Notes from WINGSForum 2026.

For those with a busy week ahead (TL;DR):

We returned from WINGSForum 2026 with many pages of notes, new relationships and, perhaps unsurprisingly, more questions than answers. But one question seems to sit underneath much of what we heard: what holds movements together, particularly through periods of uncertainty and change?

Across conversations in Montréal, we found ourselves thinking about infrastructure beyond the systems that sit within an organisation. We heard people talking about the relationships and spaces that connect movements; the conditions that make experimentation possible; different pathways towards more autonomous resourcing; and the knowledge and information systems through which movements understand their work and the world around them.

For those with limited bandwidth this week, here is what we are taking forward:

• Infrastructure lives within organisations, certainly, but also between them and across movements.

• If we want movements to sustain, adapt and experiment, we need to pay attention to the relationships, resources, knowledge, care and room for uncertainty that make collective work possible in the first place.

For those with a little more space, come wander through some of the questions with us. 🌱

Coming back with more questions

We arrived in Montréal already carrying questions about infrastructure. Our first Experimentation Space is behind us, our work alongside four youth-led movement organisations is underway, and we are slowly learning more about what it actually means to create space for experimentation rather than arrive with a predetermined package of organisational support.

So we went to WINGS listening particularly for how others across the philanthropic and movement ecosystem were thinking about what movements need in order to sustain, adapt and organise; what philanthropy understands infrastructure to be; and what becomes visible when we look beyond projects and programmes towards the conditions that make collective work possible in the first place.

Across the Forum, four threads kept intersecting with questions already alive inside Substratum:

• relational infrastructure and what holds movements together;

• experimentation and the distribution of risk;

• the accessibility of alternative and autonomous resourcing;

• knowledge infrastructure, particularly questions of agency, ownership and information integrity.

These are not the only conversations we encountered at WINGS, nor do we suggest there was a single shared understanding of them across the Forum. They are the threads that most closely connected with the questions we are already exploring through Substratum, and the ones we are carrying back into the experiment.

Infrastructure exists between us, too

One phrase seemed to circulate around many conversations at WINGS: relational infrastructure. It appeared in different ways and with different meanings: relationships between movements; spaces where people can gather and think together; networks of solidarity and mutual support; connections across generations and issues; trusted allies; and the people and places that movements themselves identify as holding their work together.

We have been thinking about relational infrastructure within Substratum for some time. It is one of the five interconnected domains through which we currently understand organisational infrastructure. But WINGS pushed us to stretch the frame further: what happens when we move beyond the infrastructure within an organisation and begin looking at the infrastructure between organisations, across movements and throughout an ecosystem?

A movement is not simply a collection of well-functioning organisations. Relationships can carry memory, knowledge, solidarity, strategy, political imagination and care across organisations and across time. Convening spaces can allow relationships to form before there is a project requiring them. Networks can allow people and resources to move differently during moments of crisis. Sometimes the infrastructure sustaining political work may be a person, a gathering place, an informal network, or a relationship that would never appear on an organisational chart.

But recognising relationships as infrastructure also creates another question. If philanthropy begins to understand relational infrastructure as something worth resourcing, how do we avoid immediately turning relationships into another funder deliverable? How do we resource the conditions in which relationships can deepen without instrumentalising them? And who gets to define what holds a movement together in the first place?

Experimentation also means asking who carries the risk

Another thread connected directly with something we have been writing and thinking about recently: experimentation. We have been arguing that experimentation requires more than permission to try something new. It requires time, resources, relationships, trust, some degree of safety, and enough capacity to survive when something does not work.

At WINGS, another dimension became increasingly visible: who carries the uncertainty of experimentation?

Philanthropy often talks about risk as something institutions need to manage. But institutional risk does not simply disappear when a funder becomes more cautious; it can move onto an organisation asked to deliver ambitious outcomes through a short grant, onto staff absorbing delays and uncertainty, onto movements expected to innovate while protecting existing programmes, or onto people asked to participate in learning processes without the time or resources to do so.

This is making us increasingly interested in distinguishing between risk and experimentation. Experimentation is a deliberate inquiry into something whose answer we do not yet know. Risk concerns the harm, loss or exposure that might accompany that uncertainty and, crucially, who is expected to absorb it.

If philanthropy genuinely wants movements to experiment, then the question cannot only be whether funders are willing to finance innovative ideas. We also need to ask what funding arrangements allow movements to stop, change direction, discover that an idea does not fit, or arrive somewhere different from the outcome originally imagined. What would it mean for philanthropy to help hold some of the uncertainty rather than simply financing the experiment?

This question comes directly back into our own practice. Substratum cannot argue that experimentation should not transfer uncertainty and unpaid labour onto movements without asking whether our own Experimentation Spaces do exactly that. How we structure participation, compensate people's time, document learning, make decisions and allow an experiment to change are not peripheral programme-design questions. They form part of the infrastructure of experimentation itself.

Resourcing alternatives without creating another prescription

Questions about risk also surfaced in conversations about alternative and autonomous resourcing. There is enormous interest across our ecosystem in how movements might become less dependent on traditional philanthropic funding, and we share that interest. We are curious about pooled resources, mutual support, earned income, longer-term asset building and other approaches that might create greater autonomy.

But we left WINGS wanting to slow this conversation down, because a compelling model is not necessarily an accessible model. Not every movement has assets it can leverage. Not every organisation can generate consulting income. Not every social justice project should become a social business. Building an alternative revenue stream itself requires time, knowledge, relationships, planning and often capital; precisely the resources organisations facing financial precarity may have least available.

So perhaps the first question is not which alternative funding models should movements replicate? but which resourcing pathways are genuinely available to different movements, and what would make it possible for them to explore those pathways without putting their political work or people's wellbeing at risk?

For Substratum, this means looking beyond the identification of promising models towards the conditions that make different choices possible, the trade-offs they introduce, and what support movements may need while exploring them. We are increasingly interested in the possibility that what travels between contexts may not be the model itself. It may instead be the questions people asked, the decisions they made, the relationships and resources they could draw upon, or the forms of support that enabled them to develop something appropriate to their own conditions.

That distinction will continue to inform how we approach our own inquiry into alternative and autonomous resourcing.

Knowledge infrastructure, agency and who gets to know

Knowledge infrastructure is also not a new question for Substratum. It is one of the five domains through which we currently understand organisational infrastructure, encompassing how knowledge is created, held, accessed, interpreted and used. What WINGS sharpened for us was a particular dimension of that infrastructure: information integrity, agency, ownership and control.

Maria Ressa's keynote, alongside conversations throughout the Forum about technology, data and learning, pushed us to think more deeply about the relationship between knowledge infrastructure and the wider information environments in which movements operate. If movements need infrastructure to act, they also need infrastructure through which they can know, interpret, remember and make meaning.

That raises questions that sit directly inside our existing work: Who determines what knowledge matters? Who controls the data through which movements are understood? Whose languages and categories are recognised? Who interprets what has been learned, and who can challenge that interpretation? What happens when movement knowledge enters philanthropic or technological systems that movements themselves do not control?

These questions are particularly relevant as we think about movement-owned monitoring, evaluation and learning, and about the growing interest in GenAI-enabled tools across the sector. Our instinct is to begin not with the technology but with agency. Before asking whether we should build a new tool, adapt an existing one, or use AI to analyse movement knowledge, we need to understand what movements actually need from their learning systems and what ownership, consent, privacy, accessibility and interpretive control should look like.

Sometimes the infrastructure needed may indeed be technological. Sometimes it may be shared access to an existing tool. And sometimes the most important infrastructure may simply be the time, relationships and practices that allow people to make sense of their own work together.

Later this month, we will be sharing more about the five domains of organisational infrastructure currently informing Substratum's experimentation, including what we mean by knowledge and relational infrastructure. We are sharing them not as a finished taxonomy, but as a working praxis that we expect to keep testing, complicating and adapting as we learn alongside movements through the experiment.

Nourishing the learning ecology

One of the things we value about being in spaces like WINGS is encountering work that can sit alongside our own questions without needing to be immediately absorbed into a Substratum position or programme. Our learning ecology continues to grow through research, conversations, practices and people whose work gives us something to think with, question, or follow further.

We are particularly interested in learning more from DALAN Fund's work on movement and ecosystem infrastructure, and in exploring what becomes visible when a movement-level understanding of infrastructure sits alongside Substratum's organisational lens. We also encountered emerging participatory research through the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity’s network on community-centred approaches to resourcing social justice. That work is still developing, but it offers another body of thinking to stay close to as we explore alternative and autonomous resourcing.

Conversations around youth governance, youth-designed funding, care and wellbeing are also staying close to the experiment, particularly as we consider what meaningful participation requires from the infrastructure surrounding it. And Maria Ressa's work on information integrity gives us another body of thinking to sit alongside our own inquiry into knowledge infrastructure, movement-owned MEL, technology and agency.

Nourishing the soil

All of these threads bring us back to the beginning of this inquiry: what holds movements together?

We do not think there is one answer, and part of Substratum's work is learning how to distinguish between different forms and levels of infrastructure without collapsing them into a single catch-all term. Organisational infrastructure, movement infrastructure and ecosystem infrastructure overlap, but they are not necessarily the same thing. Understanding where they meet, what functions they serve, who stewards them and what needs to remain distinct feels like an increasingly important part of the inquiry.

For now, we are carrying these questions from Montréal back into the work.

Questions we are carrying forward

What holds movements together, and who gets to define it? What becomes possible when infrastructure is understood not only within organisations, but between them and across movement ecosystems? How can philanthropy resource relationships without turning them into deliverables?

If we ask movements to experiment, who carries the uncertainty when an experiment changes, stalls or fails? Which alternative resourcing pathways are genuinely accessible to movements with very different assets, capacities and political contexts?

Who owns the knowledge generated through movement learning, and who has the authority to interpret it? And what might change if we understood infrastructure not simply as a way of strengthening organisational efficiency, but as a way of nourishing the conditions in which collective work can continue?