From Dreaming to Worldbuilding: Resourcing the Futures Girls and Young Feminists Are Building
What becomes possible when we reclaim our right to dream—and our collective power to make those dreams real?
On September 8, 2026, Our Collective Practice brought together feminist leaders and funders for From Dreaming to Worldbuilding: Resourcing Life-Affirming Futures, marking the launch of Dreaming & Worldbuilding: Insights, Strategies, and Calls to Action Grounded in the Power of Girls and Young Feminists.
In conversation with Our Collective Practice, Theo Sowa, Nyawira Wahito, Dr. Monique Couvson, and Paula Ten-Hope explored dreaming as a practice of freedom and worldbuilding as the collective work of bringing those visions to life. Their reflections offered a challenge to philanthropy: resource the imagination, relationships, and power that make different futures possible.
Watch the recording, and read the key insights and calls to action below.
Keeping our dreams alive through struggle
Theo Sowa of Feminist Dream Space grounded the conversation in the legacy of people who continued to dream through oppression and violence. Their visions of independence, dignity, and self-determination helped move communities into collective action.
When others define our visions as impossible, Theo reminded us, accepting those limits means giving up some of our own power and agency. Setbacks may demand that we rethink our strategies, but they need not determine the boundaries of our imagination.
Her reflection invites us to hold onto the futures we seek while remaining open to new ways of reaching them. Dreaming helps sustain the collective vision that gives political struggle direction.
Girls are already building different worlds
Nyawira Wahito of the Resource Center for Women and Girls brought the conversation into everyday spaces where girls put their visions into practice, and highlighted the critical role organisations like hers play in creating safe spaces as political infrastructure for girls' dreams.
Within their collectives, girls are creating new relationships and economies of care, experiencing safety and softness, questioning injustice, and refusing to inherit silence. These practices show how worldbuilding takes shape through the ways people live, organise, and care for one another.
Girls have been worldbuilders long before anyone gave them permission. Recognising this means taking their knowledge and leadership seriously—and understanding that the futures we hope for are already being built in the spaces they create.
Nyawira’s challenge was clear: spend less time asking whether girls and young feminists can dream or create change, and more time asking whether we are prepared to follow them.
Dreaming is a birthright—and a collective practice
Dr. Monique Couvson of Grantmakers for Girls of Color invited us to reclaim imagination as something inherent to us:
“Dreaming—or activating our radical imagination—is our birthright.”
She connected dreaming to ancestral practices that have sustained communities across generations, reminding us that imagination grows through relationships and shared experience.
“Dreaming comes from relationships… It is a collective practice.”
This has direct implications for how we support movements. Resourcing imagination also means resourcing the conditions that allow people to imagine together: time, care, trust, and spaces where ideas can be shared and possibilities explored.
Philanthropy must resource what could become possible
Paula Ten-Hope of Fondation CHANEL connected these reflections to philanthropy’s choices.
Responding to immediate needs is essential. But when funding focuses only on what already exists, it risks supporting people to manage the world as it is while leaving their visions for transformation under-resourced.
“If we want a different future, how can we afford not to fund the imagination that makes that future possible?”
Her question asks funders to consider how their decisions can expand what movements have the time, space, and resources to pursue. Supporting different futures requires a willingness to fund experimentation and possibilities whose outcomes cannot always be defined in advance.
Three invitations for philanthropy
Across the conversation, three connected calls to action emerged:
Fund imagination. Alongside crisis response and repair, resource the time and space to dream, experiment, and create new possibilities.
Move resources to girls and young feminists. Trust their analysis and leadership, and move significant, long-term, flexible resources directly to them and their organisations.
Fund collective power. Invest in the relationships, trust, care, shared infrastructure, and collective capacity that enable girls and young feminists to dream and build together.
From dreaming to resourcing the worlds girls and young feminists are building
Girls and young feminists are already imagining and building the worlds they want to live in. The question for philanthropy is whether we are prepared to resource those worlds, and the infrastructure that makes them possible.
We invite funders and resource stewards to move beyond short-term projects and invest in the conditions girls and young feminists need to build collective power, sustain their movements and shape their futures on their own terms.
Resource the dreaming. Fund the infrastructure. Invest in the ecosystems that allow girls and young feminists to build, organise, create, care and thrive for the long term.
The Dream & Power Fund is one way we are putting this commitment into practice.
We invite you to learn more, join the conversation and explore how you can resource this work alongside. Read the Dreaming & Worldbuilding report to explore the insights, strategies, and calls to action behind this work.
The event was co-sponsored by Gender Funders Co-Lab, Elevate Children, Feminist Dream Space, Nebula Fund, Global Narrative Hive, and G4GC: Investing in Ecosystems that Support our Youth
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