BY Laura Valenciano Arrieta, Sara Martinez Cabello
We have been reflecting for a while on what it means to be a feminist leader. One thing keeps coming back to us: feminist leadership does not happen in a silo. Our organizing spaces exist within the very system that we’re trying to dismantle, and over and over again, we have gathered evidence that they can replicate and enable power imbalances, oppression, and violence.
Within our movements, we have learnt to value skills, abilities, and displays of what can only be a revamped meritocratic system with better marketing. In this unconscious exercise, we have begun to equate leadership with a narrow skillset, to distinguish the work of one person from that of the other, and build logics of competition instead of cooperation, even if that’s not our intention.
This has led to many of us finding a sense of self-worth or belonging when we do things right “for our movements”, even if we do them alone.
Time and time again, we see people having a hard time leaving the spaces they occupy, overstaying and holding on to the very human wish to feel like we belong. This is why leadership renewal can be so uncomfortable at times.
It is a systemic structure, not individual practices, that makes it so hard to leave. We create systems and structures that assign faces and names to roles in which people become indispensable, leading to some carrying more work, responsibility, or risks than others. We see this indispensability happening in the form of resistance from third parties to deal with new members or activists out of their own convenience, and by repeatedly inviting the same people to occupy the very limited spaces for civil society in decision-making spaces. Indispensability translates into donors basing funding decisions on personal trust, or only funding project implementation but not overhead or any administrative costs.
We play along these dynamics when we proudly write up our reports saying that our administrative costs, or salaries, are the lowest of our budget lines, without understanding what exactly that means, and who it is we are doing a disservice to. When we only value the shiny and worth-framing work, we’re building a structure that puts value in productivity, not humanity. These dynamics tend to create a sense of urgency for the indispensable party that does not allow for learning to occur, let alone be transferred or shared. With time, this leads to leaders being burned out and losing themselves in their role, only to be shunned later because they held on to their positions for too long.
The structures that our movements continue to replicate and uphold are not random. They are a way in which capitalist structures slip into our movements without us even realizing it. These structures mirror the very ones we question when we get angry at donor practices.
It is the NGO industrial complex at its finest, and it is exactly that which we must abolish.
Feminists from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence have used the NGO or Non-Profit industrial Complex framework to describe how relationships between governments, funders, and non-profits can operate to deradicalize movements.
The NGO Industrial Complex allows for surveillance and monitoring. It permits the State and private money a direct glimpse into organizing, allowing for control, derailment of efforts away from their interests, and the overall management and micromanagement of social and political movements. It allows corporations to “social justice wash” their practices through philanthropic work, and pushes social justice movements to settle for conditions given by funders that impede us from doing meaningful advocacy and actual transformation work.
Our constant looking for funding drives many of our organizations away from our very missions, and creates the idea that, in order for our work to be sustainable, it must be monetarily funded. That funding, of course, means having to constantly convince donors that our work, and we, as people operating within the movements, are still relevant and worth investing in.
The paradox comes from the fact that our missions and visions depict utopian worlds where people are free, happy, and have full access to their rights. At the same time, in order to get funding, we have to convince donors that we’re not yet living that utopian dream, and that the skills we bring are essential to its construction. This means that not reaching that dream is what makes our movements worth investing in.
These deep-rooted systems end up redirecting activism into career-based organizing, with everything that it entails, in exchange for the means to survive under capitalism while serving capitalism itself. They encourage, and we even dare say that they force, our social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures in exchange for validation, while dissuading us from challenging said structures to begin with.
We are fed crumbs, minuscule social change, to keep us entertaining the dynamic, like when a toxic hookup likes an IG post just to keep you around.
If the board game is created by those who oppress us, then the rules of the game will benefit them as well. The game is rigged, and we keep throwing the dice instead of knocking the board game off the table.
As we write this, we want to emphasize not that we should give up, call it a day, and live in a completely unrealistic world where this doesn’t exist. We cannot turn completely the other way around for the sake of being “radical enough” or our movements to be “pure enough” and free from any external interests whatsoever.
What we envision for our movement is to understand this paradox, be mindful of how it can easily slip into our practices, and be strategic as to how we are engaging with the game. This is what we feel feminist leadership is all about: setting our own limitations and grappling with the contradictions that our own work creates.
The work of building feminist leadership can begin by questioning how to strike a balance between sustainability, autonomy, and transition. It can include fighting the impulse to overrely on one or a few people by creating balanced workloads allowing for meaningful rest and caring transitions; it must revalue administrative work as indispensable for our sustainability and as a core aspect of our organizing, and it must mean challenging business-as-usual practices that center convenience over intention. Building feminist leadership is collective work that can only be done movement-wide, in collaboration and in constant learning and unlearning with other forms of organizations, donors, and institutions who are willing to take our side and be our game accomplices.
This will not be an easy game, but we invite you to at least try to play it in a new way.