I recently had a conversation with an acquaintance who had applied for activist welfare support after the floods in Accra, Ghana this June destroyed much of what they owned. Their appliances, gadgets and other belongings were gone or damaged, rent was still due, and they had the very reasonable fear that the rains could return and the next flood could be worse. They work full-time with a grassroots organization, which can mean having a job without necessarily having the financial security to suddenly move house, replace their belongings and start again. They never received feedback on that application. Through the kind of backdoor follow-up that has become an unofficial administrative system of its own in social justice movements, they eventually learned that the welfare fund was specifically for activists who needed relocation, medical assistance, provisions and other forms of support as a result of their activism.
I understand why such a fund exists. People face threats, violence and displacement because of the politics of the work, and there should be resources when that happens. But I kept returning to the question of what counts as care in activism and what has to happen before suffering becomes recognizable as an activist emergency. A flooded home is an emergency. Losing almost everything you own is an emergency. Having rent due while trying to find somewhere safe to live is an emergency. You can spend your working life asking why the state has failed people, and still discover that the existing welfare responses want to know whether the state failed you because of your activism.
A friend recently underwent surgery and is carrying a substantial medical bill while continuing her work as the executive director of a Lesbian, Bisexual Queer organization. She cannot easily access her organization’s welfare fund because of her position, which would be a conflict of interest, and the external fund does not cover medical needs unrelated to activism.
Professionalization that overlooks precarity
Over time, we have professionalized the work of liberation, and a relatively small group of people now spends their working lives organising, documenting, researching, advocating, and building movements around questions that affect far more people than those on the payroll. Health, safety, dignity, discrimination, economic security and democratic participation remain enormous public questions, while the labour of pursuing them has become professional work.
If we have decided that social change requires people to do this work as their jobs, what have we built around the people whose working lives now carry it?
Philanthropy has made much of this professionalization possible. The work may be funded while the people doing it remain precarious. This is especially visible among grassroots activists, organisers, mobilisers and younger groups working around social justice, many of whom move from one short contract, stipend or grant period to the next. They are still living ordinary lives around the work: paying rent, taking public transport, dealing with medical expenses, supporting family and trying to meet the everyday costs of being alive. Stipends are often treated as wages for full-time work while covering very little of what a life actually costs.
This work is also happening amid growing political hostility toward the very questions activists are organising around. Across the continent, gender and sexuality have become an increasingly contested political terrain, with governments and political actors advancing laws and policies that restrict the lives of women, girls and LGBTQIA people, while broader civic spaces are being narrowed through arrests, restrictions of protest, expression and association. In many places, the consequences of being associated with this work can include surveillance, intimidation, detention or violence. Activists are working amid growing militarism and political repression, while being expected to organise, support communities and keep these questions in the public eye. To do this work, therefore, is to work within the consequences of the politics one is trying to change.
Professional security would mean earning a salary that sustains a life, having insurance and healthcare when things go wrong, and having some form of welfare that can absorb the ordinary shocks of being alive. Without those things, working in a nonprofit can feel almost synonymous with being unemployed, except that you have meetings, proposals, reports and somebody asking whether you can “just quickly” send the revised budget before close of day.
We have become very sophisticated about organizational sustainability while treating the sustainability of the people doing the work as a private matter.
Suddenly liberation has a budget, and somebody has to explain the budget variance.
When those conditions remain unrecognized and money still exists somewhere within the funding system, people learn the categories that govern access to it. If a flood does not qualify as an activist emergency, the story may have to be adjusted to fit one of the categories that does. A person facing the same situation might start reshaping the account: describing a threat that never happened, emphasizing precarity forms in an activist life that were never central to the situation, or adding details that make the crisis eligible under the category the fund recognizes. When real needs have to be translated into the language of eligibility before they can receive support, people begin adjusting their stories to fit the money available. At that point, the question becomes larger than access to funding. What does it do to a person’s dignity and sense of integrity when survival requires them to make their life legible in a language they did not choose?
And yet precarity can become part of the mythology of political commitment. The person who absorbs exhaustion, uncertainty and financial strain can appear especially serious about the work. An unspoken curriculum exists for becoming the right kind of activist, and suffering counts as coursework. We can become so accustomed to providing care to other people even when our own ability to receive it starts to feel like an administrative problem.
The quiet persistence of class
When funding is cut short, as we have seen happen over the last few years, the heightened insecurity it produces does not land evenly on bodies. People from poorer and working-class backgrounds enter activism with political commitments and a need to make a living in an economy with few alternatives. For some, a badly paid nonprofit job is still a way to turn their skills and convictions into a livelihood. You see this especially among young organisers and grassroots activists, but class runs through the movement in more complicated ways than age or job title can explain. Some people can leave activism and return to family, call on friends or move into another job. Others have fewer places to land. When the funding disappears, and organisations adjust, the same professional disruption can be an inconvenience for one person and a crisis for another.
We have spent years imagining, demanding and organising around questions of redistribution of power, resources and decision-making. There is something worth sitting with in the fact that many of the people carrying that work have experienced little of this redistribution in their own working lives. People doing most of this work can spend years without the employment benefits that come with greater security, including health insurance, medical aid, and other forms of support when life goes wrong. We are asking what redistribution could look like for society while still struggling to experience its possibilities within the spaces where we do the work ourselves.
“What would it mean to practise some of what we ask for in the immediate spaces we inhabit?”
When funding ends, the political questions activists have been shouldering remain, and so do the people affected by them. Liberation is for everyone. Yet we have become accustomed to the work of imagining it happening within a relatively small circle of people whose jobs allow them to spend their working lives thinking about power, sustaining movements and imagining a different society. The people outside those rooms are already living inside the questions being discussed there. They are living with questions of safety, dignity, economic security, discrimination and everyday power, in languages that are unfamiliar.
‘We cannot crowdfund our way out of systemic failures’
I keep thinking about the two activists – one affected by flooding, another who underwent surgery- and the many trying to hold their lives together while doing this work without access to meaningful systems of support. For queer activists in particular, some forms of support are difficult to access or simply unavailable. Crowdfunding can only do so much; we cannot crowdfund our way out of systemic failures. So when we keep asking the same exhausted people to reimagine a different world, I find myself wondering what exactly we are asking them to imagine while they are still trying to find their footing in this one. I am sitting with that question, and I do not have an easy answer.
These are not new concerns. People have long debated who gets to shape liberation, how movements sustain themselves and what it means to build a different world. This is ever more urgent given the ongoing defunding of gender and civic work. How do we move from a small group of people carrying this work as their profession to bringing these concerns back into broader democratic and public life? Who gets to convene those spaces? What makes a room a place where people can shape political questions together, rather than another structure that decides in advance who speaks, whose knowledge counts and what kind of participation can be funded? How do power, dignity, safety, economic security, and freedom become matters people can collectively reflect on, shape, and act on in everyday life? It is difficult to imagine meaningful redistribution while the work of imagining remains concentrated in so few hands.
We all deserve a new world. Perhaps we all deserve to imagine it too.
Adomaa Adusei is a Ghanaian Afro-feminist writer, cultural producer and community archivist working across memory, oral history and feminist knowledge. Her practice explores women’s knowledge, cultural memory and histories beyond official records. She has contributed to Letters from Buchei and Hummingbird Journal. Adomaa works with stories, knowledge, and memories too often left at the edges of the record. She is currently an archival fellow with the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA).