meaningful change.

Our partner in Türkiye, Suna’s Daughters, is a powerful example of how inclusion and collective impact can come together in practice.

Girl-Centred Design as a Gateway to Collective Impact

The concept of collective action isn’t new. More than a decade ago, John Kania and Mark Kramer’s article “Collective Impact” (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2011) reframed how diverse actors can coordinate around a shared agenda. Their core insight was both simple and profound: complex social problems require alignment across sectors, not isolated interventions.

However, the original model didn’t fully address a critical dimension: power—who gets to participate, whose voices are centred, and whose lived experiences shape the agenda. This is especially important in contexts of gender inequality. 

Suna’s Daughters directly addresses this gap.

They operate as a distributed network of over 30 civil society organisations, in collaboration with local and central government partners, schools, and—most importantly—girls themselves. Their role is to act as a backbone, nurturing an ecosystem where girls’ agency is centred and shared, not delegated.

At the heart of their work is Girl-Centred Design (GCD). Rather than viewing girls as passive recipients, GCD positions them as co-designers, innovators, and leaders. It challenges the idea that we can “design for girls” from the outside.

But there’s a crucial caveat: true transformation demands more than just inviting girls into design workshops. It requires a shift in power. Girls must become owners, not just participants—given space, legitimacy, and resources to lead.

Why Local Collective Action Matters for Girls

There are three key ways in which  local collective action is adding value to EMpower’s philanthropic partnership with Suna’s Daughters—especially in advancing girls’ empowerment:

1. Contextual Intelligence
   Real, nuanced knowledge about what will make a program succeed—social norms, informal power structures, everyday barriers—is held collectively by multiple local actors and girls themselves, not by any single institution.
2. Legitimacy and Trust
   When girls and communities lead, the work reflects their priorities. While external actors may bring resources, legitimacy comes only when solutions are grounded in local realities.
3. Redistribution of Power
   Collective action moves decision-making closer to those most impacted—the girls themselves—de-centring the traditional top-down model of philanthropy.

Learning Through Partnership

This partnership has enabled EMpower to foster girls’ empowerment in Türkiye more quickly and effectively than would have been possible by working with organisations individually. We’ve done this by:

• Funding design space—not just program delivery
  Investing early in community-led processes such as problem-setting, visioning, and prototyping. Supporting NGOs in adopting practices that allow girls and local actors to influence budgets, metrics, and strategies.
• Prioritising relational metrics
  Going beyond headcounts to value trust, collaboration, learning, and empowerment.
• Sharing power in agenda-setting
  Avoiding pre-prescribed solutions. Listening deeply and co-creating the agenda with partners and communities.
• Supporting network infrastructure
  Investing not just in girl-focused initiatives, but in the connective tissue—shared platforms, knowledge, and capacity for collective decision-making.

When philanthropic resources support collective infrastructure—not just isolated programs—and when accountability shifts toward community-led systems, philanthropy becomes a true partner in social justice, not just a source of charity.

And we believe that this approach is exactly what will help “Shift the Narrative”—and create better futures for girls everywhere.