Six things I wish social justice leaders understood about grief

This article is in memory of my dear friend Shipra Jha, who taught me that the path to liberation was to never make myself smaller

Before the Covid pandemic, I spent a long time paying little attention to the topic of grief. Am I alone in that tendency? Perhaps not. It wasn’t that I wasn’t exposed to it; far from it. It’s just that grief avoidance was a useful protective mechanism. Of course, grief cannot be kept at bay indefinitely and Covid really made we think more deeply about leadership, grief and the workplace. I wrote about it.

Towards the end of 2024, I was trying to process my own grief. No, that’s not true — I was trying to delay it. A very close family member was dying, and I had suddenly lost a dear friend. I regularly told myself, “I’ll deal with this once I take some leave/at the end of the year/month/day”. At this point, I attended a big women’s rights gathering of activists from all over the globe. The event was all I hoped it would be — invigorating, insightful, informative, bonding, joyous and fun.

But in my grief-phobic state, there was something I had not expected from this conference. Alongside the joy, the bonding, the connecting and the strategising, grief was taking centre stage. From climate activists speaking about degradation of their lands, to Mozambican and Sudanese feminists mourning the international community’s disregard for the violence in their countries, to trans activists sharing stories of backlash from anti-gender movements, grief was… everywhere. And I had nowhere to hide.

It manifested in different ways: I saw people forming grief circles in common areas of the conference hall. In one session I attended, which focused upon supporting activists to develop embodied rituals for self-protection, half the room ended up in tears, so powerful was the collective ritual. I turned to my neighbour and asked how she was. “I’m grieving,’’ she told me. I turned to the woman on my other side, “Me too,” she said. Much as I may have wanted to, at this conference, I could not bypass my grief. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to transform any of the loss I was feeling without planting my feet more firmly in it.

I have not been able to stop thinking about feminist praxis, leadership and grief since this global gathering. I contrasted the ways in which non-profit institutions I have worked for have handled staff grief — mostly as a private issue to be managed by the affected individual — with the ways the feminists I met at the conference were approaching their loss head-on. Publicly. Unapologetically.

My last experience of grieving in the workplace had been so different. “Take a couple of days’ compassionate leave — your work can wait until you’re back,’’ one boss awkwardly told me after I’d lost a dear relative several years ago and had broken down in the office. It was like he was dancing on live embers, so taboo was it to speak about grief.

Here’s what I think all leaders, but particularly those working in social justice spaces, need to understand about grief.

1. Grief is structural

Covid-19 really brought it home to me all the ways in which grief is a political and structural phenomenon. It is not all about one-off cases of bereavement. For some of us, the losses have never stopped and grief has been limitless. People are dealing with dispossession from their lands, climate coloniality, genocide and systemic injustice experienced over many generations. These are not naturally occurring, inevitable phenomenon — they are the result of purposeful political decisions and the way systems of power work to sustain themselves. Treating grief as a private phenomenon that is limited to just personal loss of a friend or family member is simply not good social justice leadership.

2. Grief is intrinsic to our work

For anyone working in the social justice space to deny grief in this moment of genocide, rising authoritarianism, escalating conflict, and anti-gender backlash is a bit like going for a walk in gale-force winds and expecting your perfectly-coiffed hair to remain in place. But there’s more to say. Feminists are political beings — we have big dreams for the future. For us, grief is more than just what happens directly to us. Grief expert Breeshia Wade puts it well when she says “[grief is…] connected to what we fear, what we love, and what we aspire toward”. We are grieving all those dreams that did not come to fruition. We lament all the institutions we may have believed in which have not lived up to their promises.

If grief is intrinsic to feminist work, then surely our movements and organisations know how to attend to it? During the pandemic, I wrote about how leaders were colluding in the denial of staff grief. Today, this risk remains. For example, I know many aid workers who have lost their colleagues because of Israeli air strikes, and yet their organisations have been remarkably muted about where they expect staff to put this grief. There are few spaces to metabolise it outside of the private sphere. Yes, we absolutely must be realistic and proportionate in terms of our expectations of organisations — and what they can and cannot heal in us. But I continue to see leaders promoting numbing behaviours instead of creating space for grief — filling the days with countless meetings, calls, projects and deadlines. Business is very much as usual.

3. Grief work is accountability work

The UK had one of the highest Covid death toll rates in Europe. Despite sizable public campaigns, the government did not give permission for an official public monument/memorial to remember the dead. I read this as an accountability dodge — a memorial would only serve to remind people that the government at the time had hundreds of thousands of people’s blood on its hands. Memories are political organisms — in being denied the right to memorialise, the UK government was attempting to whitewash history.

Let’s move to the workplace, where leaders’ failure to acknowledge grief can be seen as another accountability evasion. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, many non-profits in the UK made substantial commitments to racial justice. Fast forward four years, and the summer of 2024 saw sizeable far-right, racist riots in the UK in which mobs attacked hotels housing migrants as well as mosques. Shortly after the riots, I attended a sharing circle for people of colour working for non-profits which had signed up to racial justice commitments a few years earlier. Very few organisations had acknowledged the riots, checked in on their staff of colour or made the links between what was happening locally and their own stalled work on racial justice. That sharing circle was full of a specific form of grief. In particular, people were grieving their organisation’s failures of accountability for racial justice work — and the loss of hope they felt from 2020 when change seemed possible.

4. Grief can be generative

I know from the work I do supporting people to explore feminist leadership approaches, that many workplaces continue to operate on the assumption that emotions are an unwelcome visitor in the workplace. Emotions can be tolerated from time to time but not encouraged. Too many leaders worry that emotions cause discomfort in others and that they will get in the way of productivity. But I want leaders to consider the costs of not attending to grief caused by exposure to the work. Disconnection, inability to collaborate effectively with others, increased interpersonal conflicts — can any of us afford not to attend to grief in this moment? How might acknowledging and creating space for grief foster community and collective power for your team/organisation?

5. Be careful about recovery narratives

“i don’t want to tell you

when they died.

if it wasn’t yesterday

will you expect me

to be less broken”

sara rian

Those who are seduced by neoliberal approaches to leadership love a recovery narrative. “Just move on,’’ we are told. “It’s time to look to the future, not the past,” is another common refrain. The recovery juggernaut moves so fast, that many of us get whiplash. And to a certain extent, leaders do have a point. We can become too consumed by internal dynamics to the extent that our missions are neglected. But where some leaders are wrong is that we cannot move forward without paying enough attention to the past. The Potawatomi writer Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us that grief work is what helps us to build something new: “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

It is also interesting to reflect on who is more likely to be told to move on and why, and who is allowed time and space to process any loss. Many of us can give countless examples of not being permitted to mourn a loss which our institutions may have been complicit in bringing about. Since Trump made significant cuts to the US foreign aid budget, I have seen online spaces offered for US staff to lament the loss of their jobs — but where was the same energy from these groups in mourning the loss of lives in Gaza, something the US government was fuelling and funding?

6. You don’t need to be a qualified therapist to do grief work

No-one is saying that it is the role of a leader or manager to heal everyone’s grief. No-one is saying that you need to provide therapy. But it is worth asking, what is my role given that my staff are exposed to so much grief through their work? What else could I be doing? What might a grief infrastructure look like for our organisation?

The activist collective GlobalDev4Palestine has held public online vigils to honour aid workers killed in Gaza; events that I know some people have found incredibly cathartic. In 2019, Iceland held a funeral for its first glacier lost to climate change. There are communities around the world which hold monthly grief circles. The Black Lives Matter movement has always taken grief rituals seriously — and seen them as an important part of social justice organising. Grief work can take many forms.

My final words are for those who don’t hold positional power in their organisations. Do we even need our leaders’ permission to grieve? Is it time for us to claim our right to grieve ourselves? It is one thing for others to deny us the right to grieve, quite another for us to deny that right to ourselves.

Leila Billing is a co-founder of We Are Feminist Leaders. Follow her on LinkedIn and @leilabilling.bsky.social