The Call Is Coming from Inside the House: Building Solidarity When Scarcity Divides Us
What happens to solidarity when there is not enough money to go around?
LGBTIQ+ advocacy and service organizations have long operated with limited resources. As funding contracts further, that scarcity creates pressure not only on organizations and services, but on relationships within movements themselves.
A scarcity mindset can turn communities toward internal competition. Divisions emerge over whose needs receive attention, which identities are prioritized, and who gets access to increasingly limited resources. And those consequences are not distributed equally. Within LGBTIQ+ communities, trans people, for example, can face disproportionate impacts when funding and political support retreat.
This pattern is not unique to LGBTIQ+ organizing. Movements organized around gender, race, disability, migration, and other forms of identity and justice can face similar tensions: people with overlapping struggles separated into different organizations, funding streams, advocacy agendas, and political constituencies.
But those overlaps also create an opportunity.
LGBTIQ+ communities themselves encompass differences of race, disability, gender, nationality, immigration status, and economic circumstance alongside sexual orientation. The same person can therefore belong to several movements that rarely work together institutionally.
What would change if movements organized around those different parts of people’s lives became better at recognizing what they share?
This session will explore solidarity both within movements and between them. It will make space to acknowledge where experiences and interests genuinely differ, including the unequal power and privilege that exist inside marginalized communities, while asking where those differences have unnecessarily become barriers to collaboration.
The goal is not to pretend everyone faces the same struggle. It is to discover where different struggles intersect strongly enough to build something together.
What to expect
A facilitated dialogue bringing LGBTIQ+ organizers, including people working specifically with trans communities, into conversation with feminist, BIPOC-led, and other movement organizations.
Participants will be invited to speak candidly about what scarcity is doing inside their own movements: where competition has emerged, whose voices are being lost, what makes solidarity difficult, and where attempts at collaboration have succeeded or failed.
From there, the conversation will turn outward. Where are different movements already advocating for the same people without realizing it? What knowledge, relationships, infrastructure, or political power could be shared? And what would meaningful cross-movement solidarity look like beyond statements of support?
Who this is for
This session is for organizers, advocates, funders, and movement leaders working across LGBTIQ+ rights, trans justice, gender justice, racial justice, disability, migration, and other intersecting movements, particularly those interested in building stronger relationships across communities without erasing the differences between them.
What you will get out of it
A candid examination of how funding scarcity can create division within movements
Greater understanding of where power and privilege operate even within marginalized communities
Connections with organizers working across movements that share overlapping people and interests
Opportunities to identify knowledge, resources, relationships, and strategies that could be shared
Practical possibilities for deeper solidarity and collaboration across movements
Hosted by
Waypoint Commons