This World Environment Day, we reflect on the urgency of the climate and environmental crisis and pay homage to the critical role played by young feminist activism in advocating for climate and environmental justice.
These activists are not only challenging patriarchal, extractivist, and colonial norms. Still, they are also creating innovative, context-specific solutions that address a broad spectrum of social, political, economic, and environmental issues. Through this, young feminist activists continue to teach us about the interconnected nature of the environmental crisis, emphasizing the need for holistic approaches that address underlying power dynamics and systemic inequalities.
As donors committed to climate and environmental justice, it’s crucial for us to recognize the unique perspectives and insights offered by young feminist movements. By centering the voices and experiences of young women and girls, in all their diversity, we can address the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on their lives and livelihoods. To play this role, the philanthropic ecosystem must recommit itself to a set of principles that are rooted in shifting the power into the hands of those at the forefront of change. This World Environment Day, FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund offers up a set of recommendations for funding feminist youth at the center of climate and environmental justice.
Reflect the multidimensional priorities of activists in your grantmaking
Those on the frontline of the impacts of climate change are also leading the solutions to it. Young feminist groups already work at the core intersections of gender, climate, and environmental justice and challenge patriarchal, extractivist, and colonial norms. Young people are constantly building solutions as their work responds to their specific contexts and can change according to emergent issues. This means that often by tackling one social issue they are also advancing related other struggles. Funders must therefore respond to the diverse and evolving activism by young feminists with grantmaking criteria that reflect the intersectionality of young feminists and that do not prioritize funders’ conceptions of what is important. Grantmaking criteria that adequately cover a wide range of social, political, economic, and environmental justice work being done by young feminist activists. Young changemakers should see their priorities in a funder’s grantmaking criteria from the onset, without feeling pressured to alter their priorities to increase their chances of accessing funding.
Activists need core, flexible, and sustained funding
The funder’s role is to provide young feminist climate activists with flexible, sustained core resources so that they can lead the efforts they believe are more effective at any moment in time. A participatory grantmaking process allows activists themselves to decide their priorities and collectively choose where resources go. As experts on their own realities, funders should trust that activists organizing on the ground know what is most pressing in their particular contexts and know best where to direct their resources. Also, funders must be ready to support activists for the long haul. The global ecosystemic transformations that we need will take some time to be settled, and activists and movements need to be supported in a sustained effort that allows them to build their resilience, autonomy, and independence.
The outside world must be mirrored inside funding organizations
Intersectional funding for youth requires an organizational and structural shift in funding organizations. This means we need more diverse and inclusive teams that can co-create more effective intersectional programming and advocacy for the groups they support. This translates into having staff from underrepresented regions and identities, young staff who are activists themselves and who have direct ways of communication with groups on the ground, particularly groups at the frontline of the impacts of environmental and climate change such as young people in indigenous and rural communities. New work systems and habits take time to build. Funders should make sure there are ample resources, dedicated people, and a flexible timeline to get these needed changes integrated within their organization.
Boldness in philanthropy: increasing collaboration with other funders to support activists’ emerging challenges
Young climate feminists and environmental defenders face multiple and intersecting challenges. Their resistance and the alternatives they innovate are chronically underfunded. Yet we see their actions rise and increase the potential for global transformation. As funders, increased collaboration across the sector will provide more flexible, core, and context-responsive support to young people at the frontlines. Moreover, we invite the philanthropic sector to be bold and join us in being activist funders that push traditional and patriarchal power dynamics to become more inclusive and responsive to social and environmental movements. If we put our heads, best practices, and resources together, we could see major transformations in the unequal structures that have led to the current compounded crises and build a better future where those at the margins no longer survive but thrive.
Building transformational feminist climate infrastructures
The climate crisis is not a technical mistake, and thus, solutions solely based on technology or the markets will always be insufficient. To attend to the root causes, young feminists are calling on us to pay attention to how the climate crisis is also an issue of collective care where everyone’s well-being – the people’s and the planet’s – should be at the centre. As funders, we are called to mobilize resources to initiatives that strengthen the economic, social, and political safety nets for the main carers of our societies: women and the youth.
