The Feminist Self and Collective Care initiative is designed to support feminist activists, women human rights defenders, frontline workers, GBV responders, and grassroots movement actors navigating stress, burnout, secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, leadership strain, and the emotional demands of justice-centered work. Feminist partner organizations are paired with trusted feminist psychosocial mentors to strengthen self and collective care practices that respond to their needs. These care practices, co-designed within each partner organization and guided by African feminist psychosocial experts, help deepen and sustain feminist care while embedding it into personal routines and organizations’ day-to-day work culture.

Across the three project countries, the wellness interventions created safe, trauma-informed, participatory, and culturally grounded spaces where participants could pause, reflect, reconnect with themselves and others, and intentionally practice healing.

The FemPeaceEA initiative recognized that feminist activists and frontline workers often operate within environments marked by emotional exhaustion, burnout, overwork, financial strain, online harassment, secondary trauma, and social isolation. Rather than approaching wellness purely as an individual responsibility, the interventions emphasized collective care, solidarity, interdependence, embodiment, organizational accountability and cultural rituals learning from African and Indigenous traditions to reclaim communal support systems.

A major strength across all countries was the translation of wellness from abstract theory into practical, everyday practices rooted in local realities and feminist values. Participants engaged in activities such as  cultural ceremonies, gratitude rituals, yoga, meditation, grounding, art therapy, storytelling, peer counselling, healing circles, feminist reading, dance, nature healing, sound healing, and structured collective care planning.

The Feminist Self and Collective Care interventions also emphasized that care is political, radical, and necessary for sustaining feminist leadership, peacebuilding, and community healing work. Partner organizations repeatedly reframed self-care from being “selfish” or “luxurious” into an act of self-preservation, dignity, resistance, and collective sustainability of their organizational work.