I can’t say I’ve seen it all, but I’ve seen enough over the past 10 years in feminist movements to make some comments that might prove useful to big picture thinkers and organizational leaders in the sector. I’ve seen:
- movements diluted by demands to serve everyone, causing them to lose sight of the core constituency of women
- organizations with a lack of fiscal planning and/or oversight
- reactive, fear-driven decision-making from women’s rights leadership
- mission drift
- underprepared boards
- exhausted women leaders
- funders who like the idea of feminist work but won’t invest in infrastructure
- unsophisticated or non-existent budgets
We all know it’s not pretty out there for women looking for a better tomorrow. We are currently facing severe political and social backlash. On top of that, many women’s organizations struggle mightily with internal issues.
I’m going to try to shed some light on all of this and offer some thoughts on how to seek a middle path where women can advance their agenda while also maintaining inclusiveness and compassion as core values.
How Funders and Leaders Can Build Stronger, Less Vulnerable Feminist Movements
First, let’s talk about this idea in exclusionary terms, ruling out what we don’t want to see and what doesn’t serve the purpose of growing women’s power. Then we will build a hypothesis about what can serve to build that power both strategically and with more permanence.
We don’t want:
- less care in women’s movements or the world in general
- less inclusion of people who need to be included
- less moral purpose and political seriousness for feminism.
We do want:
- less exposure to structural harm, both internal to women’s organizations and external from the surrounding culture
- more capacity to act strategically for women’s best interests as individuals and social leaders.
So let’s be real about who feminists are, to start. Many people enter feminism after:
- personal violation
- cumulative gendered harm
- professional marginalization
- repeated cultural invalidation
- political defeat and backlash
I say this not to stereotype women (not all women come to feminism from these experiences) but to help us interpret the behavior of women’s organizations and move toward a healthier model. So please bear with me.
Less Vulnerability, More Endurance-Tested Strength
Vulnerability has been treated as a virtue in women’s movements. I have gone to several feminist conferences where speakers took to the podium and extolled the virtues of vulnerability. And quite frankly, I’ve always been suspicious of this attention given to the importance of vulnerability.
Why? Because we’ve almost gotten to the point of treating strength as suspect, deserving of derision or, more importantly, defunding. That inversion has cost us profound amounts of time, energy, and money. We need to set things right in order for feminism to make real gains.
At its core, this is about flipping the script so that women’s strength is treated with more respect and women’s vulnerability is treated with more suspicion.
So how do we get there?
1. Fund infrastructure, not just intention
If funders want impact, they must stop treating infrastructure as overhead. This gets said over and over, and there’s a reason for it. So let me say it again and please read this slowly and repeatedly:
Funders must explicitly fund multi-year operating reserves, real financial staffs and systems, human resources and legal support, and data tools for feminist organizations.
Feminist organizations cannot out-maneuver hostile environments while running on volunteer labor and good will. No movement becomes powerful by staying administratively fragile.
2. Stop rewarding performative collaboration
Funders often say they want collaboration — but they rarely fund the cost of it. Collaboration without time, staffing, and clear boundaries becomes forced vulnerability, not strategy. Here’s an example: a group of women’s organizations let down their guard and have some events together, then find out their funding streams have been re-routed to their so-called collaborators. That’s not collaboration. That’s just messing with an already fragile system.
Funders should:
- ask why collaboration is needed
- fund fewer, deeper partnerships
- allow organizations to say “no” without penalty
Collaboration should be a choice, not a survival tactic.
3. Protect mission clarity — don’t dilute it
One of the most subtle harms that funders cause is mission-drift by funding incentives to take on work outside the scope of women’s rights.
When women’s organizations are expected to absorb adjacent movements and constantly broaden their scope to remain fundable, they lose strategic traction.
Funders can help by:
- funding women-centered work unapologetically
- resisting the urge to make every grant cover every issue
- backing organizations that draw clear boundaries
A movement that stands for everyone ends up accountable to no one.
4. Lengthen time horizons
Short-term grants produce constant reactivity. Like short political cycles which force elected officials to fundraise for the next election as soon as they get into office, short-term grants make women’s organizations weak on strategy and put them in the position of constantly running pilots that never get scaled into real culture-shifting activity.
Strong movements are built over decades, not grant cycles.
Funders should commit to at least 3–5 year funding cycles for feminist organizations. Rather than create more paperwork headaches, allow annual reports and budgets to serve as reporting tools.
5. Fund strength, not just survival stories
Women’s organizations are often funded when they appear desperate. This trains movement leaders to behave with performative fragility, bringing us back to vulnerability and its problematic nature as a movement’s identifier. A movement that must appear vulnerable to survive will never become powerful.
Instead, funders should reward strategic confidence, and fund organizations that pick a lane and stay in it. That means a woman’s organization will be able to say, “We appreciate the special needs of women in the armed services but we can’t take on advocating for this constituency right now,” or “Sorry, we can’t cover voting rights since it’s beyond our core mission.”
Sound cruel and out of step with the times? That’s because we’ve devolved into a system where many funders signal that they want feminist organizations to subordinate their missions to larger social justice narratives. And those organizations (being much less powerful in terms of real dollars than most organizations) bend to the will of the funders’ preferences.
Here’s another example: an organization dedicated to ending domestic violence is expected to solve housing insecurity; address police reform; take on poverty, addiction, and mental health problems; and respond to every news cycle that raises issues of injustice.
The end result: women’s shelters are underfunded, staff for the organization are underpaid, and safety outcomes for domestic violence survivors are compromised. When everything becomes your responsibility, nothing gets resolved deeply.
Final Thoughts
This is the sum total of what I am trying to say:
Feminist movements don’t fail because they care too much.
They struggle because they are required to care without protection, resources, or strategic boundaries.
On the giant chessboard of social change, you cannot move your pieces effectively if you’re required to leave yourself exposed from every side.
Bibliography
Challenges for Feminist/Women’s Organizations
- “Advocacy for resourcing feminist and women’s rights organisations” – Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters
Insights from AWID on funding challenges and the need for core and flexible funding for feminist movements.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10291897/ - “The Quiet Crisis Hitting Feminist Movements and How Women’s and Feminist Funds Are Rising to Meet It” – Prospera (2025)
A recent report describing widespread defunding for feminist movements and the role of feminist funds as financial backbones.
https://prospera-inwf.org/resource/the-quiet-crisis-hitting-feminist-movements-and-how-womens-and-feminist-funds-are-rising-to-meet-it/ - “Women’s organisations and feminist mobilisation: supporting the foundational drivers of gender equality” – ODI Briefing Note
Overview of under-support and barriers for women’s movements, including recommendations for more core, long-term support.
https://odi.org/en/publications/womens-organisations-and-feminist-mobilisation-supporting-the-foundational-drivers-of-gender-equality/ - “20 years of shamefully scarce funding for feminists and women’s rights movements” – AWID
AWID’s overview of the longstanding global funding inequities that limit women’s rights organizations’ growth.
https://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/20-years-shamefully-scarce-funding-feminists-and-womens-rights-movements
External Pressures & Backlash (Context)
- “The New Global Struggle Over Gender, Rights, and Family Values” – Carnegie Endowment (2025)
Analysis of a global “anti-gender backlash” and increased resistance to gender equality advocacy in many regions.
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/06/the-new-global-struggle-over-gender-rights-and-family-values - “How funding women’s organizations prevents violence against women” – UN Women Explainer
Summarizes research on how strong, well-funded women’s rights movements contribute to reductions in gender-based violence.
https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/how-funding-womens-organizations-prevents-violence-against-women
Organizational Studies (Mission Drift & Vulnerability)
- Nonprofit mission and organizational dynamics research: This research shows how nonprofits’ mission responsiveness and external pressures can pull organizations away from their core purposes.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344272616_Nonprofit_Mission_Constancy_Responsiveness_or_Deflection
