Rest as Resistance: How Feminist Movements Are Sustaining Themselves Through Care

Across crisis zones, conflict-affected regions, and fragile political contexts, feminist activists are working tirelessly to end violence against women and girls. But they are also navigating the ongoing challenge of caring for themselves, their teams, and their movements — sustaining the very people and spaces that make their work possible.

Centering Care in Grantmaking

For more than 15 years, the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women has supported the self and collective care of its grantee partners. What began as a modest budget line in 2017 has since grown into a vital tool for building resilience of organizations and movements working on ending violence against women and girls, and resisting burnout, trauma, and backlash.

In the early days, few organizations budgeted for staff well-being. “We didn’t think we were allowed,” one partner reflected. That began to change when the UN Trust Fund introduced a dedicated self-care budget line in 2017 — initially capped at USD 2,000 and limited to small grassroots groups. Today, all grantee partners — large and small — are eligible, and in response to prolonged crises and the growing toll of frontline work, the maximum amount has increased to USD 7,500 per grant. But more than the amount, it is the message that mattered.

“For the first time, we realized: we need to spend money on ourselves and not just on our work and on our beneficiaries” — Quoted in Organizational Resilience: A Study of Practice-Based Knowledge, 2023

With this funding, grantee partners have created rest spaces, hosted trauma healing sessions, renovated offices to ensure privacy for survivors, and even built gardens and fish farms — literal and metaphorical lifelines. Care is also deeply contextual and intersectional – for partners in Asia, self-care has looked like sustainability: planting food, sharing meals, and nurturing the earth together; for partners in Eastern Europe and Arab States, it meant finding space to breathe in a protracted conflict landscape where trauma lingers in every interaction; while for partners in West Africa, it meant learning to say no — to set boundaries, to rest, to step away, to seek support.

“This budget line took the self-guilt out of care. [We] are exposed to attacks, whether verbal or physical sense, threats and pressures. Not only pressures by perpetrators of violence, but pressures from the institutions, from the government. It's really, it is important to have supervision with our psychologists and to work on our well-being as well.” —  Grantee partner from Bosnia-Herzegovina

Mainstreaming care as feminist crisis response

The grantee partners supported by the UN Trust Fund work in some of the most difficult conditions in the world. They routinely deal with not only the trauma of survivors, but also surveillance, threats, state hostility, and social stigma. In these contexts, women’s rights organizations are not only holding the line and using the care budget but are also leading bold responses and mainstreaming care. Raising Voices for instance, through their “rethink and re-energize” sessions across five countries, positions collective care as political resistance — especially where civil society space is shrinking, activism is being depoliticized, and burnout is high. By recognizing that ending violence requires sustainable, energized movements, Raising Voices is helping rebuild the collective power needed to challenge patriarchal systems — not just care for individuals, but sustain entire movements.

“Care is not a break from the work. It is the work.” — ACT Convening participant, 2024

Today, care is also integrated into every convening hosted by the UN Trust Fund — not just as a topic, but as a principle that shapes the agenda, space, and pace. It is embedded into technical guidance, learning exchanges, and partner conversations. Because care is no longer a footnote. It is a feminist methodology.

What grantee partners want donors to know

Despite the growing recognition, many organizations still struggle to fully benefit from care-related funding. Some common challenges include: a tendency to prioritize programming over people, or to see care as indulgent, for organizations in high-conflict zones, USD 7,500 across four years may not be enough for several organizations and finally, some organizations reallocate care budgets to service delivery out of guilt or need.

In order to overcome these challenges, partners have consistently shared ideas for how donors can better support care as a legitimate, measurable part of organizational development:

• Include care in proposals, results frameworks, and reporting, alongside other technical assistance
• Invest in solidarity spaces and peer learning to reduce isolation
• Ensure flexible, core, and multi-year funding that allows organizations to adapt as needs evolve and respond with urgency and care
• Fund care strategies that are intersectional, context-specific, and rooted in local realities

To learn more about our care work, listen to the most recent podcast titled “Put on Your Oxygen Mask First Before Helping Others”. And see here more details of the UN Trust Fund’s support and budget line on care.