With the newest variant of Covid-19 spreading faster than any virus in our lifetimes, philanthropy faces another reminder of the urgent need to support people facing the worst impact of the pandemic. Access to vaccines and health care is uneven, the strain on mental health on young people, front-line workers, and so many others is intensifying, and political polarization around the globe is making it harder than ever to adopt policies that protect the health and welfare of the most vulnerable.
Meanwhile the social and economic impact continues to fall hard on girls, young women, and transgender and nonbinary youths already facing discrimination and systemic oppression. Many of those same people are at the forefront of responding to the needs of their communities, showing up with the bravery, resilience, and organizing power they bring to all their activism, often with little to no resources.
In our work with the Global Resilience Fund, a pop-up, participatory, collaborative fund, set up by 25 grant makers to support young people’s response efforts as the pandemic first erupted, we have learned some important lessons that can steer philanthropy in the right direction for the next stage of the pandemic. Housed at Purposeful, a hub for feminist activism, we provided grants to 234 girl- and youth-led groups in more than 100 countries.
Our experience has made it clearer than ever that as the world continues to face more complex crises — such as rising authoritarianism, persistent threats to democracy and a worsening climate crisis — philanthropy cannot simply go back to “normal.” It did not work before 2020 and will certainly not lead us to a more just world now. Here’s how grant makers need to adjust.
Recognize that service delivery is deeply political and a critical part of feminist organizing.
In many contexts, governments have failed to provide services, especially for people from historically marginalized communities. As critical front-line responders, young activists are providing mental health care, suicide hotlines, and counseling as well as distributing supplies to people in need as a central part of their activism. Responding to an emergent crisis with service provision is deeply political work, especially for feminists leading from the margins, where their efforts are sometimes criminalized or result in violence.
And yet, many grant makers that support social justice and feminists do not classify service delivery and basic relief as activism. This shows up in language, funding flows, and eligibility criteria. A false dichotomy between activism and direct services is created, when we know both are critical to survival and progress. To be responsive to movements, grant makers must provide sufficient resources for direct services as a critical part of feminist organizing, especially in the context of crisis. Activists are best positioned to understand this full range of needs, and providing them flexible, unrestricted funding is the best way to ensure they can meet these needs — whether for organizing or direct services.
Allow people most affected by injustice to allocate grant resources.
Covid-19 is hardly the only problem facing young people today: They must deal with the threat of climate change, and many face discrimination or violence because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or physical and mental disabilities. If grant makers are serious about reaching those most affected by the pandemic, they must put the affected at the front of decisions about where philanthropic dollars go.
At the heart of the Global Resilience Fund is the leadership of 32 young people who represent movements and communities globally. Included are activists with disabilities — a group often overlooked by grant makers — and partners like the Disability Rights Fund and Women Enabled. These relationships, expertise, and leadership of activists brought resources to people most often sidelined by philanthropy.
We quickly realized to be truly accountable to activists, we needed to reimagine everything, including our approach to applications, due diligence, and grant reporting. Sign language and closed captioning are regularly available in our online spaces. We had to get comfortable with making mistakes and asking for help as we sought to ensure our approach was inclusive. Most importantly, we learned this kind of adaptation is not something that happens once; it is constant.
Putting mental health and collective care on the grant-making agenda is not optional; it is a matter of survival.
After two years of isolation and uncertainty, many of us — grant makers and activists alike — feel exhausted and burned out.
Many activists are struggling with protecting their own mental health and care because they are focusing on serving their communities, which continue to face extraordinary strains.
Based on this need, our most recent call for proposals centered on collective care and collaboration. Proposals flooded in for efforts such as establishing social-support networks for members to share healing practices, group therapy, healing support for Indigenous survivors of violence, and a summit for LGBTIQ+ communities to practice art therapy to cope with grief and loss from the pandemic.
We applaud trailblazers in support of efforts like these, especially the Urgent Action Fund Sister funds. But there continues to be too few grant makers that support their partners to build resilience for the long term. As we continue to see waves of Covid-19 and the impact of the pandemic unfold, sustained resources focused on collective care and collaboration are essential.
The risk-taking spirit that marked the beginning of the pandemic must become the norm.
Many grant makers took unprecedented risks at the beginning of the pandemic. For some, this meant funding outside of their usual priority areas; for others, it meant offering flexible funding and letting go of burdensome application processes, heavy reporting rules, and stringent due-diligence requirements.
As 2022 opens, some foundations are returning to old, broken ways of working. This puts activist groups at risk and means funding for groups responding to emerging crises, like the spread of omicron, may not receive the resources they need.
Grant makers have different and important roles to play.
A diverse range of institutions, including private, corporate, and public foundations, as well as women’s funds, international nongovernmental organizations, and U.N. agencies, collaborated in the Global Resilience Fund in ways that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. This ecosystem approach means funders are not competing but instead nourishing the existing architecture. Especially in times of intersecting crises, we need to increase our transparency and reduce competition among ourselves and our grantees.
With the climate crisis and political instability becoming even more widespread, there is a continuing need for movements to access fast-paced funding that can resource the critical front-line role feminists play during every crisis. This is not to replace, but to complement long-term sustained support and to recognize that both long-term funding and rapid-response crisis funding are critical to sustaining movements.
The experiences of the Global Resilience Fund demonstrate that it is possible to get money rapidly to movements during times of crisis through collaboration that challenges power and that the genuine inclusion, leadership, and decision making of the people most affected by a crisis need not be compromised. We can, and must, provide resources for the critical work of young feminists who are responding to the most urgent needs in their communities.
As philanthropy and the world face a turning point, it is imperative that grant makers make real efforts to redistribute money and power. We cannot keep asking grantees to produce theories of change and logic models and expect that our hyperintellectualization will bring real solutions. Instead, we need to encourage honest and open conversations that aim to shift power to the communities doing essential work that propels us all forward. A key step is building our own resilience as grant makers by recognizing our interdependence and deepening our accountability to movements critical to our collective freedom.
