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Just Futures Collaborative Dispatch (February 2025)
Introduction: Why should we care?
Just Futures Collaborative is a global endeavour to build bridges between movements and movement-actors, across regions, who are challenging criminalization and imagining just futures. Our work intentionally defies and disrupts false binaries and borders. It is with this lens that we have observed that international human rights instruments and the international gender justice and human rights funding landscape - with dire consequences to activism globally - are being dismantled by the new government in the United States, as it joins Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and others with a diminished commitment to official development assistance. We are also alarmed as our families, friends, colleagues and communities on-the-ground in the United States are devastatingly affected and pushed to even further precarity through new US national policies that could exacerbate the impact of criminalization.
The impact of the current direction of US policies on the entire world and on already marginalized communities everywhere - be it through promoting anti “gender ideology" action, eliminating a commitment to promoting diversity, retracting commitments to public health, the rapid reshaping of the global economic order, or divestment from urgent climate action - cannot be understated.
There is no greater reminder to us than this moment that our problems cannot be solved in a real way as long as we are working solely within false nation-state borders, issue-based silos, or fractured movement domains.
Summary
The February 2025 Dispatch from Just Futures Collaborative (JFC) provides a sobering analysis of the global impact of the U.S. government’s dramatic policy shifts under its new administration. As a collective dedicated to dismantling systems of criminalization and envisioning just futures, Just Futures Collaborative issues a strong warning about how authoritarianism in the United States is reverberating across the globe, affecting marginalized communities and progressive movements everywhere in profound ways.
Central to the dispatch is the argument that recent U.S. executive orders are implementing an anti-gender and anti-democracy agenda with unforeseen speed and brutality. These orders have included the removal of terms like “gender” and “diversity” from federal websites and funding agreements, a reassertion of binary sex-based language in policies, and defunding of key international aid programs such as USAID, and divestment from multilateral agreements to fund agencies such as the UNFPA and other global health initiatives. This rollback has devastated community-based organizations, particularly those serving the most marginalized such as transmasculine people, sex workers, and hyper-local health providers in regions including the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Beyond domestic impacts, the U.S. withdrawal from international treaties and defunding of global programs has created a funding crisis, exposing the fragility of movements overly dependent on U.S. aid. Many organizations, unaware of their indirect reliance on U.S. government funding, now face collapse. The dispatch calls for a reckoning: what does it mean that hard-won gains can be erased so easily? And how can movements reimagine sustainability?
The report draws on historical and international parallels including Sri Lanka, Hungary, Poland, and India to demonstrate the long-term damage that authoritarian regimes can inflict on civil society. Importantly, it emphasizes that U.S.-based movements can learn from counterparts abroad, who have developed strategies of resistance and resilience in similar environments. For instance, U.S. activists have begun using archiving tools, law and policy trackers, and emergency response funds to counter censorship and rapidly changing laws.
Amidst this crisis, the dispatch urges solidarity and strategy. It underscores the need for diversified, resilient funding streams and a deeper commitment to collaboration across regions and sectors. There is also a call for international allies and governments to fill the vacuum left by the U.S., while acknowledging that no single actor can completely replace such a major funder.
The dispatch situates these developments in a broader geopolitical context. The U.S.’s authoritarianism aligns with global far-right movements, rising inequality, unregulated tech monopolies, and worsening climate chaos. The threats are systemic, but so too are the solutions. Just Futures Collaborative insists that movements already working transnationally are best positioned to respond and that only through collective action and forward-thinking strategies can just, sustainable futures be realized.
This article has been prepared in conversation with our Steering Committee.
Download the full article (English) here!