After the Breaking: A Black Feminist Response to Retrenchment

Reimagining Philanthropy explores transformative and decolonized approaches to philanthropy that can shift our sector from traditional top-down models toward more equitable, community-centered practices. In community, we explore how philanthropic organizations can share power authentically, center affected communities in decision-making, and build truly reciprocal relationships.

The world is fracturing and augmenting into unprecedented and often terrifying shapes. Like a contagion, the toxic tentacles extend everywhere. We see this in the intensifying climate disasters, the rise of AI-driven conflicts ostensibly initiated in the name of peace, and the billionaires who use money to wield power, politics, and media nefariously—leading to a sweeping normalization of authoritarianism and autocracy.

As this happens, the machine of philanthropy remains tethered to decades-old logic, implementing approaches that are fundamentally unsuitable to the terrain we plough through, and causing harm to the communities it was meant to serve.

We are navigating a world order that serves the elite, instead of us all.

For those of us in the business of mobilizing and moving resources to movements building bountiful alternatives, this fracture has been our activator—we know change is still possible. Black feminists articulate a transformative vision of justice and care, creating conditions in which all people have the freedom and resources to thrive. So, with this frame we ask ourselves: What can we build after the breaking?

The opposition is organizing to mold a world in its image that in many ways upholds and further perpetuates oppressive systems; like glass, that can be shattered. Black feminists have always known that these systems never served, suited, or aided us. Generations of us, past and present, have advanced justice through local, regional, and global organizing—from resisting apartheid in South Africa, to raising political consciousness, to embracing Black feminist pedagogies. We have remained unwavering in our commitment toward justice, while nurturing healing, joy, and liberation through community-centered practices. The breaking, then, is the clearance required for new visioning and possibility.

We must ask ourselves what is possible now, and what role should leaders in philanthropy play? Here, we offer insights and tools for collective action.

The Sector Challenges We Face

We are living through a paradox of obscene wealth accumulation. Wealth is growing at an astounding rate; there have never been as many billionaires as there are today. In parallel, funding for movements on the side of human rights has flatlined or retreated.

At a time of relentless attacks on human rights and justice across the globe, many rich nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands have slashed their overseas development assistance. In 2025, human rights funding saw a 29 percent reduction from 2023’s record high of $223 billion in aid.

These resources have instead been diverted to militarization, with global military spending hitting a generational high, despite proof that local feminist movements are the most effective architects of global safety.

In the face of this collapse, philanthropy has largely capitulated. Ten percent of US foundations have deleted racial and gender justice language from their websites, communicating submission over solidarity. Funding for Palestinian or Black liberation is often policed to mitigate supposed risk by those who claim to be on the side of justice. This is not caution; it is complicity.

Among traditional institutional philanthropy, there has been no groundswell of solidarity or meaningful action for those bearing the brunt of risk and harm. In an ecosystem where funding for Black feminist organizing receives 0.1 to 0.35 percent of philanthropic funding, this retreat is a seismic abandonment.

The current global landscape—both familiar and unique—demands a new level of strategy.

Where Barriers Stand, Our Resolve Rises Higher

Amid this reticence and retrenchment, the Black Feminists in Philanthropy network (BFiP) is intervening. We are not waiting for the sector to act with conscience. We are organizing.

BFiP brings together over 350 Black women and gender-expansive people working in private foundations, feminist funds, community foundations, and wealth advisory roles around the world. Born out of the need to address the severe underfunding of Black feminist movements, we convene regularly to strategize how to resource them like we want them to win. So far, we have mobilized and directed almost $2.5 million to Black feminist groups in Sudan, Lebanon, and Brazil whose work ranges from life-saving crisis and conflict response to international advocacy for racial and gender justice.

What binds us is not just an identity, but a shared mandate to mobilize, even as some members carry the contradictions of their private institutions that are, at their core, architectures of preservation—of wealth, power, and the very conditions that make our work necessary.

Our mission at BFiP is therefore a dual excavation. While we are mobilizing resources, we are also digging into these institutions from the inside, chipping at the concrete logic of risk aversion and establishmentarianism. Together, we synthesize strategies and tactics to enable us as a network to act as absorbers, doing the translation work so social justice movements do not have to be stifled by bureaucracy. This is what solidarity looks like inside the belly of the beast.

From Insight to Impact: How We Move Forward 

As a growing network of funders and advisors grappling with philanthropy’s retrenchment while building new pathways to resource Black feminist movements, we draw from our experiences to offer philanthropy these concrete lessons for action:

• Community is the antidote. Isolation is a tool of institutional conservatism. It keeps people managing their positioning rather than pooling collective power. Finding allies inside and across institutions who share the same mandate and are willing to strategize with you is foundational to the work and this moment.

Use your position, don’t just occupy it. The language of movements and the language of philanthropic institutions are not the same. We in philanthropy must be the bridge—ensuring our partners can flourish in pursuing solutions that center justice, human dignity, and wellbeing, without being forced to flatten themselves into realpolitik by narrowing their vision for what’s possible to fit the political constraints of perceived practicality. For instance, providing flexible, long-term funding allows grassroots partners to pursue their full vision rather than requiring them to reshape work to fit short-term, politically “safe” outcomes. Bridging can take many forms, but every time we use our position to absorb that cost on movements’ behalf, we are making a political choice that counters oppression.

• Fund movements to be free, not dependent. The health of social justice movements should not be contingent on the whims of funder interests. The moment a group’s survival is tied to the continued goodwill of a funder, its mission becomes negotiable—and when resources recede, the infrastructure needed to advance change is compromised. We are living through the consequences of exactly that strategy, at scale.

We actually need funding designed to catalyze the conditions under which institutional philanthropy can become obsolete. This could look like funding that enables endowment building, investing in revenue-generating infrastructure, and other liberatory models of resourcing.

• Redefine risk. Black feminist and social justice movements are navigating shrinking civic space, invasive surveillance, climate catastrophes, and conflict—taking existential risks every day because the cost of inaction is greater than being still. Philanthropy, in its current posture, has decided that the greatest risk is reputational. On the contrary, the real risk is in abandoning social justice movements at precisely the moment when the cost of that abandonment is highest. This jeopardizes hard-won gains, widens injustice, and further enables the slide into authoritarianism.

The Urgent Responsibility to Practice Solidarity

This is a moment that requires philanthropy to come to its own front line, to be as brave as the movements it claims to support. Feminist and intermediary funds such as Purposeful and Thousand Currents, like the Black Feminist Fund, know this well.

The bravery and tenacity required have a very specific shape right now. It is not a strategy document or a rebranded commitment to equity. It is the decision to hold the line when the pressure is to retreat.

It is protecting funding relationships when partners are being targeted. It is the refusal to go quiet, precisely when movements need us to be loud.

Journalist Nesrine Malik noted that “misogyny is currency” when highlighting how White supremacy both enables and shields elites’ deplorable behavior. Widening this example, we see that tyranny is currency. In this era, power over is the only language the opposition speaks, and many progressive funders are watching this all unfold without grasping the urgency.

Funders who are afraid of undue attention are prioritizing the protection of assets for a future emergency, ignoring that the roof on the house is already gone.

This moment requires funder organizing—not acquiescing but actively strategizing how we can best flank movements and invest in the leadership that shapes new possibilities for us all.

There is hope that comes after the breaking. If misogyny and tyranny are the currency of the current order, let our unwavering determination be the counter.