Beauty Parlor’s first 9 months
Closing out our launch year calls for reflection.
Launching a new NGO always comes with ups and downs, a lot of experimenting, mobilizing, and the heart warming (and never ending) work of building an authentic community. Our year 0, 2024, being a Kafkaesque journey through German bureaucracy, we are beyond grateful that 2025 was instead full of the creative programming that is building this platform. We have loved every second of that but also first hand experienced the feminist backlash.
Being in the feminist field and being acutely aware that only 2% of funding goes to women’s funds, we knew what we were getting into. At the end of the year, we can proudly look back at a strong start filled with beauty, joy, connection, and strategizing with women and activists worldwide.
In our first 9 months as an NGO, we have accomplished:
Publishing 6 podcast episodes, taking us to beauty salons acting as spaces of community and resistance in Kosovo, Georgia, Morocco, Ukraine, and Romania
Hosting 2 live podcast events at Podfest, Berlin’s biggest podcast festival, and Bard College
Mentoring 8 young female and LGBTQ+ future leaders from around the world (including from Kyrgyzstan, the US, Ukraine, and Egypt) in an academic partnership with Bard College and IES Abroad
Organized two big heartwarming community events with a vibrant culture, music, and beauty program, attracting 400 + attendants, building bridges between different communities.
Fundraising for 4 women’s humanitarian organizations in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, and Georgia, as well as donating smaller sums to additional initiatives such as refugee aid in Libya and Iranian Women, Life, Freedom activism in Iran
Building a loyal and active community of supporters that engage with our daily online storytelling and awareness building, including with an average social media reach of 38,000-50,000 monthly views and an audience of about 400 engaged listeners on our podcast
Presenting our work and vision at 2 top universities: ESCP Business School, one of Germany’s most prestigious business schools and at Bard College
Soft-launching our feminist book club, which builds on the tradition of oral storytelling in beauty spaces to promote cross-cultural understanding
Establishing a core network of 20 Berlin-based volunteers committing weekly hours to growing our initiative
Gaining entry into two high-level civil society female leadership networks to strategize future feminist work in Germany 2026.
Meeting with our US branch in New York City to plan the next steps of the fundraising journey in 2026
Received media features from organizations including Cee Cee, Berlin’s biggest newsletter, and Refuge, a worldwide activist media and fundraising platform
Building the foundation for our future platform to collect corporate donations for women’s grassroots organizations
Looking forward to 2026, we have big plans: A new podcast episode highlighting US immigration and the experiences of undocumented migrants is currently in the works, building a campaign for more philanthropic funding for feminist organizations in Germany, and collaborating with the Iraqi/Kurdish NGO JusticeNow to support the creation of what would be the first Kurdish feminist fund.
All of these achievements and seeds were planted from a team (and community) that faces a myriad of daily challenges women and feminist movements share.
We have had limited and extremely unstable funding, often making us go months without paying out salaries, with the additional care burden of being a toddler mother, dealing with constant labour shortages in childcare.
Our team (and volunteer community) consists of 100 % migrant and queer people. Several of us have had extremely vulnerable VISA or migrant statuses, creating a lot of additional obstacles. Other ones are not only living with the daily stressors of their home country being at war, but sometimes determined showed up to work even after heavy missile attacks (as during the reserach trip for our Ukraine episode)
We are also operating in an increasingly hostile environment for feminist causes and civil society in general. The funding for anti-gender initiatives has risen by 300 % meanwhile, the progressive philanthropy seems to have underestimated the threat and has not stepped up its commitment. In 2025, Germany has also fallen in the global ranking of how free its civil society is, and now alls in the same category as Hungary, something that should be very alarming to say the least.
All of these parallel threads exist together. The joy, the beauty, and commitment to mobilization, but also all the challenges. It’s all strengthening us in our conviction that we are doing the right thing at the right moment, but also being humble that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. A journey, we hope you want to continue embarking on with us for 2026.
Also, our work is made possible by financial support from people like you. You can support feminist mobilization with a tax-deductible donation here.
