In Fierce Compassion and Devotion, We Continue

Dear Friends, Family, and Supporters,

We’re still here: marching, building, imagining. In this crushing moment, when so many are silenced, displaced, starved, erased, we are refusing to look away. In fact, we are choosing, daily, to show up: in our bodies, our work, our words, our communities. We are choosing to make noise for those being silenced; to offer love where it feels like hate is winning; to hold hope in chaos. 

As feminists, researchers, humanitarians, artists – as humans, we know that compassion is not soft, but rather it is fierce, active, constituted of response-ability. It is, as we say in all of our workshops, empathy plus action. And we truly believe it will save us.

Today, we want to share updates: 

Despite the loss of the majority of our funding, we continue to operate on the frontlines of crises. Our FemSMS Ukraine work, with our dear friends and partners at Project Kesher, continues to grow. As part of this tireless effort, we are finalizing the FemSMS app, with the minimum viable product (MVP) nearly complete and set to be tested in a series of workshops next month. Meanwhile, as many of you know, we are preparing to launch FemSMS in the U.S., where ongoing attacks on civil society, including immigrant and trans lives, reproductive justice, and safe refuge, demand bold new tools for information sharing, uplifting democratic values, connection, and solidarity.

We also continue our interventions in Central Asia, where in Kyrgyzstan we’re leading webinars with survivors, government, and civil society. We are sharing our trauma-informed, feminist tools for healing, prevention, and systemic response to gender-based violence. We are deepening our regional partnerships and building a coalition of action and using dialogue diplomacy for long-term safety and transformation.

Our work is evolving. It must. People use the word “pivot” but I prefer the metaphor of water – finding a way to continue on through the cracks, the turns, the spaces so many cannot reach.

We are carefully building out our umbrella identity: FootageLab, a living ecosystem that connects our participatory research, field interventions, and systems-level advocacy. FootageLab is the lab we always needed. One that holds our research, our policy work, our organizing, our dreams under a single, coherent body.

This new landscape calls for cross-sector, interdisciplinary hybrid structures. Indeed, FootageLab includes our long-standing nonprofit work and the emergence of FootageLab+, our consultancy arm dedicated to influencing systems, earning sustainable income to continue our work, and expanding the reach of our feminist methodologies. Together, these spaces form a whole — a constellation of interventions, inquiries, and actions that advance what we believe to be essential: democratic values, co-created knowledge, trauma-informed practices, and justice-centered design.

This is a return to what we’ve always known: that our interventions are not service delivery or repeated programs, but unique co-designed, innovative, cutting-edge solutions to our world’s myriad crises and injustices. We are using novel feminist participatory social science methods, all through the science of compassion, grounded in dignity, ethics, resistance, and imagination. We will share more on this in September, and as FootageLab continues to grow.

For now, I’ve been holding close the words of Andrea Gibson, the queer poet laureate of Colorado and one of the greatest spoken-word poets of our generation, who passed just weeks ago. In a conversation with Tami Simon on Sounds True, Andrea said [paraphrased and excerpted]:

“I used to think… I want to change the world. But it’s since changed for me. I’m no longer here to save the world or change it. I’m here to love the world… We can only go where we have first imagined. And so if we can’t imagine it, we can’t create it… Everybody knows what you’re against, show them what you’re for.”

That’s the invitation and what we are holding onto: to show what we’re for, to love the world through action, and to imagine and co-create what hasn’t yet been built, because we believe it’s not too late. Not for this planet, not for each other.

Dear supporters, this is very personal; we are walking through it with you – through all that has been lost and all that remains possible. This work is a devotion, and as long as you are with us, we will continue. 

In closing, the only words that come to me are: Thank you. Thank you to those who give – from funding to presence, to belief, to real care. Thank you to those who carry us in quiet ways: through long conversations, unexpected messages, thoughtful introductions, and simple acts of kindness that seem to arrive just when we need them most. To those who hold us in their hearts, who remind us what this work is for, and who reach out simply with love: asking how they can help, offering what they have, and standing beside us when the road gets steep.

Please, continue alongside us.

We feel it all. We would not exist without you. And if there’s one thing I believe right now, it’s this: love – your love, our love – will get us through.

I remain yours, as ever, 
In solidarity and with love and devotion,
Dr. Kristen Ali Eglinton and all of us at Footage