Chasing Funding to “Eat Our Own Tail”: The Invisible Emotional Work of Making Social Change

Abstract

This article presents findings from a multi-site study conducted in Montréal, QC, and Toronto, ON, Canada, on “social in-novation” networks, focusing on the forms of emotional and relational work that many participants described. The article explores how these tasks related to how workers in the two nonprofit “backbone” organizations described their contributions to the impacts they hoped to make. The intersections of these forms of work and particular identities are framed within a feminist lens—when and how are these forms of relational work recognized or made invisible? This work is contextualized within neoliberal reforms, the restructuring of the state, and external funding requirements and how these de-\termine what forms of work are deemed “impactful” in making significant social change around broad issues of homelessness and social exclusion.