View and download the full guide, Movements as Forests: A Radical Grantmaking Model for Feminist Climate Justice.

The forest ecosystem has so much to teach us. We envision a new kind of philanthropy that learns from and mirrors its interconnected resilience.

As the world spins with increasing uncertainty and deepening crises — from climate breakdown to democratic erosion, from shrinking civic space to televised genocide — we find ourselves returning to the liberatory politics and values that ground and root us. As the elite and powerful are grabbing lands, forests and livelihoods, and disrupting the very Earth’s systems which keep us all alive, we remain in solidarity with communities across the world whose lives and livelihoods are being attacked by these crises. Our interrelatedness with other humans and more-than-human beings, ubuntu (the African philosophy of interconnectedness) and solidarity, and structures of collective care and resistance are the grounds from which our work and vision blossom.

Traditional philanthropy typically operates through competitive grant processes where wealthy donors maintain control over resources, requiring detailed applications and reports from recipient organizations. This system often recreates the same power imbalances that social movements are working to dismantle.

In our vision for a different approach to philanthropy, picture movement partners not as ‘grantees’ but as diverse plant life: towering canopy trees of established movements providing shelter and stability, resilient understory shrubs of emerging groups bringing new forms of life, grassroots collectives as vital ground cover protecting the soil of our communities, and the essential mycelial networks of coalitions that connect beneath the surface. Each element contributes uniquely to the forest’s capacity to defend itself and thrive through challenges.

In this vision, funders don’t maintain their separation and power over the forest — rather, they become part of its regeneration by releasing control over resources accumulated through the extractive systems that movements are working to dismantle. Like nutrients cycling back into the soil, philanthropic wealth must return to the communities from which it came. To bring about a fundamental shift from charity to reparation, redistribution, and regeneration, philanthropic business-as-usual must be composted to be reabsorbed by the forests of movements.

We had the opportunity to co-create this nature-inspired vision through the Funder Learning and Action Co-Laboratory on Gender, Environmental and Climate Justice (FLAC) between 2023 and 2025. As part of the Design Team — movement practitioners brought together to work with funders and regranters (intermediary organizations that redistribute funds) to reimagine how to best resource feminist climate and environmental justice movements — we developed a movement-centered grantmaking model that treats funding as gifts, redistributions, or reparations rather than conditional transactions.

While FLAC ultimately sunset in June 2025 before this model could be implemented, this experiment revealed crucial insights about what radical grantmaking requires, reaffirmed the importance of centering movements, the relevance of learning from ecological relationships that challenge human/nonhuman divisions, and showed how funders must commit to changing power relations in order to move towards meaningful transformation.

Learning from movement forests

Our grantmaking design emerged from our movement experiences and vision, and was informed by reflections and conversations with FLAC funder members. Frustration with how philanthropy perpetuates the very power imbalances that movements are working to transform led us to question: how can we radically rethink grantmaking? Is it possible to do so within existing structures? Even progressive funding typically requires frontline communities and movement actors to compete, report upward to funders, and accept external oversight — with donors extracting unpaid labor while maintaining control.

We proposed five core principles for our giftmaking model:

1. Funding as unconditional gifts, not grants, recognizing wealth’s origins and treating funding as necessary redistribution rather than charity with strings attached
2. Pre-consultation instead of applications, replacing competitive processes with trust-based nominations and conversational needs assessments
3. Rotational power-sharing, where movement partners become decision-makers, with an ethic of constantly shifting power towards those with lived experience beyond grantmaking to include institutional governance, financial structures, and organizational decision-making traditionally reserved for funders
4. Non-extractive learning, through peer-to-peer exchange among movements where they control what knowledge counts and what gets shared, how and to whom
5. Collective care and mutual accountability, recognizing that movements have their own accountability systems rooted in community, with ethical labor and intentional care infrastructures as core practices

In practice, this means movements receive funding without cumbersome applications, maintain control over their work and knowledge-sharing, and participate as decision-makers rather than recipients.

This approach challenges the fundamental premise of funder oversight and control. Rather than charitable gifts with conditions, it recognizes that much philanthropic wealth originates from the same extractive systems that movements are trying to change, making redistribution a form of reparation.

Separately, these principles may seem like common sense. The radical challenge lies in implementing them within institutions designed around oversight, scarcity, risk-aversion, and control. Elements of these principles already exist within feminist funds, Indigenous funds, youth-led funds, participatory grantmaking, or mutual aid practices. Our vision is that all of these elements are interrelated and must be implemented in tandem.

We refuse the compromises that keep philanthropic power structures intact. We reject the tradeoffs that movements are repeatedly asked to make — adapting to risk-averse institutional cultures, competing against each other for resources, or accepting advisory roles that create an illusion of power-sharing without fundamental redistribution of control.

Our forest metaphor captures this vision: healthy movements, like healthy forests, require diversity, mutual support, and regenerative practices that strengthen the entire ecosystem over time. Rather than a finished product, we offer this model as a living, breathing framework that challenges funders to move beyond symbolic inclusion.

FLAC sunset gift-making as a small test

The FLAC collaboration concluded in June 2025. However, as part of FLAC’s sunset process, we were able to pilot a very small, scaled-down version of our grantmaking model through what we called ‘sunset gift-making.’

This pilot offered a glimpse into the model’s potential while operating under many constraints. Within a very tight timeline of approximately six weeks, the FLAC Design Team facilitated channeling unrestricted funds — considered ‘gifts’ or ‘reparations’ — to five diverse groups working at the intersections of gender, environment, and climate justice. These funds, ranging between $20,000 and $30,000 USD, were given with no reporting requirements and allocated based on identified needs and capacities and work already being done in the world.

The selection process, led by the Design Team, prioritized regional, thematic, and strategic diversity, focusing on community-led alternatives and groups on the frontlines of environmental defense. We mapped groups with limited access to external funding, identifying 20 organizations before selecting five based on urgent need and ensuring no direct ties to Design Team members, to avoid conflicts of interest.

Importantly, we only contacted groups we could actually fund, managing expectations with care. When large numbers of applicants compete for a few grants, most groups end up donating their unpaid labor to a system never designed to support them. We chose relationships over competition. At the same time, we recognize that nomination-based systems require concerted efforts to avoid gatekeeping, and to disrupt the privilege of individuals and groups who most commonly have access to philanthropy.

The five groups ultimately supported included:

• A network in Palestine focusing on environmental justice with women’s leadership in solar and low-carbon energy projects, operating amidst ongoing infrastructure destruction and apartheid.
• A grassroots, women-led community movement in South Africa fighting extractivism and coal impacts.
• An Indigenous women’s research team in Myanmar dedicated to biodiversity documentation, environmental defense, and cultural work.
• A small community group in Western Uganda empowering rural women to manage livelihoods and protect water commons across several districts.
• A network based in Guatemala connecting Indigenous women, land defenders, and healers across Mexico, Central America, and Brazil, championing Indigenous sovereignty, ecofeminism, and climate justice through cross-community exchanges and creative campaigns.

We eliminated bureaucratic barriers by implementing what movements have long requested: no applications, no reporting requirements to fulfill, no competitive processes to navigate — just honest conversations about the current realities and threats, the needs, and direct resource transfer based on trust, movement connections, and shared liberatory values. Even within a very tight timeline and other restrictions, this process eliminated competitive dynamics and allowed groups to focus on their work rather than grant-seeking.

We intended the Design Team to serve as temporary stewards who initiate the process and then rotate out, as movement partners with other lived experiences take on more decision-making to prevent advisory power concentration. We envisioned a comprehensive care infrastructure, transformative learning journeys, and multi-year support in line with the Movement Forest approach. Yet even this limited pilot demonstrated that funding without applications, reporting requirements, or competitive processes is both feasible and effective, while highlighting how much more is possible when the necessary institutional conditions are in place.

Essential conditions for transformative grantmaking

Our experiences have illuminated the institutional conditions that movement-centered grantmaking requires. Like interconnected root systems supporting forest resilience, these elements must work together:

Power-sharing in grantmaking requires power-sharing in governance. Traditional philanthropy maintains hierarchical structures where funders retain ultimate control. To avoid tokenism, movement partners need formal decision-making authority — not advisory roles that create an illusion of inclusion. This requires clear roles, transparent accountability mechanisms, and structures that fundamentally redistribute power rather than simply adding participatory elements to existing systems.

Philanthropic operational infrastructure must align with values. Administrative procedures and legal requirements within funding institutions can undermine trust-based approaches. When movement actors in remote areas suddenly face extractive documentation demands, or when small grants require burdensome annual audits, the institutional infrastructure contradicts the values. Funders must be transparent about institutional constraints from the outset and invest in ‘laboratory conditions’— environments designed to test transformative approaches without typical barriers.

Genuine commitment requires organization-wide transformation. Leadership of philanthropic organizations must be directly involved and committed. This means adequate time, multi-year resources, stable contracts for movement practitioners, fair compensation, and comprehensive support infrastructure including translation, interpretation, technology access, and care support.

Thoughtful intermediary selection and ethical labor throughout. Movement partners should meaningfully influence the selection of fiscal sponsors and funding entities. Prioritize those most trusted by the communities being supported, challenge unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles, and where possible, build direct funding mechanisms that strengthen movement capacity rather than creating dependencies.

Most philanthropic ‘experiments’ occur within predetermined boundaries that preserve existing power structures. True transformation requires willingness to fundamentally reorganize institutional relationships — patient cultivation of healthy ecosystem conditions that allow the forest to emerge and thrive.

Join the movement for genuine transformation

We’re releasing our complete grantmaking design, Growing a Movement Forest, as an open-source resource to encourage further experimentation. We invite others to download, critique, expand and adapt our model. Start with elements that feel possible in your context — gift-giving without strings, processes that avoid scarcity and competition, elimination of unnecessary reporting. Build toward shared governance, rotational decision-making, and authentic power redistribution.

View and download the full guide, Movements as Forests: A Radical Grantmaking Model for Feminist Climate Justice.

We’re eager to learn from others experimenting with these approaches. Share your experiences, adaptations, and insights as you test different elements of the model and explore what redistribution looks like in practice.

The Movement Forest remains our vision for a world where philanthropy as we know it no longer needs to exist because resources reside where they’re most needed: in the hands of those actively transforming our world. Every experiment brings us closer to that reality.

The forest doesn’t emerge overnight — it requires patient cultivation, protective conditions, and commitment to nurturing an ecosystem where all participants can thrive. We invite you to join us in growing these movement forests, one experiment at a time.

Design Team and FLAC staff, January 2025

Acknowledgements: We extend our deep gratitude to Maria Alejandra Escalante, Chief Co-Creator of FLAC, for her leadership, vision, and support, and to Zoé Vangelder for their invaluable contributions to transformative learning frameworks that informed our approach.

Inspired by this article? Here are some ideas for next steps:

• If you’d like to support the groups featured in the sunset gift-making pilot or learn more about movement organizations working at the intersections of gender, environmental, and climate justice, contact the authors at the above email addresses.
• Watch the Post Growth Institute’s webinar on Radical Philanthopy, covering what radical means, how to navigate relationships during strategic transitions, and bold and applied methods in fundraising.
• Find out more about the PGI and sign up to our monthly Full Circle newsletter for more inspiring articles and content.

Teaser image credit: Author supplied.