HOLDING Complexity building Continuity

2025 was a year of doing, not just studying.
Inspired by scholar Bagele Chilisa's work around Relational Ontology in African philosophy, we reimagined research as a collective and ethical process messy, complex, but deeply transformative.

ALT revealed how limited tech support for South Asian languages forces users into English, restricting access and expression.

SLT uncovered a vibrant network of community-driven language initiatives in Africa, powerful counterpoints to profit-driven Big Tech.

Technology can be rooted in, owned by, and built by the people it serves.

Published conversations with activists and archivists, such as the Syrian Design Archive and recorded our pilot conversation with Haneen Maikey of alQaws, as part of our Archiving Movements podcast series.

Launched the UK Community of Practice Knowledge Production series

Facilitated Feminist Archiving workshop in Manila and co-facilitated “Disrupting the Canon: Collective Practices of Memory and Power” in Kathmandu, Nepal.

We are proud of the knowledge production that stemmed from the UK Community of Practice, our participation in the UnMuseum Working Group with Black South West Network, and our role on the UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk Project steering committee.

Throughout 2025, we built and deepened relationships with liberatory archives, memory workers, and community organizers from Nepal, Palestine, Indonesia, Lebanon, India, and beyond.

We continue learning how to hold complexity, honor community care, and practice archiving as a collective, anti-colonial act.

We created and debuted a reparations dialogue game at the EDGE Funders Alliance Conference in Bogota, Colombia, that engaged 25 participants from across the philanthropic ecosystem in play-driven conversations on reparations

We co-authored a blog unpacking the idea of expertise in philanthropy as part of the “Myths of Philanthropy” series by Elemental and the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

Along with the Finance and Operations team, we co-designed and co-held the 2026 all-team Budgeting Process. With recognition that a budget is a value statement, the WK? annual budgeting process is anchored in personal, political, and cultural relationships to money and how we live this in our resource allocation decisions.

Our most profound learning centered on relationality as a superpower. In an increasingly extractive world, we reaffirmed that collective movements and cooperative communities are essential for restoring dignity to life and balance to the planet. We also learned to move at responsive speeds, adapting our rhythm to the needs of our communities.

We centered our approach on inviting Indigenous women to reflect honestly on their realities and envision futures of strength and connection with the land, using questions about creative power, dreams, resisting urgency, nurturing connections, play, and relationships.

This included supporting a collective of six Māori women on who traveled to the Reclaiming Indigenous Ecologies of Love Conference in New Mexico and connected with an Indigenous women's collective in Arizona, engaging in ceremony, presenting at the Labriola Indigenous Library, and hosting fireside sessions using hīkoi (walking) methodologies to explore the relational intersections of land, body, emotion, and story.

In holding these spaces, we witnessed how imagination, storytelling, and embodied connection can become acts of resistance and renewal. Each gathering reaffirmed the power of Indigenous women’s leadership and the deep relational wisdoms that guide climate and community justice.

As we remain a lean team, we aim at adding specialized financial expertise and support on a needs basis. Balancing day-to-day financial management with evolving internal processes and compliance continues to be both a challenge and a practice in adaptability

One of our main learnings this year was the realization that grunt work is political work—recognizing that the invisible systems we maintain are fundamental to sustaining justice-centered movements. We found that while non-profit financial and operational management requires routine and precision, it also needs pausing to see the bigger picture, intentionally building care and reflection into the workflow, coordinating with balance so operations continue seamlessly, and centering our communities with gentleness and radical love in their everyday systems.

In 2025, we strengthened Whose Knowledge? as a practitioner organization, anchoring our internal processes in learning, adaptation, and reflection. This work included:

We believe that by intentionally building systems, methodologies, and frameworks, we are creating reusable, adaptable, and movement-owned architectures that can extend beyond our organization and strengthen the broader ecosystem.

Our work centered on assessing existing frameworks, leading reflective discussions to identify what works, and implementing new structures and methodologies that sustain momentum while embracing the imperfections of organizational adaptation.

A key focus this year was democratizing leadership, which involved expanding the Operational Leadership Team and establishing a Programming Committee to intentionally broaden participation, deepen collaboration, and enable shared ownership of decision-making. These structures were designed to build a more inclusive environment and empower individuals to actively shape organizational direction. Furthermore, new Board members were welcomed at the governance level to bring fresh perspectives, honesty, and accountability, helping to refine board practices, strengthen alignment with the external political environment, and encourage the organization to question orthodoxies while staying true to its feminist and decolonial knowledge justice mission.

We shifted focus toward internal communications and processes, ensuring that our external voice remains authentic and aligned.

This included an exciting process to refine our organizational visual identity, experimenting with color, typography, and visual elements that better express who we are and what we do.

Each program developed a dedicated communications strategy to clarify its goals and audiences.Together, these strategies form a collective framework, weaving our messages into one shared narrative as we move into 2026 with alignment and determination.