Practicing solidarity: Lessons from a partnership between funders and social movements  

While 2025 has been a year of mounting crises, it has also seen powerful grassroots organizing, from local demonstrations across the United States to global gatherings for food sovereignty and climate justice. Grassroots feminist movements are playing an important role, as they offer intersectional frameworks to advance diverse struggles. 

To sustain and bolster this vital work in the face of cuts to traditional funding, social movements and funders need to work more closely than ever. But to strengthen this relationship, we need to acknowledge inequitable power dynamics, seek mutual learning, and push the boundaries of how philanthropy has traditionally functioned. 

At Grassroots International, a funder committed to supporting social movements, we’ve been engaged in a process of deep dialogue, learning, and collaboration through a framework we call “solidarity philanthropy.” Here’s what we’ve learned from grassroots feminist movements about three components essential to solidarity philanthropy. 

1. Relationships of learning and trust 

Grassroots feminisms are worldviews and political practices rooted in the realities of women, queer, trans, and nonbinary people facing intersecting systems of oppression. As a funder primarily focused on struggles over food, land, water, and territory, our understanding has been deeply shaped by movement partners like World March of Women (WMW), a movement active in more than 60 countries. 

A defining moment in this learning was marching shoulder to shoulder with WMW through the streets of Paris at the People’s Summit, held in parallel to the 2015 COP21 climate meetings. The experience solidified for us how personal and structural violence against women and LGBTQIA+ people intersect with environmental and food system issues. That learning profoundly influenced our approach to grantmaking moving forward. 

Together, we’ve realized that transforming deep and persistent injustices depends on long-term, mutual commitment. We’ve also realized that the depth of trust within a partnership determines the scale of what that partnership can create. 

2. From funding to accompaniment 

Another takeaway from our relationship is that funding alone isn’t enough. Solidarity requires accompaniment—showing up as a partner and ally. In 2018, we joined WMW, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ), and the Indigenous Environmental Network in launching the Strengthening Grassroots Feminist Movements Collaboration. The initiative paired flexible funding with exchanges and joint strategy spaces, enabling movement leaders to connect and learn across regions. A central outcome was the Berta Cáceres International Feminist Organizing School (IFOS), which convenes organizers from more than 40 countries for collective education and planning to advance “feminist economies for the sustainability of life.” Started as a virtual effort over the pandemic, IFOS has been expanding nationally and regionally through a train-the-trainer approach and is set to launch in person in Kenya in 2026. 

IFOS has demonstrated how movements grow stronger by learning from one another—sharing strategy, analysis, and organizing skills across local and global contexts. When funders both resource and take part in exchanges and convenings, they help sustain this mutual learning as a vital engine of collective power. By going beyond funding, accompaniment transforms philanthropy from a transactional exchange into a long-term practice of trust, reflection, and collective progress. 

3. Financial autonomy 

WMW and other partners have helped us understand the fundamental importance of financial autonomy—of movements engaging funders on an equal footing, setting their own priorities and timelines, and being supported by reliable funding and long-term solidarity. And this requires a mindset shift among funders. 

Our partnership has made clear that when funders commit to learning that cultivates their political consciousnesses, realigning their practices, and holding one another accountable, meaningful shifts in philanthropic culture become possible. The Feminist Organizing School for Funders, developed alongside IFOS and anchored by GGJ, is one example. By learning side by side with movement leaders, funders confront how they can either reinforce unequal power dynamics or help dismantle them, with critical implications for movements’ financial autonomy. 

This shared learning has deepened funders’ understanding of financial autonomy as moving away from top-down, donor-driven, conditional funding and onerous reporting requirements, toward long-term general operating or flexible core support. It has also broadened our sense of responsibility to include resourcing movement infrastructure, learning exchanges, emergency response, and other needs as they emerge. 

Working together toward collective progress 

This critical moment is an important opportunity for self-reflection and transformation in the sector. It offers a chance for us to come together as a connected community that helps shift money and power to those on the frontlines driving change. Our shared learnings have shaped our understanding of solidarity philanthropy, a concept we’re still refining as we build partnerships between funders and social movements that reflect the broader transformation we seek. We hope these learnings offer nonprofits a clear starting point to put these principles into practice and help build relationships grounded in solidarity. 

Photo credit: Hanae Takahashi, Friends of the Earth Japan (@hanaetakahashi.i)