Across climate justice, civil and human rights and environmental justice we have witnessed young people using innovative tools to lead, organise and mobilise. Evidence shows that youth-led movements have the power to effect sustained social transformation, shifts in public narrative and often alter the course of history.
Yet so far, and despite good intentions, pro-rights funders have fallen short of supporting young people in a way that respects their power and expertise while also supporting them to scale and bridge movements internationally.
Meanwhile, the anti-rights youth movement is thriving. Ipas’ excellent new report ‘Future-Proofing: the professionalisation of an anti-rights generation’ finds that anti-rights actors have embraced youth movements as part of a long-term sustainability strategy, globally exporting US-based models evolved by evangelical networks in the last century. While these networks initially cohered around opposition to abortion rights and feminism, they increasingly challenge LGBTQ+ rights, and their success has implications for democracy and the climate change agenda.
If the pro-rights, pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ+ funding community wants to counter this influence, we must learn from anti-rights tactics while finding ways to fund and engage youth-led movements and organisations on their own terms.
Anti-rights funders resource young people on a large scale to influence political and cultural norms, treating them as strategists and movement shapers.
They accept that youth movements know their audiences well and can meet them where they are – which is usually online, with short-form ideological commentaries and memes tailored for specific digital spaces by the same ‘netizens’ who occupy them.
Their strategy suggests an understanding that change pathways in movement-building are diffuse and hard to quantify; they do not expect proof of a linear theory of change in three years’ time.
Meanwhile, pro-rights youth movements typically receive less than 5 per-cent of total funding in progressive philanthropy and are constantly working to short-term KPIs. Such narrow metrics fail to account for the generational, multifaceted nature of movement-building work.
Funders and INGOs recognise the importance of ‘doing digital’ to engage young people (often without a clear idea of what this means), while shrinking from the opportunity to hand narrative power and financial resources to the generation that actually grew up with smartphones in their hands.
This aversion has created barriers to long-term planning and scale, preventing investment in the key infrastructure required to build and sustain youth movements; leadership development, capacity strengthening, leadership transition support, innovation and partnership/coalition-building.
As a result, youth-led movements and organisations often face a level of operational incompleteness that would be considered a crisis for any adult-led NGO. Faced with permanent resource constraints and a hamster wheel of funding cycles, they experience high levels of volunteer turnover and burnout.
To keep pace with anti-rights movements, funders should consider intentionally ring-fencing a proportion of gender rights grants for youth-led initiatives, and funding incentives which allow established NGOs to ‘unlock’ additional philanthropic dollars through collaboration with youth-led organisations or activists.
Anti-rights approaches to youth movement-building use the interdependence of rights and social justice issues to dismantle legal principles and protections from the inside out.
In this context, abandoning progressive principles such as trans rights or migrant rights – issues which are under constant attack and may be seen as harder to defend, offers up a wedge that can be exploited, creating a weak point for anti-rights youth movements to exploit and impediments to movement synthesis.
Progressive funders must abandon their “strategic” single-issue focuses and instead focus on supporting youth-led reproductive rights movements to strengthen links with LGBTQ+, racial justice and pro-democracy movements, building capacity for cross-issue strategising and relationship-building. This intersectionality is second nature to youth movements. Funders need to embrace this model and relinquish our need to set strategy from on high.
The anti-rights movement’s early identification and ongoing support of talented youth is something that comes up again and again in the IPAS report. Their movement supports early-career prospects, helping young people to build leadership skills and professional networks. Critically, Anti-rights actors maintain strong connections with young people across different sectors into adulthood, reaping the rewards as their members grow into positions of power in law, politics or business.
Alternatively, young progressives who ‘age out’ (or burn out), or who choose a career outside the civil society or UN system, are often lost to the broader movement.
Progressive philanthropy needs to openly address calls for flexible multi-year fellowships (three–five years and not project-based). Such fellowships must cover professional skills-building in policy drafting and negotiation and provide access to national, regional, global and multilateral networks, all while ensuring equity through affirmative selection for structurally excluded youth.
In the context of shrinking civic space, pro-rights youth-led movements need access to the same safeguards that anti-rights youth movements have, such as digital and physical security, and rapid legal support, including access to funds.
These safeguards and support become only more critical as progressive youth movements increasingly become the subject of intense attacks, especially online and without the security infrastructure available to more ‘established’ groups.
