Citizen action is evolving. Today, there are fewer formal civil society organisations and more people-led and collective efforts, visibly moving quickly and fluidly to meet rising interconnected crises. Progressive grassroots groups and a new generation of changemakers are at the frontlines of resistance, emergency response and systemic change around the world. Rooted in their communities, they represent their own interests, demand their own rights and contribute to positive change in very concrete ways. These include modifying unfair laws, driving policy change, holding duty bearers to account, crafting solutions to some of our most challenging social problems and promoting peace, human rights and equality.

Many of these groups are often attacked by state and non-state actors that are trying to restrict their work and impact.  This is why, now more than ever, it is important to prioritise these activists and groups intentionally through dedicated lines of direct and indirect support.  Any support provided must meet their specific needs, adapt to their contexts and realities and allow them to determine their priorities and ways of navigating these illegitimate restrictions.

Between 2018 and 2023, CIVICUS implemented the Strengthening 21st Century Citizen Action (STCCA) programme, funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).  This initiative addressed gaps in knowledge and practice on connecting with and strengthening emerging groups that might not necessarily identify with formal civil society. It also designed and tested new approaches to mobilise stronger and better resources and solidarity to strengthen citizen action in the 21st century. Check out the programme’s Theory of Change.

This flexible programme allowed us to co-develop, with diverse grassroots changemakers, a wide range of analyses, consultations, prototypes, toolkits and resources on better supporting the new forms of citizen action. We piloted an alternative resourcing mechanism and a referrals and coordination mechanism among rapid response grantmakers, co-created an influencing campaign and organised several virtual and in-person dialogues, labs and convenings with donors, enablers and activists.

This work engaged hundreds of youth-led groups and small, informal, change-seeking organisations operating at the intersection between civic space restrictions and social exclusion. We also engaged members of the donor community and other civil society allies and enablers around the world.  

All these efforts focused on three focal areas:

1. Understanding the resourcing landscape for civil society in the 21st century.
2. Testing approaches to support individual activists and new generation changemakers who may not associate with formal civil society.
3. Exploring avenues for more direct and democratic resourcing of smaller, informal groups at grassroots level.

As a result, we gained deeper understanding of the barriers that hinder the flow of essential resources to these important changemakers. We learned that a large number of international donors and enablers, like international NGOs and grantmakers, mostly support more “established” civil society organisations. They also often remain stuck in the past, plagued with top-down, colonial, global north biased, racist and transactional practices rooted in the “white saviour industrial complex.” 

We also realised that many donors and allies – including the most progressive ones – struggle to understand, trust and connect meaningfully with groups operating at the grassroots level. This is because they are too focused on implementing their own solutions and narrow frameworks. They often navigate institutional policies and procedures that perpetuate extractive and transactional grantmaking practices and inhibit establishing trust-based relationships.

WHAT BLOCKS FLOW OF RESOURCES TO GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS?

Based on these years of collective listening, analysis and co-creation with diverse actors, we believe that this is a crucial moment of change and evolution for the donor community, intermediaries and all relevant stakeholders in the civil society resourcing ecosystem. There are five key actions we encourage donors and enablers to follow:

• The kinds of resources and solidarity needed and valued by new generation changemakers.  
• The challenges, blockages and gaps in the current support ecosystem.  
• The value and complexity of co-creating with activists.  
• What good solidarity, radical inclusion and meaningful support mean to changemakers and what they expect from international allies. 
• The need for working alongside activists to unlearn and relearn current resourcing paradigms. It clarified the need to embrace intersectional, equitable, caring, relational and decolonial lenses, democratise access to knowledge and social capital and catalyse ecosystems of solidarity.   
• What is needed to make organisational transformations happen: 
  • Time, intention and space to build trust-based relationships.
  • Introspection on how we are perpetuating systemic inequalities. 
  • High-level leadership publicly committed to this agenda.  
  • Sense-checking potential initiatives and programmes with activists.