What Funders Get Wrong About Girls and Young Feminists

Girls and young feminists are often misread by philanthropy – seen as passionate but not political, inspiring but not strategic. That's a mistake.

That’s the animating idea behind two new publications from Our Collective Practice. The reports, released by the Girls Power Learning Institute, draw on case studies and curated stories from girls around the world to lay out the strategic and intentional political vision of girls and young feminist organizers around the world.

Proximate reached out to some of the authors and contributors – Jody Myrum, Priyanka Samy, and Laura Vergara – to learn more. We spoke about the danger of depoliticizing girls' activism; joy as a political tactic; and what it looks like to build movements beyond moments of visibility. The following converation has been edited for length and clarity.

These two reports speak directly to philanthropy, and the problem with foundations "depoliticizing" girls' activism. What does that mean, and how can philanthropy avoid the depoliticization trap?

One of the most persistent myths in philanthropy is that girls’ work is – or should be – apolitical. Too often, funding frameworks extract girls from their social and political contexts, ignoring the systems actively working to suppress their power.

Take the common philanthropic investment in "girls' economic empowerment" through small-scale entrepreneurship programs, like teaching girls how to make and sell handmade crafts, soap, or baked goods. These initiatives are often framed as empowering because they provide girls with a modest income or basic financial literacy. However, they rarely acknowledge or challenge the structural barriers that keep girls economically marginalized in the first place – like gendered labor markets, unpaid care work, or the criminalization of informal economies.

Similarly, many donor-funded education initiatives for girls focus on school enrollment, attendance, or test scores – often framed around building confidence, providing school supplies, or constructing classrooms. While these are important, programs like this often stop short of addressing the political forces that shape why girls are pushed out of education in the first place: discriminatory policies that exclude pregnant girls or married adolescents; sexual violence by teachers or school authorities; austerity policies that defund public education.

In both cases, these initiatives treat girls’ education as a technocratic issue, not a political one. This "depoliticized" approach reduces girls and young feminists to passive beneficiaries of development interventions.

Funders have a critical opportunity to shift this. It begins with recognizing girls and young feminists as political actors and resourcing them accordingly.

The reports argue that girls organize and do movement-building in unique ways – sometimes challenging traditional movement structures. How does this play out?

Social movements are ever-evolving collective efforts. They are rooted in shared power, deeply intersectional, and they grow by deepening their base through responsive, creative, and relevant strategies.

Girls’ and young feminists are relational before they are institutional, and this is a strength. We see that girls are rejecting rigid hierarchies and the gatekeeping that comes with it. [Their movements] don’t emerge from boardrooms, but from WhatsApp groups, school corridors, under streetlights, across rooftops, in borrowed community halls, and through the interconnectedness of their lived experiences.

For instance: the solidarity circles started by Dalit girls in informal settlements of Bangalore, India, were not branded campaigns or even well-structured meetings. They were weekly gatherings where girls shared stories of everyday joys and violence; danced and wrote; dreamed out loud; and taught each other how to draft petitions or speak at ward meetings with local authorities.

Over time, these circles become incubators of political education, mutual care, and collective action. These spaces, often invisible to formal movements, become sites of collective power. Their power does not lie in formal structures, it lies in rhythm: how they laughed together, held one another, and refused to be erased.

There’s language in the report around “joy as resistance” and creativity as a tactic. Can you share an example of what this looks like?

One example comes from a case study in the report where it documents the powerful organizing work of Black girls in Pretoria, South Africa. They sparked a national movement to draw attention to and challenge the continuation of racist practices in Pretoria’s education system—driving tangible social and policy changes, including efforts to dismantle colonial-era hair rules. The girls refused to be silenced, recognizing their natural hair as more than a personal choice—it was a declaration of identity and pride.

Through joyful defiance and creative resistance, they organized, cared for one another, and shared their stories in ways that captured international attention.

The concept of “erasure” comes up often in these reports – this idea that this work is often systematically invisibilized and erased. What does that look like?

Too often, the dominant narratives that drive investments in girls are constructed by funders or large INGOs – and portray girls as passive, vulnerable, or in need of saving.

Even when girls are shown as leaders, they’re often cast as exceptional individuals, disconnected from the collective and political nature of their struggles. For example, Malala Yousafzai is frequently portrayed as a lone survivor who rose to global fame after being shot by the Taliban, rather than as part of a broader network of girls and young feminists resisting patriarchal violence. Greta Thunberg is often held up as a singular visionary of the climate movement, with little attention paid to the thousands of young climate organizers – many of them from the Global South – who are driving intersectional, community-based activism.

These depictions strip girls and young feminists of collective agency. By centering narratives on individual achievement rather than systemic injustice and collective struggle, they disconnect girls from the broader movements and contexts they are deeply embedded in.

Evidence demonstrates that these narratives are far from the truth. Girls are architects of systemic change. They are shutting down streets in Latin America while singing feminist anthems. They are flooding the streets in Iran and cutting their hair in protest of the murder of Mahsa Amini. They are using TikTok to educate, organize, and disrupt dominant narratives. These are the narratives and frames that should be driving our work.

‍

The report challenges “adultism”, or the decentering of girls’ voices and the myth that girls are too young to lead or theorize. This came up in Proximate’s conversation with John Hecklinger of the Global Fund for Children. What can be done about it?

The first step for funders, larger NGOs, and governments is to unlearn adultism and [understand that] girls are not just future leaders – they are already organizers, thinkers and movement builders.

Ceding power is not just about including young people. It’s about transforming how we think about knowledge, leadership, and accountability. That means redistributing resources directly to girl-led and young feminist groups, without unnecessary bureaucracy. It means creating decision-making spaces where girls are invited to shape priorities, budgets, and strategies, and hiring young leaders in roles of real responsibility and influence.

It also means valuing lived experience as expertise – and understanding that the analysis of a 15-year-old queer girl resisting forced marriage or a 14-year-old Dalit girl organizing against caste-based discrimination is theory in practice. Practicing intergenerational solidarity that listens without being dismissive, and sees guidance as mutual not hierarchical.

Girls from the margins bring vision and clarity shaped by struggles.Trusting them to lead isn’t a risk: it’s our best chance at building movements rooted in justice and radical imagination.

So much of the spotlight today is on headlines or rapid response campaigns. But what does sustained movement-building look like for girls and young feminists? And how can funders help?

Movements are inherently in motion—constantly transforming, evolving, and growing. They are alive, shaped by the people who spark and sustain them across generations.

For girls and young feminists, sustained movement-building means understanding that real change doesn’t happen in a single headline or viral moment. It emerges from the accumulation of everyday actions and intergenerational work: resistance, base-building, political education, mutual care, advocacy, narrative shifting, and deep organizing.

Funders can counter erasure—and be far more effective in supporting long-term systemic change—if we disrupt harmful dominant narratives and root our strategies in the truth: that girls and young feminists are central to every movement, every issue, and every sector. When we fund girls and young feminists, we’re not only investing in the future—we’re resourcing the power that’s already reshaping the present.

If you could shift one dominant narrative about girls and social change tomorrow, what would it be—and why?

If I could shift one dominant narrative tomorrow, it would be the idea that girls, especially those from historically marginalized communities, need to be empowered by others to lead. This narrative is not only patronizing, it’s deeply violent.

I want the world to stop seeing girls as problems to be fixed or voices to be included and start seeing them as political actors, movement theorists, and fierce visionaries who are already building freedom in the margins.

We’ve spoken a lot about how girls are resisting, dreaming of, and building new worlds. Something else we explore in these reports—and that is central to our framing—is the importance of uplifting girls’ resistance without romanticizing it. 

Ultimately, the goal is not simply to celebrate girls' resistance—it’s to build a world where they don’t have to resist. A world where girlhood is defined not by struggle, but by safety, dignity, joy, freedom, and boundless possibility.