Why Do We Need to Invest in Collective Care?
The point of activism is to create change in systems that are unfair: challenge people and institutions that cause harm, call them to account, and propose alternatives. Their work disrupts the status quo. And it is hard work. Challenging powerful people and systems often provoke a backlash. The consequences—whether personal or organizational—can range from inconvenient to deeply harmful.
Collective care (1) has evolved in response to these challenges. It is an important part of the activist toolkit: a way of supporting individuals and organizations to remain involved in change-making in the long term. The emergence of collective care represents a conscious decision to try to learn from the past, develop practical strategies to provide better care, and support people doing the hard work of activism. But it is also a pragmatic investment in movement efficacy, stemming the loss of knowledge and experience that comes as people leave, as well as supporting the collectivizing of knowledge and strategy through the practices of collective care.
It is important to offer this caveat: Collective care is not a panacea. Sometimes the brutality of power kicking back is too great. This work needs to be grounded in the movement assessments of the increasing threats and challenges they face. In some instances, collective care strategies will be part of the solution. In others, they will be impossible to enact, given the conditions. Additionally, sometimes the challenges that undermine collective care are internal to the movement: Power circulates in unhealthy ways in any entity that brings humans together, feminist organizations included (see “Practical Insight 3” for further discussion).
In this blog we will share some of the emerging insights on how to get practical when it comes to both directing funding towards and bringing collective care practices into the internal and external work of women’s funds.
Four Diverse Collaborations Power Our Insights on Collective Care
This blog shares some of the lessons learned from four collaborations focused on collective care and feminist healing:
- The four Urgent Action Funds (UAF-Africa, UAF-Asia & Pacific, UAF-Latin America & the Caribbean, and UAF for Feminist Activism) focused on learning and documentation of their interdependent and independent work on collective care, particularly the infrastructure of collective care.
- The Leading from the South consortium, comprising African Women’s Development Fund, Fondo de Mujeres del Sur, International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI), and Women’s Fund Asia, focused on strengthening their own practices and Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning frameworks for collective care.
- The Communities for Collective Care collaboration brought together five global and national women’s funds (Doria Feminist Fund, FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund, Mongolian Women’s Fund, Tewa, and Women’s Fund Fiji) to look at their collective care work internally and with partners.
- FemFund (Poland), Women’s Fund Armenia, and Women’s Fund in Georgia came together in a collaboration focused on virtual and physical feminist healing spaces.
Practical Insight 1: Recognize the Political Agenda of Collective Care
An important starting point for any work to embed collective care in an organization is to recognize that it is deeply political and inherently contextual. There is a political agenda that sits behind the practices: enacting collective care contributes to the radical reshaping of our world. In this way, it is both an act of resistance and a strategy of resistance. As one of the partners said:
“Collective care is not just a practice. It’s a proposal to imagine a different humanity and a different world. It is about being in a collective space, whether things happen differently. It is an antidote to extraction, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.” (UAF-Latin America & the Caribbean)
This political framing recognizes that a healing justice framework is a tool to respond to the generations of violence, harm, and trauma caused by intersecting systems of oppression. Importantly, this insight helps us to recognize that some of the harms that arise within our movements must also be understood in this context. FemFund (Poland) reflected that feminist healing gets to the “underlying systems of oppression: The causes of the harm in relationships, between groups, and individuals are very often rooted in the oppressive system. So, if we want to transform it, we have to do it through transforming our relationships and joining forces for a more just future.”
Practical Insight 2: Engage the Politics of Naming and Framing
From the outset, the importance of naming and framing was evident. Three of the four Fenomenal Funds collaborations framed their work using “collective care,” and the fourth collaboration used “feminist healing.” It is important to acknowledge the power of naming and framing: It is always political and sits within context-specific, structural power dynamics of knowledge production, appropriation, marginalization, and co-option. It is important to take the time to unpack the conceptual provenances and nuances of the terms that are in use. The process enables individuals and organizations to expand and challenge their own thinking and grounds subsequent work. But don’t get stuck here. If you can’t agree with a definition, see if you can come to some sort of shared understanding on intentions and then move on, getting practical by exploring strategies.
Practical Insight 3: Move Away from Self-Sacrifice and Guilt
Working in a context of ongoing conflict and violence, Women’s Fund Armenia and Women’s Fund in Georgia surfaced interesting conversations about guilt and self-sacrifice in the context of collective care. Following a participatory approach to allocating limited resources for collective care, Women’s Fund Georgia directed funding to groups working on the borders where tensions were high. They reflected that “groups working on the ground were surprised—they did not think it was time for them to take care of themselves; they were preoccupied because women, girls, and LGBTQ+ communities were relying on them, so groups wanted to give these resources to the communities they were working with. They felt guilty to use anything for themselves.” For this reason, there is an imperative to evolve collective care as a contribution to overcoming guilt and self-sacrifice. At one of the Leading from the South “Caring Activism” discussions, a participant framed the shift in this way: “We need to move away from the idea of ‘dying for the struggle/dying for the revolution.’ We have to live for the struggle. We are part of the movements; we have the right to be in [a state of] well-being, to do joyful activism.”
Practical Insight 4: Embrace Contextual Nuance with Flexibility and Multidimensionality
Collective care is inherently contextual, which requires flexibility and multidimensionality in practice. At a practical level, this action looks like starting your work with a local mapping process to ensure contextualized understandings of the language, concepts, and customs of collective care and the structural conditions that frame activist work. The mapping must analyze structures of oppression and interrogate the power dynamics that exist in communities if women’s funds are to ensure that their work does not reinforce the marginalization of particular groups of people or perpetuate discrimination.
As a women’s fund, it is critical that your organization is able to build flexibility into any grantmaking or accompaniment work you do on collective care. This ensures that the work can be responsive and pivot as required. For example, in the context of a short-term crisis, women’s funds adjusted the scope of activities they funded—pivoting to more practical needs such as food, reproductive health supplies, and safe spaces for activists to gather. Flexibility is also critical to enable funds to respond to the interconnections of collective care and broader social justice issues. UAF for Feminist Activism gave the example of Indigenous peoples and communities of color. They know that they cannot rely on the police or the medical-industrial complex to care for them. Instead, women’s funds are supporting community clinics or community hotlines as contextually appropriate responses.
It is also important to recognize that collective care is intrinsically multidimensional. It spans time and integrates a range of different forms. For example, FIMI grounded their framing of collective care in Indigenous spiritualities, conceptualizing care in reference to past, present, and future times. UAF-Asia & Pacific spoke of “creating and maintaining spaces where activists can sustain themselves physically, financially, and—importantly—emotionally and mentally.” They also reflected on the practice of collective care during a crisis: “It is not just about addressing certain crises but also regenerating afterwards.” They shared an example of a community garden that had been established to address food insecurity but that also functioned as a space of laughter, connection, and enjoyment.
The UAFs also made an important distinction in care practices in situations of high danger, like war, and in less dangerous environments: “For those directly impacted by conflict, care often means being less visible and more inward-focused, aiming to reduce exposure to danger.”
Practical Insight 5: Value the Time and Knowledge of Partners as You Contextualize Collective Care
Many women’s funds are integrating collective care into their grantmaking and accompaniment work. As we flagged in “Practical Insight 4,” collective care thrives when it is contextualized. Insights may be gathered through conversations or other more formal data collection methods. But the UAFs highlighted the importance of these contributions being remunerated. And FIMI noted that the depth of the relationship correlated with the depth of the discussions when exploring these issues with movement partners.
Practical Insight 6: Recognize That the Infrastructure of Collective Care Takes on Many Forms
Collective care can take on different forms. One community may require a permanent, physical space, such as those envisaged by the Feminist Healing Spaces collaborative. These places will provide access to feminists, allies to healing practitioners, and spaces to convene. They can also be temporary, such as convenings that bring activists together to learn, dialogue, and collectively strategize at a particular moment. Women’s Fund Asia’s partners characterized this latter activity as an important form of care—validating the power that comes from collectively strategizing to overcome challenges and power up success. And collective care infrastructure can also be about movement-based knowledge generation. This can take on two forms: one, building up “collections” of intra- and inter-regional collective care practices and two, convening learning spaces to reflect on the evolution of collective care. Importantly, the act of convening these learning sites has also been recognized as a practice of collective care.
Practical Insight 7: Engage Healers
Engagement with healers was a clear point of commonality across the projects. The Feminist Healing Spaces collaboration named the lack of specialist feminist healers in their communities, and UAF-Africa highlighted their realization that “the insights and wisdom of healers had previously been sidelined from conversations and practices of care. In response, sister funds started to deepen the work with healers and center them in the care work, opening more space for embodied practices.” UAF-Asia & Pacific noted that it is important to work with healers who also hold a feminist orientation “because there is a politicized lens to this work.” But they also spoke to the complexities of this work in their region where who the healers are is very linked to caste hierarchy and could be associated with medicalized ways of healing.
Practical Insight 8: Shift Organizational Culture and Power Dynamics
As a woman’s fund, it is important to walk the talk. Collective care is not just something to integrate into grantmaking and accompaniment. It is also a set of practices to adopt as part of the organization’s own practices. Internal collective care work exists on an evolving continuum. Initial internally focused interventions might see organizations
- adopting an organizational framework or policy on collective care and allocating a budget for implementation (Women’s Fund Fiji flagged the importance of leadership groups in driving the cultural changes); or
- funding access to psychosocial support services, increasing medical benefits, introducing new allowances focused on care, or supporting workplace-based collective care sessions.
But over time, participants pointed to the importance of internally focused work evolving. FemFund (Poland) highlighted that healing is not a “checklist”; it is a supported process of “unlearning” old organizational cultures and being intentional in internalizing a specific culture of integrating healing into working practices. For them, this included surfacing organizational tensions and then working with a facilitator to embark on a healing process that they characterized as truly transformative. This “structural reckoning” with the power dynamics of an organization is imperative. No organization is exempt from causing harm. Women’s funds should embark on this work with an expectation that this work could give rise to significant changes in organizational practice and culture. This could include redesigning work environments to be more inclusive and sustainable, to ensure appropriate acknowledgment of work done, and to be supportive of both individual and organizational learning and growth. As Fondo de Mujeres del Sur noted, this work requires time and effort and is not easy. And it can be deeply hurtful when it fails, giving rise to legitimate anger, frustration, and disappointment.
Practical Insight 9: Funder Mindset Shifts Are Critical
Collective care work requires flexible funding to enable women’s funds and partners to be responsive to the context and meet the needs identified by the activists, organizations, and communities. The Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning approach also requires flexibility: Donor insistence on documenting “tangible results,” for example to ask for quantitative data on people who have been “healed,” can be counterproductive. Healing is not linear; it is an intersecting transformational and relational journey that can be very difficult to capture in percentage form.
Final Reflections: Walking the Talk
A final caveat. We hope that these practical insights offer you a useful pathway to consider how to embed funding for collective care into your partnership agreements and/or to embark on your own experiments with collective care. Along the way, you will likely both exceed and fail to meet your expectations. Working out how to boldly and graciously make the space to learn together and be scrupulously accountable to each other will be critical.