Running on Urgency: A Calming Meditation for Women’s Advocates

There is a particular kind of tension that settles into women’s funding and advocacy spaces — a sense that everything matters deeply, immediately, and all at once. The work is urgent. The stakes are high. The calendar is full. Even the coffee tastes slightly stressed.

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash

Funding cycles are short and seem to demand that we fill the hours with news-cycle-induced campaigns. Even well-intentioned conversations can carry a low hum of pressure, as if pausing too long might be wasting the precious minutes we feminist whirlwinds have available to save the planet.

Over time, urgency has a way of turning even our best ideas into sprinting marathons — a pace that no one can sustain, and that very few enjoy.

This posture is a realistic response to a landscape shaped by underfunding and backlash. But taking the dictum of the personal being political as our guide, I would like to suggest that sometimes we have to put the personal first. We have to slow down. We have to pause. We have to nurture ourselves.

A Call to Calm Down

Calm doesn’t mean disengaged. It means having enough steadiness to ask better questions, and enough trust in the work to let answers emerge over time.

In a sector accustomed to urgency, choosing steadiness can feel almost radical. But it may be worth asking whether the work for women’s rights, and the people funding it, might benefit from fewer alarms and a little more room to breathe.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am not defining calm as a personality trait or a wellness practice. In advocacy and philanthropy, the ability to experience calm is largely a product of structure — how time, money, and expectations are arranged.

So, for this purpose, here are some observations that funders and organizers might experiment with in defining a calmer path.

Fund Longer Than the News Cycle

For funders, taking multi-year grant approach with light reporting requirements is like being a “good enough” parent. It helps resist feeding into the idea that strategy has to be reframed every time the political weather shifts.

This helps calm the whole system. Funders can experience more peace of mind and organizations can stop scanning constantly for the next crisis signal.

Separate “Urgent” From “Important” in Decision-Making

Organizations and their leadership boards can tease out this important distinction between what’s important and what is truly urgent due to time-bound constraints. For example, if a volunteer doesn’t like the design of a new campaign poster, it’s not an emergency and doesn’t require an urgent response. Or how about this example: If a board member is dissatisfied with how she is receiving communication from the organization’s staff, it doesn’t need its own thread on Signal for after-hour rehashing.

Fund Operating Capacity. Full Stop.

That’s right. It’s good for everyone when funders normalize the funding of permanent staff jobs, childcare, FMLA leave, and longer-term financial planning.

Build in Time for Sense-Making, Not Just Reporting

As funders and as organization staffers, we can ask: What are we learning? What’s changing? What no longer fits? What’s amusing about all of this? Are we having any fun doing this work?

Learning, and getting better at things, requires psychological safety. A big key to any movement that wants to progress and attract a following is: letting go of purpose even just for short periods while you experiment and improvise.

Let Calm Be a Signal of Strength, Not Complacency

A feminist advocate I recently met and spent time with showed me a new trick. She started every new conversation with an unusually long pause when it was her turn to speak. It had an amazing effect. It slowed down the whole room.

At first I noticed how the people in the room were fidgeting, but by the third or fourth time I saw her do it, I knew she was on to something. Her behavior was reframing the conversation for more impact.

Her calm, in this sense, was not signaling an absence of authority or endurance. Quite the opposite. It was creating evidence that her message was important enough to be spoken slowly and with precision.

Optional Further Exploration

For readers interested in exploring how steadiness, time, and restraint support better decision-making — inside and outside philanthropy — the following work has been helpful to many.

Decision-Making Under Pressure

Time, Pace, and Long Horizons

Organizational Stability and Capacity

Care, Sustainability, and Nervous Systems

Print PDF

Author: Kiersten Marek

Kiersten Marek, LICSW, is the founder of Philanthropy Women. She practices clinical social work and writes about how women donors and their allies are advancing social change.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.