The SUBLIME Toolkit: Leading through a feminist lens
Discover practical insights for applying feminist leadership in everyday work.
Across civil society, social entrepreneurship, and community-based work, organisations committed to justice and equality often operate within systems that still reproduce hierarchy, bias, and unequal power relations. Even with strong values and technical expertise, leadership practices can unintentionally mirror the very dynamics they seek to challenge.
Feminist leadership offers a way to confront these contradictions. Rooted in intersectional feminism, it recognises that social change requires not only new policies and programmes, but also a deep shift in how power is understood, shared, and exercised. Without attention to leadership practice, relationships, and accountability, efforts for gender and social justice risk remaining fragile or incomplete.
What’s inside the toolkit
The toolkit offers a practical and reflective approach to leadership as s a wider concept that goes beyond positions and hierarchy. It is about how we relate to others, and it is expressed through behaviours, values, and the way we act. The toolkit is intentionally inclusive and relevant for all actors who are committed to more just and inclusive ways of leading.
Leadership as a positive and inclusive use of power
The toolkit is grounded in ActionAid’s Top Ten Basics of Feminist Leadership, which frame leadership as a positive and inclusive use of power to enable others, rather than power over them. These principles guide users through reflection on self-awareness, care for self and others, dismantling bias, inclusion, sharing and using power responsibly, accountable collaboration, respectful feedback, courage, and zero tolerance for abuse of power.
How to use the toolkit
About Sublime
SUBLIME is an EU-funded project that fosters a collective journey across border communities in Europe to advance sustainable development through meaningful local action. The initiative combines active citizenship, learning experiences, and concrete, innovative activities to promote both climate and gender justice at the grassroots level. By connecting people, ideas and practices across regions, the project encourages communities to act together for more inclusive and resilient futures.
As a companion to the toolkit, our dedicated podcast series explores feminist leadership through conversations with practitioners, activists, and leaders from different contexts.
Explore our work
Grapes of Change
Grapes of Change
ELEVATE
ELEVATE
voices of impact
voices of impact
SUPR Lab
SUPR Lab
SoTecIn Factory
SoTecIn Factory
