NEWSLETTER: Meet the Moment, Support the Collaborative this GivingTuesday
A LETTER FROM LYRIC THOMPSON, FOUNDER AND CEO OF THE FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY COLLABORATIVE
Today, we mark GivingTuesday, an occasion to support organizations and initiatives doing good work in the world today to deliver us a better tomorrow. We hope that you count the Collaborative among those organizations, and that you will consider donating to our campaign to close our 2026 budget gap.
Like many nonprofits, we find ourselves facing an uncertain financial future in this highly-polarized environment. For the first time in our history, we have had donors pull funds, citing the uncertain political context and concerns about attacks on philanthropic and charitable institutions in the global “war on woke.” Words like “feminist” have attracted negative attention from right-wing media and online trolls, posing such threats that we are considering changing our name to ensure our survival.
As I told PassBlue’s Maria Luisa Gambale and Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal, “It’s pretty dire.”
We’re not alone. A report by UN Women earlier this year found that, due to unprecedented cuts to official development assistance, half of women’s rights organizations working in crisis settings are likely to close their doors within six months. The Alliance for Feminist Movements presents a similarly stark analysis, zooming out to include budget cuts from private philanthropies as well.
However, we are not without hope. As our Senior Fellow Beth Woroniuk found in her research, feminist foreign policy countries outperform other donors in their levels of investment in gender equality and specifically support for women’s rights organizations at a roughly 5:1 ratio. Women philanthropists like Mackenzie Scott and Melinda Gates are doing their part, channeling more resources to charities and to women’s funds, organizations and advocates than their male counterparts.
And on a more personal level, we have been humbled and inspired by the incredible ways in which our community is showing up for us in this uncertain time. When we lost funding from a donor shifting away from supporting U.S.-based organizations in the current climate, our longtime French partner, Equipop, agreed to take on our France-based staff member and continue the work on our behalf. Where some funders have had to step back, others are stepping forward, increasing support as they are able. For the first time, we are experimenting with government partnerships, supporting the Government of France to build an accountability mechanism for the annual ministerial conferences on feminist foreign policy. And while our work on foreign policy has not traditionally been of as much interest to individual philanthropists, a few have responded to our call and are beginning to help us build an individual giving program (Thank you, Pete Proimos and Stacey Keare!).
The lessons we are taking from this moment are clear:
Despite the precarity, this is a moment of real progress and hope beyond the headlines. Feminist foreign policy is emerging as the framework we need to meet this moment.
But that progress is under real threat as critical resources for this work dwindle. An infusion of political and financial support is urgently needed.
Feminists have built a transnational ecosystem that is nurturing and providing strength to its members, who are stepping up and innovating with new strategies to find our way forward together. It won’t be easy, but it's our unity, hope and commitment to this work and to each other that will sustain us. (To wit: please also support our amazing members who are making foreign policy feminist in the U.S. and around the world).
I know you’re probably receiving a lot of these solicitations, given the dire state of funding for gender equality today. As you consider where to invest, it can be hard to decide which initiatives to support. So, in closing, I’ll make our case by sharing a powerful endorsement from a former ambassador for feminist foreign policy who I was interviewing for a project documenting lessons learned from different contexts on how to sustain feminist foreign policy gains in the face of backlash. This is a diplomat who had experimented widely with various tactics, from building community-based support for FFP across her country; to soliciting support from regional partners to expand the work regionally; to building buy-in through diplomatic associations and political leaders in her government and conducting media outreach to build buzz and intrigue.
When I asked her to pick one thing that she thought had done the most to sustain this work, she didn’t hesitate:
“The best instrument to preserve and protect feminist foreign policy is the Collaborative,” she said. “Write that down.”
In solidarity,
Lyric Thompson
Founder and CEO, Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative