Paper details
| Paper authors | Mahrukh (Maya) Hasan |
| In panel on | Communities of Practice as Sites of Solidarity, Resistance and Shifting Power in Humanitarianism |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
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Abstract
As we face unprecedented challenges in 2025—widespread funding cuts, polycrisis, AI disinformation threats, and climate displacement—communities of practice have become vital spaces of resistance and transformation in humanitarianism. Drawing from my decade-long journey as a Muslim, Pakistani-American community organizer to global humanitarian network leader and co-founder, I explore how peer-driven communities can grow from mutual aid to movement infrastructure.
I share lessons from leading and co-founding two distinct spaces: Fifty Shades of Aid, which grew from playful peer connection into the world's largest aid worker network (26,000+ members), and the emerging Shifting Power Community of Practice, intentionally designed to bridge movements for power redistribution in the humanitarian sector and beyond.
Through this comparative lens, I examine critical tensions:
1. Intimacy v. scale: Expanding from small circles of trusted peers to global networks while preserving both the deep personal bonds that enable vulnerability and the radical political purpose that drives systemic change
2. Unity through difference: Sustaining community cohesion through cultural flashpoints that reveal conflicts within diverse, global networks or across movements; and
3. Economic independence: Sustaining volunteer-driven spaces when donors resist funding community infrastructure and activist spaces resist monetization models that could enable genuine independence.
Drawing on adrienne maree brown's "moving at the speed of trust," principle, I argue that centering Majority World and marginalized experiences through anti-oppression, co-creation, care, learning, and action is essential for building a more just sector all the while bridging fragmented advocacy spaces from decolonizing aid to feminist and climate activism.
As humanitarian transitions accelerate amid today's crises, this presentation offers practical wisdom about when communities of practice can successfully grow from survival to transformation — and the conditions that enable such growth.
