Sustaining Life, Building Power
“As the world feels on the brink of a precipice, social movements are both sustaining life through their practices and building power to radically transform the very systems threatening life.”
Over 2021, while continuing the essential emergency response and care work they had been doing since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, social movements increasingly got back into the streets. They mobilized with the conviction that not doing so was too great a risk. With ever-intensifying climate chaos, crack-downs on civil society, war and militarization, gender violence, hunger, inequality, and more, the issues that drove them to mobilize were matters of life and death.
Through these actions, movements built power as they built community. Their efforts made a major impact, achieving critical wins in some cases, and keeping essential struggles going in others. Organizing continues across all sectors as we write, from Amazon workers to Amazonian communities.
We are convinced that centering support for social movements could not be a clearer mandate for progressive philanthropy. While we amplify this message within the funder community, we are also striving to embody our values about what true solidarity from a movement support organization looks like.
As the world feels on the brink of a precipice, social movements are both sustaining life through their practices and building power to radically transform the very systems threatening life. Now is the time to scale up movement-support infrastructure to match the enormity of the challenges at hand and the tremendous capacity for societal transformation that social movements have shown themselves to have.
Check out our 2021 annual report to learn how Grassroots International has been accompanying social movements in defending human rights, responding to crises, mass mobilizing, advancing transformative visions, pushing the bounds of philanthropy, and more.