Sustainability on Our Own Terms: On the Future of Feminist Movements

With gender equality under attack and feminist and women’s rights organizations struggling for survival across the globe, we must urgently address the question of their sustainability. There is no feminist future without sustaining the movements and the institutions fighting for it.

Transforming the funding ecosystem requires safeguarding gender justice and human rights as a priority globally—a priority that can then guide the structural changes that are needed.

For far too long, “sustainability” has been reduced to a technical requirement, a checkbox in grant applications, rather than a real question about what it takes for feminist movements to survive and transform our societies for the better.

Recent funding cuts have revealed the fragility of the feminist funding landscape. In this context of structural precarity, the real question is not whether feminist organizations are sustainable, but what it will take to transform the funding ecosystem so that sustainability becomes at all possible.

To answer this question, we draw on the latest research from The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), Where Is the Money for Feminist Organizing?—one of the most comprehensive global datasets on feminist resourcing, based on 1,174 organizations across 128 countries. As Co-Executive Directors of AWID, in this article we examine how the current funding system produces fragility, how movements are already building alternatives, and what must change to make sustainability possible on feminist terms. Transforming the funding ecosystem requires safeguarding gender justice and human rights as a priority globally—a priority that can then guide the structural changes that are needed.

A System that Keeps Movements Fragile

Over the past decade, feminist advocacy on resourcing has shifted parts of the funding landscape. AWID’s 2010 global survey revealed that half of feminist organizations had never received core support. Today, thanks to relentless work of feminist resourcing advocates and allied funders, 71 percent receive at least some core funding. This is evidence that sustained advocacy, principled and progressive funders, and movement pressure can shift a system once thought immovable.

This shift is largely the result of the emergence and growth of a global network of women’s and feminist funds who have embraced core, flexible, and long-term funding as a foundational feminist funding practice. However, this progress is far from sufficient. Nearly a third (29 percent) still receive no core funding at all. Even among those who do, core funding is often marginal: 62 percent report that less than one-fifth of their total budgets is covered by core funding. Most grants remain painfully short-term. Only four percent—read that again: four percent!—of the respondents have access to grants longer than three years.

Short-term, restrictive, and inflexible grants produce chronic precarity and strategies based on scarcity, making it very hard not only to scale up impact but even to survive. The data makes this very clear. Looking back at their fiscal data for 2023,

• More than a quarter of responding organizations (28 percent) reported having no financial reserves at all by 2025.
• Nearly half (46 percent) said they would have no savings left past 2026.
• 64 percent told us they would not be able to operate for more than six months if external funding stopped.
• Nearly half have already faced the possibility of closure.

Our survey respondents articulated a pressing need for change, especially in the context of growing far-right power and militarization across regions. In the words of one respondent: “Multi-year flexible funding is key to the sustainability and resilience of civil society and feminist movements in the face of anti-democratic threats and actors.” Such grants, other respondents explained, allow movements to work more effectively and safely, and to focus on achieving actual change rather than constantly mobilizing resources or squeezing to fit into donor priorities just to survive another year. Most funders do not allow grantees to use their funding to build reserves, a strategy which would have protected grantees in this era of funding cuts.

Long before “sustainability” became a sector buzzword, feminist movements were already practicing it, not as endless growth or financial accumulation but as the collective ability to sustain our work, our people, and our struggles over time.

Sustainability of feminist organizations is compromised not only by shortages in the quantity and quality of available funding, but also by the conditionalities and strings attached. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63 percent) reported that they had to change priorities to align with funder agendas, potentially pushed to compromise on their mission and autonomy. This happens in an already restrictive landscape, where 86 percent say little funding exists for their movements, themes, and regions; this means that there are few alternatives that would come with fewer political strings.

A stark example of funder pressure is the attempts to restrict Palestine solidarity. In recent years, many civil society organizations have faced explicit or implicit pressure to restrict expressions and acts of solidarity with the Palestinian people, to cut ties with Palestinian partner organizations, or to exercise censorship around terms that describe reality, such as “genocide” or “apartheid.” This pressure from funding institutions accompanied state repression and criminalization of Palestine solidarity in many parts of the world. Yet, even in this time of widespread repression, new possibilities emerged within philanthropy, reminding us that the field is never homogenous and that movement solidarity is not easily silenced.

While the funding system kept producing structural fragility and dependency, movements have been building more sustainable alternatives to preserve themselves and their independence. Let us acknowledge these alternatives both inside the system —for example, feminist funding practices and institutions—and outside of it, such as autonomous resourcing.

Feminist Funding Is Sustainability

Long before “sustainability” became a sector buzzword, feminist movements were already practicing it, not as endless growth or financial accumulation but as the collective ability to sustain our work, our people, and our struggles over time. They did so through relationships of care, shared resources, and with political clarity even in periods and conditions of scarcity.  Over decades, they have created a global model and ecosystem of women’s and feminist funds and movement-led resourcing mechanisms grounded in flexible, core, and long-term support; trust-based relationships; investment in care, safety, and wellbeing; and alignment with movement priorities.

Feminist funds were among the first to center issues such as holistic security, collective care, and sustaining activism over time. They recognized that movements are about people and relationships, not just projects and outputs.

Today, national and regional women’s funds operate across the world. Constituencies long excluded from philanthropy and aid have also built their own institutions: funds supporting young feminist organizing, trans rights movements, sex workers’ rights movements, Black feminist organizing, feminist digital rights, and much more. More than half (55 percent) of our respondents identified women’s and feminist funds as a key source of funding—more than any other type of funder. Among them, 41 percent say it accounts for half or more of their annual budgets. Feminist funding is a proven model of what sustainability can look like in practice.

Building Sustainability Through Autonomous Resourcing

Historically marginalized communities and social justice movements have always relied on one another for survival, and feminist movements are no exception. For the first time, AWID research examined data about autonomous resourcing: financial, human, and material resources that carry no expectations or conditions imposed by philanthropic,  bilateral, and multilateral funders. It enables self-determination, protects political autonomy, and is itself a form of movement-building.

The data is striking:

• An overwhelming majority of 81 percent of organizations now rely on resources they generate directly: volunteering, in-kind support, mutual aid networks, community fundraising, membership fees, and other solidarity-based mechanisms.
• For nearly a third (29 percent), these autonomous resources constitute their primary means of survival.
• Half of all organizations increased their use of autonomous resourcing between 2021 and 2023.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in autonomous resourcing, within feminist movements and among funders. Autonomous resourcing is both a political practice and, often, a necessity. It reflects deep commitments to solidarity, self-determination, and collective survival, while also addressing the structural exclusion many movements face from mainstream funding.

Sustainability on our own terms means that we need our organizations to last, but to last in ways that align with our values: advancing social, economic, gender, and climate justice while remaining accountable to communities that we serve.

As interest in these practices grows within philanthropy, there is a risk of romanticizing them or expecting movements to compensate for systemic underfunding. We believe that what philanthropy should take from autonomous resourcing is inspiration: how to support movements with trust and solidarity, as if our future depends on it. Because in this increasingly anti-democratic and militarized world, it truly does.

Sustainability Is Already Part of Our DNA

Practicing sustainability when your organization is in a constant state of precarity is challenging, if not impossible. Yet, feminist movements have always created ways to be sustainable, not as a compliance exercise, but as a necessary and political ethic. At the root of it all, feminist movements sustain one another with courage, possibility, resistance, imagination and care. We sustain the idea that another world is not only possible, but necessary and present in how we relate and care for each other.

Sustainability on our own terms means that we need our organizations to last, but to last in ways that align with our values: advancing social, economic, gender, and climate justice while remaining accountable to communities that we serve.

As we have consistently been advocating for decades: core, multi-year, and flexible funding is essential, but it is only the beginning. Feminist movements also need the freedom and autonomy to use resources in ways that build and grow community wealth, systems of care, and long-term safety nets.

The first barrier to dismantle is the set of restrictions that force us to spend money in fundamentally unsustainable ways. Feminist organizations need the freedom to build financial reserves and savings. For decades, millions of dollars earmarked for gender equality have ultimately flowed into hotel chains, global consulting firms, airlines, and other private sector actors, simply because funding rules prohibited those funds from being used to build feminist-owned alternatives. While framed as procedural, the impact has been both economic and political, as these restrictions have systematically prevented feminist movements from building assets, infrastructure, and economic power and independence.

We need to be able to invest in our own feminist economies: cooperative accommodations and conference venues, movement-aligned consulting hubs, our own transportation solutions and financial services, and our own revenue-generating enterprises rooted in feminist values. These include: Cooperatives that feed communities, agroecological projects that protect Indigenous seeds and food sovereignty, queer- and trans-led and other minority-led enterprises that create safety and autonomy. These are not aspirational ideas but existing feminist economic realities that could flourish with the right kind of support and resources available.

This work needs to go beyond narrow or isolated financial solutions, beyond framing everything through current buzzwords like “financial inclusion” and “innovation.” What is required instead is feminist fiscal expertise and feminist financial and economic justice frameworks that situate organizational sustainability within broader agendas of redistributive justice, reparations, debt cancellation, and transformation of the international financial architecture.

Cross-sectoral Collaboration for a “Just Transition”

The transition of feminist organizations towards more sustainability will not be easy or quick, but it is both possible and urgent. Imagine a just transition process: one that deliberately untangles systems of dependency and precarity with intention and shared responsibility.

This moment calls for new conversations and new forms of collaboration between movements and allies across philanthropy, bilateral institutions, multilateral agencies, and community-led funders that lead to urgent action. It invites philanthropy not to simply fund movements, but to become part of the transformation: sharing risk, relinquishing control, and investing for the long term.

Feminist movements have already shown that sustainability is not merely a financial condition, but a way of life. If we have come this far on ingenuity, solidarity, and stubborn hope, imagine what becomes possible with abundant resources at our reach.

So where do we go from here?

First, we must arrive at a shared understanding of what sustainability actually means for feminist movements and our institutions. We mean this not as a narrative to satisfy donor requirements, but as the ability to sustain our people, our politics, and our work over time—on our own terms. This framework must integrate what it means for all of us: including for those of us in rural areas, in zones of war and militarization, in bodies and identities that are criminalized and attacked in this current backlash.

Second, we must acknowledge and celebrate what we have done successfully in the past two decades to ensure our survival and sustainability of our collectives and organizations, all despite chronic underfunding and funding that is overwhelmingly short-term, inflexible, and restricted. We already have so much to build on.

Third, we must identify and directly target what still needs to change so that the funding systems we operate within stop denying us sustainability, and instead distribute power, risk, and responsibility more equally across civil society, philanthropy, and development institutions.

We call on everyone, especially those with financial means and access to wealth, to act with urgency and intention. To bring your human, social, and professional capital to move long-term, multi-year resourcing to feminist, women’s rights, and gender justice movements—right now. Because a world where rights truly exist must be built, sustained, and resourced into being.