On March 18, we presented our Network at an online event in the framework of the Committee on the Status of Women. Our team talked about the history of how the Network was founded, what it means for each of us, and which work is enabled through the Network. We centered the efforts of grassroots feminist groups and discussed what principles enable a more flexible, caring, sustainable, and feminist infrastructure of moving resources. We will share our key remarks and advocacy recommendations in a series of three articles.
Part one, written by our member Anastasia Chebotaryova, is about the feminist principles of funding and partnership, which we developed and want to promote. Follow us for part two (on communities of care) and part three (on feminist visions of the future).
My name is Anastasia Chebotaryova, and today, I want to speak about intersectional feminist perspectives on wartime response to the crisis and the practical case of UFN on how we are moving resources and shifting narratives about what support in times of war means.
I have been a feminist activist since 2017. My work and life are based in Kyiv. I chose to stay in my hometown even when Russian troops occupied the suburbs of my city. During that time, I joined the efforts of volunteer cooperation that provided various ranges of humanitarian support to people. This experience showed me how activist networks and grassroots cooperation have become the country’s circulatory system. Grassroots movements, not restricted by project-cycle logic and top-down frameworks that were not adequately localized nor adapted, became the most effective responders to multiple crises.
With the beginning of the full-scale war, the everyday priorities of activists and WROs were significantly expanded due to the additional workload related to assisting IDPs (especially women and children) and rising levels of GBV and CRSV. The war brought changes to feminist organizations and initiatives but did not weaken them, as new members (very often volunteers or IDPs) joined them.
However, feminist grassroots efforts in Ukraine are still not systematically supported and remain invisible. The intersectional grassroots feminist movement, which has been historically underfunded in Eastern Europe and across the Globe, stayed under-resourced during the war in Ukraine. Even with donors entering the country, grantmaking is restricted, slow-moving, and overburdening with lengthy application timelines, burdensome requirements, and longer-term outcomes. Our work experience and reports coming out over the last two years confirm this. The most recent report by HIAS and Voice Amplified talks about the systemic misalignment of donors’ funds to the needs of local groups and a hierarchical relationship experienced by local organizations from international donors.
My own grassroots activist experience made me live through what multiple researchers report: the current donor and philanthropy ecosystem creates gaps in addressing rapid changes, especially for grassroots leaders. We strengthen those leaders so they are capable not only of addressing issues during the war covering for both government and international organizations and agencies but also of being able to access decision-making processes around durable solutions, recovery, and reconstruction.
As a head of grantmaking, today I will focus on how we move resources to intersectional grassroots feminist initiatives, including the unregistered and activist, in ways that are:
- Needs-based: partners can decide the topics of their activities themselves;
- Flexible: partners are able to revise their strategies during the implementation process;
- Context-sensitive: funding that provides timely emergency and livelihood support;
- Inclusive: the funding is made accessible for partners with various capacities and backgrounds;
- Intersectional: the funding aims to serve communities that face multiple types of discrimination;
- Reflexive: the funders are open to feedback through all process phases.
We support the implementation of specific practical initiatives of grassroots feminists aimed at increasing the visibility of women human rights defenders and comprehensive support for the rights and safety of women and LGBTQI people in Ukraine.
In the sub-granting program, we use the needs-based approach. This means that our partners decided on the topics of activities themselves to meet the most recent needs of their communities. The topics of the grants vary, including:
- Activities on women’s leadership, protection of women’s rights and gender equality;
- Psychosocial support for women IDPs and LGBTQI+ people;
- Advocacy support aiming rights of feminist and queer communities;
- Core support for the security, health, and sustainability of activists and vulnerable groups of women;
- Work with internally displaced persons;
- Increasing the competitiveness of women in the labor market and promoting them to the level of decision-making in Ukraine;
- Core Support of women’s and human rights organizations and groups;
- Humanitarian aid, logistical, and resource support.
Our grant program supports the efforts of feminist activists by providing flexible resources to meet rapidly changing needs. Our approach is beneficial to women, trans and nonbinary activists, who are disproportionately affected by war and have less access to resources and decision-making. We also started to incorporate a care component by providing resources to support those dealing with mental health struggles such as burnout, trauma, and other psychosocial impacts of living and working through a war.
The basis of our approach is that while most donors prefer to support institutions, we invest in people. In a war context, individual people and informal communities are the ones carrying institutional memory and capacity to sustain the movement during and after the war.
We have stories that provide evidence of how effective unrestricted funding for grassroots movements is. In the summer of 2023, after the Kakhovka Dam explosion and flood that came due to it, local activists and the government were left to provide humanitarian support to the affected population by themselves because workers of INGOs and UN agencies were not able to be on the location due to high-security risks. The situation was critical: evacuations were conducted after russian shelling from the other occupied side of the Dnipro River, houses went underwater, and there was a lack of drinking water, food, and non-food items since survivors lost everything. One unregistered initiative, Feminist Lodge, which received an unrestricted small grant for humanitarian support for women and girls, was able to provide lifesaving humanitarian aid for civilians to responders on location that lacked resources due to the unrestricted nature of their funding. Activists report that:
“We could provide support according to individual requests rather than a standardized set. We covered not only hygiene products but also necessary medicines, including for chronic patients. This became possible thanks to the flexibility of financing, which made it possible to respond to urgent and most urgent needs. When submitting the application, we could not foresee the crisis due to the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam. However, we were able to react promptly to it thanks to financing.”
This showcases how our grantmaking model enables feminist activists to respond quickly to unexpected situations, which is crucial during uncertain times like crises and war.
Anastasia Chebotaryova is a member of the Ukrainian Feminist Network for Freedom and Democracy and co-founder of the grassroots feminist organization Feminist Lodge.
Additional Sources:
Still Waiting For the Sky to Close, 2024.
Capacities and needs of women’s rights and women-led organizations in Ukraine: transformations during wartime, 2023. An analytical report of complex research conducted by NGO Resource Center with support from the Vital Voices Global Partnership.