Giselle Carino: On the Architecture of Solidarity
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Giselle Carino: On the Architecture of Solidarity
It’s 8a.m. in Buenos Aires when Giselle Carino joins our call.
She’s freshly returned from one of many trips she’s made this year as founding CEO of Fòs Feminista. Known affectionately as Fòs, the transnational alliance advances sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice, through a network of about 200 organisations across 40 countries in the Global South.
Argentina is a poignant setting for a conversation about feminist resistance and the long arc of solidarity. Giselle was born here in 1976, just as a brutal military dictatorship seized power. With civil liberties suspended and dissent violently suppressed, even modest democratic demands became radical acts. Decades later, Argentina would become the birthplace of Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), the mass feminist movement ignited by the murder of 14-year-old Chiara Páez. What began as national grief transformed into continent-wide mobilisations – several years before the Me Too movement - reframing gender-based violence as a structural crisis and fuelling waves of activism across Latin America and beyond.
When we speak, the movement is marking its ten-year anniversary. But for all its progress, the threats facing Argentina are far from over. Femicides still occur once every 35 hours. Prevention programs have been defunded. Some officials have blamed “the excesses of feminism” for the rising violence, and there have been calls to erase femicide from the Penal Code.
When I ask Giselle how she makes sense of this moment – of the global backlash against women’s rights – her response lands with particular force. “We are the backlash,” she says. “The feminist movement, with its transformative power, is the backlash to thousands of years of oppression.”
“We are the backlash.The feminist movement, with its transformative power, is the backlash to thousands of years of oppression.”
It’s a striking reframe. When patriarchal, colonial, and racialised systems push back, she explains, it’s because something has already shifted - because feminist movements have made themselves felt "in the only peaceful revolution in the world".
Over the course of our conversation, Giselle demonstrates an incredible ability to not only reframe power, but to locate it, again and again, in the hands of the women, girls, and gender-diverse people she works alongside. “People know what they need,” she says. “They don’t need anyone to tell them what they need.” It’s a sharp departure from a sector still shaped by donor priorities and imported solutions. Under Giselle’s leadership, Fòs works to strengthen what already exists.
Her perspective is grounded in a life lived on the fault lines – growing up without clean water in rural Argentina, training in political science, and building decades of transnational feminist strategy. In this conversation, she traces the architecture of solidarity: a structure built over time through trust, mutuality, and long-term commitment to justice.
Together, we draw a throughline across movements and crises - from post-earthquake Haiti to Brazil’s Zika outbreak, from abortion care to youth-led digital campaigns. We explore how history can sharpen our vision of authoritarian playbooks. And at every turn, she returns to the principle that animates her work: local knowledge isn’t a resource to be consulted, but rather, the centre of everything.
Defining solidarity
Defining solidarity
When I ask Giselle how she defines solidarity, she begins by drawing a clear line around what it is not. “Oftentimes, our own experience shows what solidarity isn’t. Solidarity is not about parachuting in with a solution,” she says. “We don’t have models or recipes for change. Our work is local and we build from there.”
"We don’t believe in a vision of the world where some are saviours and some need to be saved, or some have the knowledge and resources, and others have the needs".
Nor is it saviourism. “We don’t believe in a vision of the world where some are saviours and some need to be saved, or some have the knowledge and resources, and others have the needs. Change can only be co-created with the people who live the realities they seek to transform. They hold the relationships, the contextual knowledge and have ideas about the solution.”
At Fòs Feminista, solidarity takes structural form. The Alliance acts as connective tissue – linking close to 200 grassroots, national, and regional organisations across 40 countries, sharing political intelligence, mobilising flexible funding, building solutions and helping partners learn with and from those who’ve faced similar challenges and pioneered new approaches.
But how does such a broad coalition stay cohesive? I ask, given the differences in language, law, and lived experience. Rather than simply respond, she shifts my gaze – gently excavating the assumptions beneath the question.
“We have been fragmented by colonial powers, language,” Giselle begins, “and oftentimes, those experiences are very much alike and we have much more in common that we believe, our shared humanity.” She points to Turkey, Nicaragua, Venezuela – and increasingly, the United States – not to equate them, but to name a shared political inheritance: what it means to resist the erosion of rights. In confronting authoritarian regimes or grappling with democratic backsliding, the patterns are familiar. “Now, sadly, the U.S. is coming to understand what many have long lived through.”
To be clear, Fòs doesn’t require alignment on every issue. It is not about imposing consensus, but rather, working to strengthen local capacity with shared values and common priorities for change. As Giselle puts it, “It’s about solving problems together.”
Threading the intersections
Threading the intersections
Fòs Feminista is globally recognised for the breadth of its work - from responding to Brazil’s Zika outbreak, to strengthening feminist strategies that tackle gender-based violence in health systems. Its reach is vast, but the throughline is clear: community-rooted action in the face of compounding injustices.
I ask Giselle how the Alliance decides where to focus energy and resources – especially amid urgent, overlapping crises. “We’re one of the few organisations that work on sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. That is our core focus, but it is also true to say people don’t live single-issue lives,” she tells me.
“We’re one of the few organisations that work on sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. That is our core focus, but it is also true to say people don’t live single-issue lives.”
That insight has become a principle of design. Rather than narrowing its remit, Fòs enables its partners to respond holistically – to the realities people actually live. That might mean linking contraceptive access with actual supplies, or strengthening abortion care pathways while also training providers to recognise signs of intimate partner violence. She offers a clear example. “Women were coming to us for contraception or maternal care, but nobody was asking them if they were experiencing violence. So, providing services without addressing that part of their lives was deeply inadequate, right?”
During the Zika outbreak, the crisis wasn’t just viral – it was infrastructural, racialized, and gendered. The hardest-hit communities were in Brazil’s northeast, where water insecurity, poverty, and racial exclusion had long shaped health outcomes. “These were areas with the least access to clean water,” Giselle explains. “People need to save water which creates the opportunity for the mosquito to prosper. So, the issues are in fact deeply interconnected in our daily lives.”
That’s why, Giselle tells me, Fòs resists the pressure to compartmentalise. Instead, the Alliance mobilises flexible funding so its partners can act across the full spectrum of needs – strengthening the parts of the rights-based agenda that matter most in their communities.
Backlash and progress
The backlash and the long view
Giselle has lived through political repression. “I was born in 1976 at the beginning of brutal dictatorship in Argentina,” she says. “And perhaps because I was shaped by those who fought for democracy, I like to think two things.” The first: “We are the backlash. The feminist movement – with all its transformative power – is the backlash against patriarchal, colonial, racist systems of oppression. Our existence threatens them.”
Progress, she adds, has never followed a straight line. “We take one step toward progress, we face a new challenge, and then we make more progress.” The Green Wave is a worthy example. The mass mobilisation to legalise abortion in Argentina was led by feminists, students, health workers, and grassroots organisers. After years of sustained action, the campaign succeeded in 2020.
“We take one step toward progress, we face a new challenge, and then we make more progress.”
But even that victory remains vulnerable. Argentina’s current government is attempting to reverse abortion access – one of many signs that rights once secured can be quickly unravelled. “We need to remember that we are the ones unsettling these systems. That’s why the response is so intense.”
Still, she remains highly attuned to the risks ahead. “This is not to minimise the brutality or harm of the opposition. It’s real, and it’s everywhere. In the U.S, the normative power is so strong – what happens there, echoes across the world.” History keeps the long view in sight. “We shouldn’t forget that arc. Over and over, civil society has proven essential to democracy. That’s why our focus is on sustaining organisations who are built to fight the fights that matter most.”
Calculated risks and collective courage
Calculated risks and collective courage
How do you sustain collective action in a context of political repression? For Giselle, the risks she sees are systematic, escalating, and in many cases, predictable.
“They come from different places,” she says. “Domestically, and through association with international alliances.” Over the past decade, she’s watched patterns repeat: movements have been suppressed; organisations have had their NGO status revoked; or organisations have been challenged in the courts. “Sadly, we have seen that increase in the past 10 years, resulting from authoritarian regimes around the world to which we are a huge inconvenience and we will continue to be.”
The pattern of repression, she explains, is disturbingly consistent. “Authoritarian regimes have a playbook to do this. When you follow, it's like a pattern of what's going to happen next. You will have an audit harassment tool for organisations, and then you will be asked to register in a government run facility. Next, you'll be asked to submit every initiative you run for approval, and therefore they have the right to not approve things.”
Fòs Feminista works to reduce exposure, especially for women, girls and gender-diverse people. “We work to protect identities. They choose when and how to be in public. That is part of our collective self-care.”
But for many, safety can never be guaranteed.
“We fight because we do not have any other option. Our struggle is central to our survival as organisations, as people, and central to our democracies, so we will always find a way."
“We fight because we do not have any other option. Our struggle is central to our survival as organisations, as people, and central to our democracies, so we will always find a way. Despite the harassment, people in these organisations will go to great lengths and great personal sacrifices to do the work they need to do to advance the justice and rights agenda”.
The limits of the 'crisis' framework
The limits of the ‘crisis’ framework
I ask Giselle what it takes to build institutions that don’t abandon people in times of crisis. She gently pushes back – not dissimilarly to Seye Abimbola’s “hug with a pinch” formula. “The crisis framework sometimes isn’t very helpful,” she says. “It splits humanitarian and development work into silos. We think that’s a completely false framework to work through in countries that face huge difficulties.”
Her point is clear: crises are rarely discrete events. They are structural, compounding, and shaped by histories of extraction and neglect. Haiti offers one example. “After the 2010 earthquake, it became the epicentre of international aid. “I think the data showed that they probably had about 10,000 international NGOs operating there,” she says. “But most of the billions of dollars went to paying the salaries of foreign staff, not rebuilding Haiti.”
“After the 2010 earthquake, it became the epicentre of international aid...But most of the billions of dollars went to paying the salaries of foreign staff, not rebuilding Haiti.”
Now, as the country faces continuing instability, international attention has moved on. “The United Nations’ humanitarian response plan for Haiti calls for around $900 million. Just 8% of that is funded.”
Fòs never left and in fact, expanded its work. It continues to support two longstanding partners, including one clinic that has remained open throughout, providing reproductive health services. Fòs supplied what they needed - menstrual cups, contraceptives, medical equipment – to keep their doors open. “These issues are structural,” Giselle says. “They cannot be solved by a single intervention – especially one guided from the outside.”
The Zika outbreak in Brazil is another case in point. Declared to be “over” in the months following the 2016 Olympics, it was quickly deprioritised by the global health community. But for the women – often young, Black, and living in underserved areas – the crisis had only just begun. Many of the children born with Zika-related complications require long-term, intensive care. Fòs supported women through this period, backing local efforts to build social protection networks and pass legislation to improve long-term care. In July 2025, a law was passed that established compensation for moral damages and a special lifetime pension for affected children.
“That’s what we’re investing in,” she says. “Because that idea – that a crisis has a beginning and an end – is part of the problem. That is why the crisis framework isn’t the most helpful. What needs to be done must be led by the people who are impacted.”
One plus one equals three
As our conversation draws to a close, we return to the question of foundations. Giselle recalls her own. “I grew up in a rural community where we didn’t have clean water until the community made it our priority.” It’s a story she sees repeated across countries and contexts. Communities know what they need. What they lack is capital, visibility, and platforms to be heard.
Under Giselle’s guidance, Fòs does not impose models. The Alliance offers tools, resources, and political space for communities to lead – to translate knowledge into strategy, and solidarity into structure. From South-to-South collaborations to grassroots innovations, its approach is deeply pragmatic and radically local.
“The magic happens when people connect,” she says. “One plus one never equals two. It’s always three. Because something new gets made when we come together.” That is the architecture of solidarity. Not simply sentiment, not a template – a practice. A muscle built over time.
Photo credit: Buenos Aires by Andrea Leopardi