In the context of a polycrisis, many partners recognized the importance of connection, relationship building, and seeding their commitment to collective care. Collective care challenges dominant ideologies and promotes radical transformation. Feminist perspectives argue that well-being is essential for activism and movement building. Collective care involves transforming systems of oppression and should be flexible to local contexts. Four Fenomenal Funds Collaboration Labs focused on collective care and feminist healing. They included the following:
- Urgent Action Funds (UAFs): These funds focused on learning and documenting collective care, particularly its infrastructure, in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and feminist activism.
- Leading from the South Consortium: Comprising the African Women’s Development Fund, Fondo de Mujeres del Sur, International Indigenous Women’s Forum, and Women’s Fund Asia, this pre-existing group worked on strengthening their internal practices and co-creating a shared feminist understanding of collective care, well-being, and healing resourced by the grant.
- Communities for Collective Care Collaboration: A mix of global and national women’s funds, including Doria Feminist Fund, FRIDA, Mongolian Women’s Fund, Tewa, and Women’s Fund Fiji, explored collective care in philanthropy and shared practices.
- Feminist Healing Spaces Collaboration: This group focused on creating healing spaces, documenting resources, and politicizing healing within the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds members and donors, working with partners like FemFund (Poland), Women’s Fund Armenia, and Women’s Fund in Georgia.
Impact: Meeting the Purpose of Better Serving Movements
The collaborations produced valuable outputs:
- Communities for Collective Care Collaboration
- Evolved organizational collective care policies and practices for each women’s fund, including work focused on their internal processes, work focused on their grantmaking and movement-building approaches, and the integration of collective care into Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning frameworks
- Contributed to a global report on collective care
- Developed a toolkit for collective care advocacy in philanthropy
- Feminist Healing Spaces Collaboration
- Produced an online library of resources for collective care, bodily autonomy, and feminist practices
- Two of the collaborative partners bought land and are building physical feminist healing spaces
- Encouraged transformative conversations on healing within their networks
- Achieved significant recovery through trauma-healing processes in the cases of such horrible events in their personal lives and the lives of their communities
- UAFs
- Drew on the arts and created graphic recordings from their from regional reflection sessions, which will provide contextual insights that can be used by movement actors in those regions
- Informed advocacy with funders resulted in a major partnership moving forward with an integrated care and crisis framework and another partnership incorporating a specific budget line for collective care
- Contributed to the integration of care in the UAF’s sisterhood vision for environmental climate justice, which will inform their programmatic action planning and advocacy with climate donors
- Enabled the UAFs to deliver strategic events in movement spaces focused on healing and collective care
- Delivered events focused on collective care in movement spaces
- Leading From the South Consortium
- Evolved their understanding of collective care through reflection sessions, face-to-face gatherings, and supporting conversations with healers
- At the Leading from the South convening on Resistance, Resilience, and Care, Global South feminists affirmed that learning is a form of care, and that spaces for shared learning and co-strategizing are vital to collective care.
Insights for Women’s Funds and Other Funds
1. Collective Care Is Political and Contextual and Requires Flexibility and Multidimensionality in Practice
- Framing collective care is always political and is an important starting point for any collaboration on this topic shaped by structural power dynamics.
- Groups adapted terms like “healing justice” to fit local needs and contexts.
- The trauma arising from living in oppressive environments grounded the Feminist Healing Spaces collaboration’s interest in healing, which they see as critical to feminist movement building. Their work focused on the physical spaces that can be created as a contribution to nurturing cultures of well-being and collective care, based on the feminist values of care and solidarity. Over the course of the process, they evolved the idea of “co-healing” to acknowledge the collective dimension of healing.
- Collective care challenges dominant ideologies and promotes radical transformation.
- Feminist perspectives argue that well-being is essential for activism and movement building.
- Collective care involves transforming systems of oppression and should be flexible to local contexts.
- For example, UAF-Latin America & the Caribbean framed collective care as a resistance to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
- UAF-Africa highlighted collective care as a response to trauma caused by intersecting systems of oppression.
- Women’s Fund Armenia reflected that initiating conversations with partners on how to use funds for healing demonstrates just how political the idea is. “This is when the most marginalized groups reflect on why they never took time to even think what self-care is and why it’s the first time in the history of their organizations or initiatives that someone is asking them to intentionally allocate resources, to think about it, to brainstorm, to come together as a group. It is particularly important when there are a lot of traumatic experiences coming from war and conflict.”
- FemFund (Poland) reflected that healing gets to the “underlying systems of oppression. The causes of the harm in relationships and 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.”
- Local mapping is a critical first step to ensuring 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.
- Flexibility is paramount to enable responsiveness.
- For example, in the context of a 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. They also adapted their practices of solidarity to better meet the needs of activists during these emergency periods. led by these activists who have contextual knowledge and sensitivity.
- Flexibility is also critical in the response to the interconnections of collective care with broader social justice issues. UAF for Feminist Activism gave examples 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.
2. Internal and External Focus on Collective Care
- Internal collective care work exists on an evolving continuum of self-reflection and shifting practices, whereas external collective care work integrates care into work with partners like knowledge generation and sharing, grantmaking, and collective healing.
- Internal Work: Women’s funds began by adopting organizational frameworks for collective care, offering psychosocial support, and introducing care-based policies.
- Over time, they recognized the importance of structural changes in organizational culture and power dynamics. FemFund (Poland) highlighted the importance of “unlearning” old organizational culture—healing or collective care is not a checklist; it’s about being intentional, about really internalizing a specific culture of working together where healing is integrated and recognized. For them, this included a process to surface organizational tensions and then work with a facilitator to embark on a healing process that was truly transformative.
- Participants spoke of the imperative for structural reckonings with the organizational power imbalances and dynamics that give rise to damaging and toxic relationships in the workplace. Participants acknowledged that no organization is exempt from causing harm. There should be 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, sustainable, consistent in the appropriate acknowledgment of completed work, and supportive of both individual and organizational learning and growth.
- Fondo de Mujeres del Sur noted that this work requires time and effort and is not easy. Changes at this level resist “the capitalist productive logic: a ‘pause week’ challenges a world that demands immediate results.”
- External Work: Funders integrated collective care into their grantmaking by supporting partners engaged in care work, creating safe spaces, and emphasizing relationship building. They established spaces with partners to explore collective care.
- For example, the Mongolian Women’s Fund outlined the therapeutic benefits of collective care gatherings that have included art therapy, storytelling, stand-up comedy, etc.
- Internal Work: Women’s funds began by adopting organizational frameworks for collective care, offering psychosocial support, and introducing care-based policies.
3. Collective Care Infrastructure
- Collective care requires physical spaces, both permanent (e.g., feminist healing spaces) and temporary (e.g., gathering places for activists).
- Movement-based knowledge generation is also a key component.
- The UAFs and the Communities for Collective Care collaboration worked on regional knowledge exchange to generate collective care resources.
4. Engaging Healers as New Actors
- Healers are central to the healing work but often are marginalized in mainstream care practices. Many groups began deepening their work with healers, recognizing their importance within feminist movements.
- UAF-Asia & Pacific noted that healers, integral to movement sustainability, must be included in the broader conversation about collective care.
- Healers are central to the healing work but often are marginalized in mainstream care practices. Many groups began deepening their work with healers, recognizing their importance within feminist movements.
5. Challenging Self-Sacrifice Narratives
- Reframe collective care as essential for survival and joy in activism. Women’s Fund Armenia and Women’s Fund in Georgia addressed guilt and self-sacrifice, where activists felt the need to prioritize others over themselves.
6. Collective Care Is Not a Panacea
- While collective care can be a solution in some contexts, it cannot solve all the challenges activists face, especially in extreme situations like war.
7. Advocacy and Funding for Collective Care
- Advocacy is essential to make the case for integrating collective care into feminist work. It requires not only practical but also political and ethical perspectives to change power structures.
- Donors must understand the value of collective care and allocate resources accordingly to support this work.
8. Navigating Power Relations
- Navigating and addressing power dynamics through intersectional racial justice is also a healing process.
Insights for Donors
- Flexible Funding for Collective Care
- Funding for collective care must be flexible to support both collaborative activities and internal shifts within organizations. This flexibility allows for creative adaptation and more effective implementation of care practices. The experience of working with Fenomenal Funds has transformed the relationship between several of the participating women’s funds and their own partners—supporting more creative work on gender equality to emerge in communities.
- Leverage Social Capital for Relationship Building
- Existing relationships can expedite trust building in collaborations. Donors should fund relationship-building activities to strengthen collaboration and ensure success.
- Funding that supports relationship building is crucial to the success of a collaboration: It’s an upfront investment that one group noted “possibly prevented some challenges later on.” As part of the relationship building, it is also useful to agree to decision-making processes. Another suggestion is to spend time learning how to surface tensions, name group power dynamics, and resolve them with collaborative mindfulness and care.
- Investing in Long-Term Change
- Collective care requires long-term commitment. Donors should support the process of unlearning toxic organizational cultures, advocating for well-being as integral to movements, and resourcing spaces for ongoing reflection and learning.
The collaborations yielded several outputs, such as reports, toolkits, and resources for healing, and led to shifts in organizational practices, grantmaking, and advocacy strategies. They emphasized that collective care is political, contextual, and multidimensional, with deep ties to social justice and anti-oppression efforts with a specific focus on healing justice and working with healers. Additionally, the work highlighted the importance of flexible funding, relationship building, and ongoing advocacy for collective care in feminist movements. The collaborations also explored how collective care challenges narratives of self-sacrifice and promotes the well-being of activists.