Powering People: Why the Future of Philanthropy Lies in Movement Ecosystems
by Bridget O’Loughlin and Alex Sardar
As shrinking civic space reaches a global crisis point, it is more important than ever to support nonviolent social movements to mobilize people power and push back. The newly released WINGS Report on the Philanthropy Support Ecosystem for Social Movements in Africa and Latin America offers a timely and urgent analysis of how philanthropy must evolve to support in a meaningful way grassroots actors at the forefront of democratic transformation.
Our colleagues at WINGS prepared this report as part of the Powered by the People (PxP) initiative — a groundbreaking $47 million+ multi-donor project designed to build resilient support ecosystems for nonviolent social movements (NVSMs). The PxP initiative was unfortunately terminated after just one year as part of the dissolution of the US government foreign aid infrastructure in early 2025.
Even in that single year, PxP embodied many of the practices that WINGS identifies as essential to a transformed philanthropic approach. PartnersGlobal is proud to highlight the report’s findings and groundbreaking recommendations, which align closely with how we will continue to support social movements over the long term.
From Charity to Infrastructure: A Paradigm Shift in Giving
The WINGS report makes clear that we need to stop viewing philanthropy as charity and start understanding it as infrastructure — particularly in the context of social movements. In both Latin America and Africa, WINGS identifies a growing network of intermediary, joint, and community funds — locally embedded, activist-led, and trusted by the movements they serve. These intermediaries do more than distribute funds; they absorb risk, provide holistic support to their partners, and foster a culture of giving rooted in solidarity and autonomy.
PxP embraced this very logic. In its first year, more than $8 million in grants were moved to movements and activists across Global Majority regions, with more than 150 grants addressing issues in community development and economic well-being, youth employment, and sustainable and inclusive development. These weren’t just grants — they were lifelines, delivered through an ecosystem of movement support organizations with deep contextual knowledge and relationships of trust.
WINGS underscores that philanthropy support organizations are the “connective tissue” between funders and movements. PxP operationalized this through regional grantmakers and movement support partners who didn’t just fund movements — they convened them, co-designed strategies, and helped define what success should look like from the ground up.
Rapid Response as a Right, Not a Perk
One of the standout innovations of PxP was its global Help Desk — a rapid response mechanism that could mobilize funds and technical assistance for activists under threat in as little as 24 hours. Using secure platforms like Signal PxP’s help desk operators worked with a global network to move resources quickly and discreetly. More than 20 activists were relocated to safety through this mechanism alone in under three months of the Help Desk going live.
WINGS makes a parallel call for flexible, rapid-response funding mechanisms, citing the importance of speed and agility in contexts where civic space is closing fast. In a powerful quote from an interviewee in the report: “It happens quickly, like a storm, so there is no time to put in HR and accounting.” PxP responded to that storm with agility and care, exactly as WINGS now recommends.
From Impact Metrics to Movement Stories
Traditional impact metrics fall short when evaluating social movements’ impact. Both WINGS and PartnersGlobal call for new ways of understanding and communicating value — rooted in context, story, and collective learning. PxP’s “Learning from Stories” methodology, developed in partnership with Results for Development, was designed to help movements reflect on their own narratives as a way to capture learning, surface impact, and explore unexpected results that can’t be quantified in performance metrics. Simultaneously, PxP’s developmental evaluation provided ongoing and real-time opportunities to identify accelerators and course correct when certain approaches were hindering progress, facilitating collective learning and holding Partners accountable to its commitments to movement partners.
Similarly, WINGS emphasizes the need to redefine success in ways that are shaped by movements themselves. Their research notes that in both Latin America and Africa, movements are intersectional, community-rooted , and driven by values and visions that do not always align with donor expectations or compliance frameworks. The risk, as WINGS puts it, is movement capture — when funders unintentionally co-opt or constrain movement goals by enforcing inflexible grant conditions or top-down metrics of success.
Philanthropy for the Long Haul
Most significantly, the report challenges funders to think beyond one-off investments and embrace long-term commitments to infrastructure building. PartnersGlobal and PxP Consortium partners are currently developing the highest priority of such opportunities for continued support, including:
- A People Power Curriculum for ongoing training in NVSM tactics and strategy with our partners at ICNC.
- Tools to bridge civic education and movement organizing — particularly relevant in contexts of authoritarian resurgence, in collaboration with StreetLaw.
- Peer exchange programs between Global Majority and U.S. movement actors, recognizing the need for reciprocal learning across borders.
WINGS echoes the same need for cross-regional learning and sustained support, pointing to networks like Comuá in Brazil, Comunalia in Mexico, and Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur as successful examples of movement infrastructure.
The Bottom Line: Invest in Ecosystems, Not Projects
At their core, both PartnersGlobal and WINGS ask the same question:
What if philanthropy wasn’t about giving to movements, but about growing with them?
Supporting social movements isn’t just about writing bigger checks. It’s about rewiring how we think about power, trust, speed, and sustainability. It means creating ecosystems where activists, funders, and support organizations collaborate horizontally, learn in real time, and stay responsive to dynamic political contexts.
Even though PxP ended prematurely, its architecture and insights live on — and the WINGS report gives us the validation and vocabulary to keep that vision moving forward.
If we want democracy to be resilient, we have to make movement infrastructure resilient.
And that means investing not just in outcomes, but in the people, networks, and values that keep collective action alive.