Collective Care
Our Approach to Collective Care
Our Approach to Collective Care
To effectively meet movements’ holistic safety needs, in addition to providing fast, flexible, and short-term grants, Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism is shifting to offer longer-term funding and resourcing collective care and safety infrastructures led by feminist and LGBTQ+ movements in the U.S., West Balkans, and South Caucasus.
Through this approach, we aim to build a pipeline of movement partners who have experienced crisis and are receiving the flexible support they need to build local infrastructures, cultures, and strategies that position them to preempt and respond to the next crisis, reclaim traditional and ancestral survival technologies, and self-determine and practice social change solutions that genuinely ensure the care, protection, and safety of their communities and ecosystems.
“Turning Towards Healing Justice”, A video by Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism
Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism centers the following principles in implementing our collective care work:
- Trust
- Reciprocity
- Interdependence
- Care & Wellbeing
- Courage
- Accountability
Our practices include:
- Putting those who traditionally come last, first
- Practicing political rigor
- Embodying care
- Rooting in intentionality
- Going at a pace that brings everyone along, practicing spaciousness
- Honoring lineage
- Centering movement autonomy & self-determination
The Urgent Action Fund Guiding Principles of Collective Care
The Urgent Action Fund Guiding Principles of Collective Care
- We are interdependent, and our well-being as people, organizations, and movements is bound up in the well-being of each other and the planet too.
- Movements are more powerful and sustainable when they have access to resources to tend to their emotional, mental, physical, digital, and spiritual well-being and safety;
- Collective care strategies and practices must be community-led and determined;
- Collective care is a strategy that actively resists the ways we have been socialized toward alienation, isolation, individualism, competition, and scarcity; it models an alternative way of being and calls for us as people, and especially movements, to practice and embody our visions of liberation and justice as the basis for creating social change
- Collective care is the antithesis of dominant culture and makes visible the ways that white supremacy, racial capitalism, patriarchy, colonization, ableism, and queer and transphobia contribute to harm and generational and collective trauma;
- It asserts that we must interrogate and transform the ways generational trauma impacts us so we can work toward rebuilding systems and cultures that promote compassion, accountability, dignity, healing, safety, care, justice, belonging, and well-being.
Photo Credit: Beavera
Climate, Crisis, and Care: Our Approach to Philanthropic and Policy Advocacy
Through our advocacy work, we aim to increase access to human rights spaces for feminist activists, improve the quantity and quality of resources available to fund movements, and help ensure protection for those on the frontlines of mitigating and visibilizing rights violations and conflict.
Photo Credit: Dominique Boulay
The Emerging Roles of Collective Care for Global Feminist Movements: What You Need to Know About the Urgent Action Funds Report
“How Can We Ground Ourselves in Care and Dance Our Revolution?” contains interviews with 141 activists in 63 countries speaking on how they integrate care into their activism and work. We’ve asked those who compiled the research to provide a deeper understanding of the importance of collective care in the feminist space.
Together, we can resource feminist movements in a more sustainable
way, by integrating care into activism.
Together, we can resource feminist movements in a more sustainable
way, by integrating care into activism.
