LGBTQI+ groups used dating apps and encrypted channels to locate and support survivors who could not safely seek help through formal routes.
What I witnessed was a gap that was financial, but also deeply conceptual in how gender justice work itself was understood. Much of the labor that made this work possible remained difficult to name, difficult to measure, and even more difficult to fund. If philanthropy wants to support gender justice work, it must fund the forms of labor that actually sustain it.
Gender-focused fieldworkers engaged in this work through care, emotional labor, and relationship building—forms of labor that rarely fit into a budget table or a project timeline.
Too often, gender justice work is still treated as secondary to the forms of disaster response that are seen as more urgent, technical, and measurable. Psychosocial support, menstrual health and hygiene, pregnancy and postpartum care, trust building, and survivor accompaniment are often treated as supplementary.
But for many people living through crisis, especially those navigating gendered violence, stigma, and exclusion, these forms of support are what make survival possible.
After the earthquakes, fieldworkers supported women’s access to menstrual products, contraception, breastfeeding support, and psychosocial care. LGBTQI+ organisations tried to secure safe shelter and relocation for survivors who could not safely remain in camps.
Psychologists and outreach workers responded to survivors’ experiences of abuse, fear, and social isolation, often without institutional backing or even the language to name what they were trying to support. These were core forms of gender justice work in the aftermath of the disaster, even though they were rarely recognised as such.
Much of this labor was difficult to fund in ways that reflected the realities of the work.
How do you budget for the hours it takes to build enough trust for a young woman to disclose abuse? How do you account for the emotional labor of holding space for survivors while carrying your own grief, stress, and exhaustion? How do you fit slow, relational work into timelines built around visible outputs and rapid delivery?
I interviewed one fieldworker focused on supporting postpartum women who described how donor quotas pushed her team to prioritise the number of people reached over meaningful follow-up care. To move faster, they eventually stopped carrying the device used to measure infant growth and could no longer monitor babies as closely as they should have.
Another fieldworker recalled a young woman asking for a contraceptive injection because her husband refused to use condoms. Yet when fieldworkers raised the issue, camp coordinators denied her request, stating that she should simply convince her husband to use a condom.
These examples show how funding structures and institutional logics can actively narrow what care becomes possible in practice.
They were deeply strategic in how they kept care possible under restrictive conditions.
Gender justice work often depends on labor that is relational, embodied, and difficult to quantify. Because this labor is feminised and complex to measure, it is also easier to dismiss. It is more likely to be seen as ‘soft,’ less strategic, or outside the boundaries of what traditional philanthropy considers fundable.
Work grounded in care is more likely to be overlooked, even when it is what keeps the rest standing.
In the earthquake zone, this contradiction appeared again and again. Fieldworkers were expected to act as counselors, coordinators, advocates, and emergency responders all at the same time. They were deeply strategic in how they kept care possible under restrictive conditions.
LGBTQI+ groups used dating apps and encrypted channels to locate and support survivors who could not safely seek help through formal routes. Others shifted their language intentionally, framing menstrual justice as ‘hygiene’ or breastfeeding support as ‘infant nutrition’ to gain access and fly under the radar in conservative settings.
For many, there was no real boundary between work and life because they were living in the field themselves. They worked constantly, often while underpaid, unpaid, precariously employed, or volunteering. Some were also survivors of the earthquakes themselves.
Several described psychosomatic symptoms, burnout, and a persistent sense of inadequacy despite carrying immense responsibility.
If gender justice work is to be funded seriously, especially in crisis and post-disaster settings, philanthropy has to move beyond funding only what is most visible, reportable, and easy to categorise.
