The revolution will not be funded: three feminist imperatives for crisis response

Awino Okech of Feminist Centre for Racial Justice*

Donald Trump’s second term as American president was as expected accompanied by an escalation of his “America first” policy. Trump’s ideological approach is rooted in a white ethno-nationalist agenda undergirded by an anti-equality, anti-Black, anti-migrant and anti-internationalist stance. Trump’s raft of executive orders have been used to assert the President’s ideology nationally and through threats “reclaim” America’s power internationally. It has also included withdrawing from international institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organisation and World Health Organisation and closing United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with the attendant and desired impact on operational budgets. 

Trump’s actions underscore a deeper and longstanding problem with the existing political and economic arrangements that shape the world. That a few countries hold the power to determine in negative ways the fate of other countries has never been more evident in the ongoing televised genocide in Gaza among other world conflicts that are funded and sustained by the global North. More concerning is the evident failure of the multilateral system to halt mass murder and hold global North governments accountable for their complicity in these conflicts. Additionally, Trump’s onslaught on social justice work via an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion in the US and by extension internationally funded work has forced a critical conversation about the prevailing development funding model. I argue like others that this moment is not a passing cloud but is reflective of the cusp of a crumbling world order. Consequently, it is an invitation to consider how we step into transformative work beyond a dependence on bilateral donors and private philanthropy. However, this invitation does not absolve these entities of their current responsibilities. I share below three provocations.

The continuum of crisis response

First, there has been a lot of talk about the polycrisis and within that an assertion that feminist movements are best positioned to deliver effective crisis response due to their deep work in their communities. However, it is my position that in the last twelve months we have not been explicit about the continuum of crisis response to understand what is not being prioritised. Too much emphasis in the feminist funding ecosystem is placed on responding to immediate needs such as the importance of protecting defenders and rescuing institutions. There is very little emphasis on systems work based on an implicit assumption that those doing frontline response work have the space, time and capacity to engage in systems thinking. 

My experience from nascent work at the Feminist Centre for Racial Justice in supporting activists to connect research to transnational strategy through a two-part movement building school, confirms that the nature and demands of frontline work means that activists have no time to engage in the historical analysis of the situations they seek to transform. As part of what is named as a crisis response, we must privilege and resource knowledge as critical to supporting the transformative change we seek. This work is imperative at this moment when feminist knowledge work is under attack globally. After all, as Amical Cabral reminds us “nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory”. 

Movements versus Organisations

Second, there appears to be a narrow understanding of movements and movement support work even though everyone touts their funding as being in support of movements. I am not sure that organisations and networks are not being used as placeholders for movements. In this confusion, we are likely to reproduce the same approaches that have not worked to unsettle power because the work is rooted in the NGO logics that are often about justifying change as linear and proving institution’s centrality to the positive outcomes reported. In this context of institutionalised approaches to social justice, we have produced many activists and fewer organisers who focus on building power and strategies for change within and beyond their communities.

If we understand change making as complex, long term and contingent on many actors coming together in a synergistic manner at different moments, then the nature of change making investments must shift. The NGO industrial complex as we know it has produced competition for financial resources that could be easily alleviated by asking who else should be resourced alongside frontline work to facilitate transnational shifts. This approach unsettles the NGO industrial complex and unyokes social justice actors from resource scarcity as informing how we think about meeting this this moment.

Building Feminist Imaginaries

Finally, there has been a lot of work around feminist economic alternatives and a foregrounding of indigenous knowledge systems specifically on the commons specifically in Latin America. However, this work remains bifurcated across themes and regions with limited resources directed towards enabling spaces for building cohesive transnational feminist imaginaries. This moment invites blueprints for testing and failing (because failure is productive) to effectively step into seizing and transforming power in this global political moment. This is difficult work because it requires visualising other ways of organising societies when our worldviews are often entrenched in what we know. It is also complex work, when our archives and histories are ignored yet they offer useful blueprints for majority worldmaking from Pan African, tri-continental and Black Internationalist movements from the 1940s into the 70s. There is a responsibility for feminist informed funders to enable the work of our public intellectuals and thinkers to co-create these blueprints for the inclusive and just worlds that this moment urgently requires. When there is a lot of noise in the world, we must step back and cut through the noise to define informed action. Will you meet this moment?

About the authors

 *Professor Awino Okech is based at SOAS University of London’s Department of Politics and International Studies where she is also the founding director of the Feminist Centre for Racial Justice. A version of these remarks were delivered at a Care and Crisis convening in Brazil in May 2025.