Reimagining Social Change Through Contribution, Not Consumption

In a time when the ability for just change is increasingly dependent on donor funding, and when gender justice work around the globe faces severe budget cuts and shrinking civic space, a bold movement is unfolding in rural communities. This movement grows through the powerful act of giving. It is inspired by the spirit of the gift economy.

Buzz Women draws on the radical imagination of the gift: not charity that flows top-down, but gestures of connection, reciprocity, and respect that circulate laterally. Gifts, after all, are not about doing a favour but instead are acts of love, dignity, and recognition. Where charity reinforces hierarchy, gifts unsettle it.

This is where Buzz Women places itself, as a feminist reimagining. In the global development space where funder–NGO relationships are shaped by neoliberal logics of efficiency, metrics, and scarcity, the question then to ask is, ‘where do communities fit in this web of giving, taking, and accounting?’

Buzz Women attempts to flip this structure on its head. It uses the unequal money power that exists in donor ecosystems, but channels it toward practices that cultivate reciprocity, and community ownership rather than dependency. At the heart of its model is the recognition that every woman already holds within her the strength, wisdom, and possibility to craft her own life.

Education is offered on the doorstep and what it sparks is confidence, agency, and dignity. Women who join Buzz’s learning journeys are not passive recipients. They are invited (never obligated) to contribute to a pay-it-forward fund, a gesture that circulates change rather than accumulates it. Each contribution, however small, ensures that others too can walk the same path. In this sense, women are not beneficiaries but contributors, cultivators of possibility.

The spirit of giving threads through every part of the movement. Anchor women offer their time and care; community trainers, many of them once learners, step up to share knowledge. Funders, when they enter this space, are invited to give not just money but trust, a radical departure from the transactional logic of grants. Even the Earth is understood as a giver, with Buzz’s green curriculum nurturing awareness of nature’s abundance and urging collective responsibility to care for it.

This reframing matters. In the dominant development world, success is measured by scale, outputs, and cost-efficiency. Buzz Women proposes something gentler but more radical: that growth is not about how many are reached but how deeply they connect; that sustainability is not about exit strategies but about continuity rooted in community; that transformation is not a service delivered but a relationship cultivated.

By rooting itself in contribution rather than consumption, Buzz Women reshapes the architecture of change. It shows that when giving emerges from connection rather than obligation, it does not deplete, it regenerates.

“When you give a gift, you’re not giving something away. You’re giving something of yourself. Every time a gift is given it is enlivened and regenerated through the new spiritual life it engenders both in the giver and in the recipient.” — Margaret Atwood