By Oleksandra Brashovetska
What comes to mind when you think about infrastructure? Is it something tangible? Is it based on systems and processes? Are you thinking about hard infrastructure like transportation or soft infrastructure like the education system? OECD suggests that “Infrastructure plays a critical role in the well-being of people and in the development of countries and communities around the world. It enables the flow of goods, people and information, and provides services…” .
But what if we look at the infrastructure from the lens of feminist activism and grassroot movements? What if we actually listen to and honor communities, their lived experiences, sacred knowledge and traditions to define which infrastructures are already in place and which of them still need to be named? What happens when we accept interpersonal relationships, collective and self-care, resilience and sustainability as infrastructure?
Resilience
Resilience is a popular concept, used often to describe a person’s capacity to deal with change and become stronger especially in response to crises (e.g. climate change), praising an individual’s endurance, celebrating survival and adaptation. While resilience is an appreciated strength, there is danger in celebrating resilience without questioning conditions that make resilience necessary. Young people, women and queer communities in the Global Majority are disproportionately affected by overlapping crises, and are, therefore, forced to develop resilience.
What if resilience was never meant to be a solitary achievement? Maybe resilience does not mean standing alone in the midst of the storm. Maybe resilience can be understood as collective practice, growing through relationships towards stronger courageous communities. “We hold each other” – one FRIDA Grantee Partner once said, sharing a story of how they navigate uncertainty. Resilience can also mean having the freedom to rest, to ask for help, to set boundaries and to say no to a system that tells us exhaustion is normal; and to reimagine and rebuild unjust systems with the support of others.
Trust
In grassroots movements and among young feminist organisers, trust is more than a feeling or relationship. Trust becomes an invisible system that allows communities to collaborate, exchange, coordinate, share risks, and act collectively. Unfortunately, the spaces in which young feminists and grassroots collectives operate are not automatically safe or trust-based, facing power inequalities and reproduced discrimination. This is why trust requires mutual accountability: communities need to know that their stories will be respected, treated with care and confidentiality. That knowledge will be owned by and always remain with the community. In this sense, trust is built through time and consistent honest transparent practices.
Trust can create conditions in which communities can do things together, can afford to take collective risks and build new more equal and fair structures and systems.
Collective care
Care can be understood in so many ways and across different contexts, yet it appears to be widely recognised as important for sustaining activism, building resilience, and ensuring long-term sustainability of communities. Often collective care practices are seen through a health lens, such as mental health practices or therapy. However, among feminist activists collective care has emerged in the form of collective infrastructure. Some examples include building care-centered team practices and policies, sharing responsibility and ensuring flexible workloads within the team, prioritising risk prevention and establishing safety systems.
Even where young feminist collectives and movements do not have established collective-care systems, there is often an understanding that organising without attention to well-being can result in exhaustion and burnout. Yet, collective care remains difficult to sustain, and the question remains: What would it take – what conditions and resources – for young organising environments to become places where girls, young women, LBTQI+ youth can practice care and sustain themselves, each other and their movements?
Evidence from feminist funders and researchers suggests that young feminist organisers already possess significant knowledge and practice around care. At FRIDA I witnessed community wisdom around care generously shared with us by grantee partners, whose practices are culturally grounded, drawing on local, traditional and ancestral practices. But what I also noticed is that care is competing with the work it is intended to sustain. Young feminist organisers often have limited-to-no resources and high workloads. Being dedicated to their communities, they first respond to the community needs, often forgetting or simply not having resources available to sustain themselves.
Conclusion
In pursuit of a more just and equitable world, we should be expanding and revising how we approach infrastructure, acknowledging the essence of soft infrastructures for communities and sustainability, and committing to intentionally resourcing all forms of infrastructures. In this way, invisible infrastructures of resilience, trust and collective care will be understood and accepted as organisational collective capacities. It is precisely relationships, tacit knowledge and communities’ wisdom that are the foundation and struts of the bridges we are building for the future.
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