Editor’s Note: The following Op-Ed by Yifat Susskind, Executive Director of MADRE, helps to shine a light on the setbacks being faced by feminism in today’s authoritarian world, and offers some key insights on how feminist movements might become more self-sufficient and remain powerful in today’s hostile political environment.
2025 will be remembered as the year that transformed both philanthropy and the global women’s movement as we know it. All around the world, women’s rights organizations are caught between an increasingly emboldened right-wing opposition and an unprecedented funding shortfall. Until recently, these gathering threats were treated as separate problems. But democratic backsliding and donor retreat are not merely trending together: they are twin symptoms of the same malady, which has reached epidemic proportions with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Those of us involved in funding women’s rights organizations have seen how democratic deficits induce budget deficits for grassroots women and girl-led organizations. We’ve also seen the tenacity, ingenuity and resourcefulness of women organizing in some of the world’s most repressive environments. Feminist movements are working to meet this moment by developing new, diversified strategies to finance and sustain crucial work. And philanthropy has a critical role to play in resourcing this much-needed paradigm shift towards more resilient, self-sustaining movements for women’s rights worldwide.
The Limits of Philanthropy
Around the world, most not-for-profit organizations are almost entirely dependent upon philanthropic donations and foreign assistance to sustain the work that much of humanity depends upon for safety, essential services, and long-term investments in our collective future. This is precisely the way the entire system is designed, reflected in the designation and regulation of “non-profit organizations.” The existential flaws and risks in this design are more glaring than ever before.
As right-wing parties gain power through national elections, major bilateral funders, including Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States, are reversing long-standing commitments to foreign assistance generally, and gender equality in particular. In countries around the world—from Russia to India to Argentina to the US and beyond—we are witnessing the institutionalization of the anti-rights movement at the highest levels of government and a windfall for right-wing civil society organizations determined to rollback the gains of progressive social movements.
As the world’s largest providers of foreign assistance slash aid budgets, women’s organizations are forced to divert their focus from long-term gender equality efforts to the provision of short-term critical services. Where funding for women’s rights and gender equality continues to flow, it often does so under new and excessive restrictions, which further impede the work of women’s rights organizations and movements, prioritizing the interests and fears of funders over the needs of communities.
The work of ensuring the enfranchisement, political participation and basic rights of half the world’s population is fundamental to democracy, making women’s rights organizations both a first-line of defense of liberal democracy and a target of authoritarian States and movements. Yet rather than ramp up support to feminist organizing at this critical moment, much of private philanthropy is in stark retreat. Key global women’s rights funders, including Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Wallace Global Fund, and others, have either announced their closure or scaled back their women’s rights programming, in some cases abruptly and with little time for grantees to adapt. Most recently, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, the Gates Foundation, announced its wind-down, while the strategic direction of two of the world’s other largest foundations – Ford and Open Society Foundations (OSF) – remains unclear.
The outlook for individual giving is no brighter. The greatest generational transfer of wealth in history– accruing to more women than ever before– has failed to produce a commensurate number of new foundations. Increasingly, people of means are choosing instead to establish donor advised funds, which are not required to make grants. There is an estimated $250 billion dollars sitting in donor advised funds right now, doing little else than generating returns for the donors and banks. When money is granted, it is often done in small amounts and haphazardly– with little research, context analysis or expert input that is the signature added value of professionally staffed foundations.
In fact, the political empowerment of authoritarian forces, particularly in the US, has produced a notable chilling effect across philanthropy. Institutional funders, such as Ford, OSF, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Tides Foundation, have become targets of right-wing smear campaigns, lawsuits, or bad-faith government investigations, purportedly undertaken to root out support for terrorism. Meanwhile, individuals are increasingly fearful of being identified as donors of groups that may come under scrutiny in a newly repressive environment for philanthropy and a rapid closing of civic space as a whole. Many foundations operate discreetly, meaning there is little public accountability– including support and encouragement to those foundations making brave decisions. The public support we have seen for universities holding the line, for example, has not been mirrored in philanthropy. Taken together, these dynamics are producing an existential threat to the financial viability of feminist organizations worldwide, just as authoritarians intended.
The Opportunity
Although some significant institutional and individual donors are thankfully maintaining their commitment to gender equality, the degree of turmoil, transition and realignment within philanthropy is outpacing the ability of many organizations to adapt. Seismic shifts in both the political and funding landscape demand a level of flanking and donor organizing never seen before as well as the adoption of additional, new funding models.. Tw
Two moves are urgently needed right now. First, donors must organize a broad, concerted, collective response against authoritarianism– much as we’ve seen in the university sector in recent weeks. There are a few promising developments, such as the Unite in Advance Coalition and new levels of solidarity and coordination between donors and their grantees. We urge funders to deepen and accelerate such initiatives, for the safety of all. Second, resources are needed to underwrite a bridging period, one that would give women’s rights organizations time to research, test, evaluate, and refine alternative means of financing their work beyond philanthropy.
Initial areas of inquiry include:
- What can the global women’s movement learn from movements past and present that have financed significant work outside of philanthropy? Could we adapt modalities of self-funded movements, like Labor, mission-aligned income-generation, or fee-for-service work?
- How can time-tested, locally-rooted models of women’s resource mobilization, such as African women’s revolving loan funds or models of mutual aid, be adapted and scaled to support feminist work?
- What needs to change within the feminist funding ecosystem to account for contracting resources? How can these changes be undertaken while avoiding destructive competition over scarce funding and maximizing protections for the work of the sector and the people who rely on it? Is there potential for collective approaches, such as pooled investment funds or shared service centers, to support work?
While we decry the retreat of funding for feminist work, we also know that the contradictions and constraints of philanthropy have at times undermined truly intersectional feminist organizing, mobilization, and service delivery– even as foundations and foreign aid groups proclaim their dedication to long-term impactWe therefore approach this moment of rupture with both alarm about the threat it poses to our movements and collective safety and progress, and optimism about the solutions we can develop together. Whatever the future of financing feminism looks like, we know that it will emerge as a result of the brilliance and determination of women and gender-expansive people fighting for their rights. Meanwhile, within a few short years, philanthropy will be having a reckoning: where did we stand and what did we do in this moment? Young feminists are already collecting the receipts.
