Over the first weeks of 2026, we at Flamingo Collective have found ourselves in a series of deep conversations with activists and civil society leaders across Europe.
Some in Brussels meeting rooms, others in retreats, coaching spaces and online community circles. Different settings — but the same context entering the room: democratic rollback, shrinking civic space, funding cuts, rising authoritarian narratives, and growing pressure on the communities our partners work alongside.
This landscape is shaping strategy discussions, leadership dilemmas and organisational redesign processes across the ecosystem we accompany.
And yet, what we are hearing is not only fear. It is a quiet but growing call to change and evolve.
Beyond Shock
Many organisational leaders speak about how much collective energy is still spent reacting — responding to political attacks, managing crises, and absorbing institutional shocks. One grassroots leader reflected recently that those closest to systemic violence are often less surprised when systems reveal themselves as violent or exclusionary. They already know their contours.
It raises a useful question for many Brussels-based actors: What becomes possible when we move beyond shock — into grounded strategic clarity? It feels like that’s where we are right now.
Scarcity — Structural and embodied
Across our organisational development work, the language of scarcity is ever-present.
Scarcity of funding, political space, time, and capacity. But what we are noticing is that scarcity is not only structural — it lives in the body. Leaders are carrying exhaustion. Teams are holding uncertainty. Organisations are processing loss while still delivering.
Protecting energy is becoming the most important leadership work.
Community Spaces as Places to Breathe
Alongside our paid consultancy work with many great organisations and movement, the ecofeminist community spaces we create — retreats, circles, gatherings — are becoming places where a different kind of reflection is possible.
Here, conversations move beyond strategy and essential power-analysis, into grief, imagination and renewal.
We hear about endings: programmes closing, the energy of transnational activism extinguished, funding disappearing, organisational restructuring. Painful realities — and yet sometimes also clearing ground. In these spaces, we often speak about the power of the “in-between” — the pauses between action where insight emerges and new possibilities begin to take root.
What This Looks Like in Practice
If we take the move from scarcity to abundance seriously, it shows up in practice:
- Making time — intentionally — for grieving and healing inside organisations and movements. We witness some already doing this by simply allowing for the expression of emotion alongside facts and figures in their strategy reviews.
- Creating space for critical reflection on strategy, tactics, and purpose. Even daring to ask what needs to be composted in our work — what has served but may no longer serve this moment. We are seeing organisations and movements beginning to do this in a more strategic and considered way, rather than simply in reaction to cuts and donor demands.
- Developing leadership muscles for joy, creativity and imagination —as core capacities. At a recent discussion among women CSO leaders in Brussels, we shared practices for protecting joy: from forest walks to dancing, from art and music to introducing dreaming/visualisation in strategic planning processes.
- Strengthening our ability to hold contradiction and complexity without collapsing into urgency. When all is urgent, nothing is strategic. One example of this is to learn and use techniques for identifying and managing polarities.
- For some organisations, this may mean investing in unexpected alliances. For others, pivoting more deeply into movement and community-building work.
- Acknowledging that the scarcity we are facing makes it more important than ever to take a systemic, root-causes approach to change, one that sees the connections between struggles. We can’t keep putting on plasters via single-issue campaigns that only address symptoms.
In all cases, it requires spaciousness.
Holding Defence and Imagination Together (Fighting the bad vs building the new)
Some degree of defensive work remains essential, as so many of the organisations we accompany are protecting the environment, democratic space and human rights under significant pressure. And at the same time, leaders are asking how to keep building — cultures, structures and futures that are more feminist, regenerative and relational.
The work is not either/or, but learning how to hold both without being consumed entirely by crisis response. That is not easy.
Dreaming Feminist Futures — Together
As we hold these reflections, we are reminded that imagining beyond scarcity is collective work. Our next Flamingo Collective online community gathering will be centred on dreaming feminist futures — creating shared space to imagine the leadership, movements and organisations we want to grow in the years ahead. This work is inspired by the brilliant feminists from across the globe who make up AWID
Because even in times of limited funding, imagination and co-creation remain powerful resources.
Closing Reflection
What we are carrying – from our work accompanying various brave and brilliant organisations and leaders and in the community spaces we create – is an invitation to notice where scarcity is shaping us — and where abundance might already be present.
To protect energy and joy as collective resources.
To make space for grief and imagination.
To trust the generative potential of the in-between.
To keep focusing on the long-term and the systemic.
We may not quite yet be in spring, but something is stirring.
We’d love to hear from you:
Where are you feeling scarcity most in your work right now — and where might abundance already be quietly present?
Join the conversation in our next COMMUNITY MEET-UP!