Over the past year, The Substratum Initiative has been listening to youth-led movements: the pressures they carry, the organisational realities they navigate, and the questions that emerge when movements are expected to hold more with fewer resources under increasingly constrained conditions.

This listening has shaped every aspect of what comes next in Substratum’s journey.

In June, we began Phase 1 of the Substratum Youth Movement Cohort-our first shared infrastructure experimentation space.

This is not the launch of a pre-designed programme or a predetermined model. It is a bounded space for collective inquiry, designed to explore what forms of movement infrastructure can be shared, federated, or collectively stewarded, and under what conditions those approaches become useful, ethical, participatory, and sustainable.

Over the coming year, Substratum and our movement partners will engage in a process of experimentation, reflection, adaptation, and collective sense-making. Rather than beginning with solutions, we begin with relationships, shared questions, and a willingness to learn together. We expect that some ideas will evolve, some assumptions will be challenged, and some experiments may reveal the limits of what is possible. All of these are valuable outcomes.

This first phase is intentionally small. It has been designed not to maximise participation, but to make participation meaningful, sustainable, and responsive to the realities youth-led movements are already navigating.

Introducing our Phase 1 Movement Partners

We are grateful to begin this first phase of experimentation alongside four extraordinary youth-led movement partners whose work spans climate justice, feminist organising, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the protection of environmental and climate defenders.

Each organisation brings deep expertise, distinct lived realities, and a commitment to imagining new ways of strengthening movement infrastructure.

Green Africa Youth Organisation (GAYO)
GAYO co-creates and implements climate solutions across Africa. Working across themes such as just transition, adaptation and resilience, zero-waste cities, and green jobs, we bridge communities, institutions, and policy to deliver locally owned and durable change. Their work is grounded in enabling young people to live, work, and lead within the systems they help transform.

Loss and Damage Youth Coalition (LDYC)
The Loss and Damage Youth Coalition is a global network of over 1,400 young negotiators, activists, researchers, storytellers, communicators, and trainers from more than 100 countries, united in pushing for ambitious international action on loss & damage (L&D).

CHEVS
CHEVS is a youth-led feminist collective advancing LGBTQI+ equality across Africa by building agency and power with diverse LGBTQI+ youths to shape their own future and boldly confront inequality across sectors. CHEVS’ work is achieved through movement building, advocacy and narrative change efforts, while building political power to achieve the liberation of its communities across the region.

Climate Activist Defenders (CAD)
Climate Activist Defenders (CAD) aims to protect the lives and well-being of front-line climate justice activists working under oppressive and dangerous conditions by providing emergency response and safety resources and by building a support network within the climate justice movement. CAD is currently operating globally to support climate justice activists, environmental human rights defenders and Indigenous defenders. 

Together, these four movement partners reflect the breadth, complexity, and interconnectedness of youth-led organising today. They were not selected because they share identical internal structures, contexts, or priorities, but because each brings a unique perspective to a shared inquiry and reflects the diversity of contexts and realities that youth-led movements are navigating today, and that diversity is central to the experiment.

The Question We Are Holding

Over the coming year, we will experiment together with one overarching question:

What forms of infrastructure can be shared, federated, or collectively stewarded within youth-led movement ecosystems, and under what conditions?

We will explore this broader question through one shared area of experimentation: Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL).

More specifically, we are asking:

What becomes possible, and what must change, when monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning are shaped by movement realities, knowledge systems, and forms of accountability rather than donor requirements alone?

We do not begin with fixed answers; we begin with relationship-building: trust, curiosity, shared stewardship, and a commitment to creating the conditions for meaningful experimentation.

Journeying With Us

Over the coming months, we will continue sharing reflections from this journey: the questions that emerge, what we are learning through practice, and where the experimentation leads us.

Our hope is not to produce a blueprint that others simply replicate. Rather, we hope to contribute to a broader conversation about what movement infrastructure might become when it is designed with movements rather than simply for them. There will be insights that affirm our assumptions and also moments that challenge them. Both are part of the work.

To our Phase 1 Youth Movement Partners: thank you for your trust, your openness, and your willingness to step into a process whose outcomes are not yet known. Your participation is not simply shaping this cohort; it is helping us collectively explore what becomes possible when experimentation, participation, and shared stewardship are treated as forms of infrastructure in their own right.

And to everyone following Substratum: thank you for journeying alongside us. Whether you are a movement leader, funder, researcher, practitioner, or simply someone curious about how we might build stronger foundations for collective work, we are grateful that you are here.

We look forward to sharing what we discover together.

With gratitude,

Uma
Founder & Lead Strategist
The Substratum Initiative