The Urgent Action Sister Funds
Meet the Sisterhood
Meet the Sisterhood
In 1997, Urgent Action Fund was founded when frontline feminists called for a new grantmaking model: one that would provide access to fast, flexible funding so they could mobilize quickly and effectively in response to unexpected risks and opportunities.
Today, there are four independent Urgent Action Sister Funds: UAF-Africa, UAF-Latin America & the Caribbean, UAF-Asia & Pacific, and our organization, Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism, which funds in Canada, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the United States.
Our Collective Work
Our Collective Work
Collectively, the Urgent Action Sister Funds support feminist activism led by individuals, organizations and movements in more than 160 countries through rapid response grants, coalition-building, collective care and protection, and feminist advocacy. Since our founding, the Sister Funds have together provided $50 million USD in rapid response funding to thousands of women, trans and non-binary frontline activists around the world.
Collaborative, co-equal and geographically distinct, the UAF Sisterhood is the only global consortium of independent funds with a mission to sustain feminist activism worldwide by providing rapid response funding to women, trans and non-binary frontline activists.
8000
Grants Awarded
160
Countries Worldwide
$50M
USD Granted
700+
Advisors Worldwide
where we fund
Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism offers support to women, trans, and non-binary activists in Canada, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the United States. Our Sister Funds offer support to activists in other regions worldwide.
Urgent Action Fund – Africa
Urgent Action Fund-Africa (UAF-Africa) is a pan-African and feminist fund. Using a rapid-response grantmaking model, the Fund supports unanticipated, time-sensitive, innovative, and bold initiatives.These enable African feminists and women’s rights organizations to seize windows of opportunity, fracture patriarchy, amplify their voices, enhance their visibility, and become significant actors who can influence policy and law while shaping discourse. This way, UAF-Africa fills a unique grantmaking niche within the African feminist movement, providing stepping stones to activists as they use their agency and resilience to achieve social, economic, political and environmental justice.
Urgent Action Fund – Asia & Pacific
Urgent Action Fund Asia and Pacific (UAF-A&P) is a regional feminist fund that strives to protect, strengthen and sustain women and non-binary human rights defenders across nearly 53 countries and sub-regions of Asia and the Pacific. We build the resilience of activists and their movements across two regions through innovating our programs, mobilizing resources, and knowledge production and dissemination.
Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism
Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism provides fast, flexible funding to women, trans and non-binary activists who take and face enormous risks to challenge oppressive systems and build a more just and equitable world. Our holistic resources enable frontline feminist movements to respond to real-time threats and opportunities, protect and care for themselves and one another, and sustain and propel solutions to the most critical crises and injustices of our time.
Urgent Action Fund Latin America and the Caribbean
Urgent Action Fund for Latin America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean, is a regional feminist fund that contributes to the sustainability and the capacity strengthening of activists, their organizations and movements by providing access to flexible, strategic and timely resources to respond to moments of risk, crisis and opportunity. We place holistic feminist protection and care at the center of our work with women, non-binary and trans human rights defenders, and our team, and we raise awareness among the philanthropic community about the importance of supporting cultural practices of care.
It is clear to us that community and solidarity contribute to collective care and open a new opportunity for change.
Tatiana Cordero Velásquez, Ecuadorian activist and former Executive Director of Urgent Action Fund – Latin America and the Caribbean
sisterhood feminist
principles of philanthropy
sisterhood feminist
principles of philanthropy
We practice trust and reshape accountability.
We respect the autonomy of our partners, refraining from imposing our own agendas. We challenge the disproportionate demand for monitoring and results, making our grants available with limited reporting. We ground our decision-making in our accountability to movements and the wider ecosystem. We ask ourselves: is this action appropriate for us to take or is it better led by others?
We interrogate and challenge power.
We reject the dominant culture of giving that reinforces the donor’s power over the recipient. Instead, we seek to build mutual solidarity, cultures of sharing, and power with each other. Our Sisterhood itself is a site to disrupt and heal unequal power relations: among us, we navigate lines of difference based on race, age, geographic proximity to funders, ease in English, vaccine inequity and more. We hold conversations about power with care and vulnerability.
We navigate risk with care.
As feminist funders, risk is inherent to our work. We support defenders who face regular threats to their lives as they challenge state and corporate actors, including in countries where their activism is criminalized. We are careful not to add to the dangers that activists face. We also understand ‘unhealthy’ activist and funding practices as a source of risk. They cause burnout and threaten the sustainability of movements.
We ground in collective care and protection.
As they contend with violence, grief, and exhaustion, we support defenders to stay safe and sustain their activism. We go beyond an activist’s access to leisure time to interrogate the roots of collective spiritual, mental, and emotional distress. We change our organizational policies and cultures to incorporate care. We focus on the ways our networks can nurture us. And we question even the most sacred tenets of our movements, challenging them when they lead to disillusionment and burnout.
We are interdependent and independent.
Our model of international philanthropy upends the paradigm of organizations headquartered in the Global North with branches in the Global South. Each Sister Fund is autonomous, rooting power and decision-making in the regions. We also collaborate closely, building a shared global analysis, speaking with one megaphone on advocacy issues, and learning and innovating together. As many organizations look to build new structures that share power, we are glad to share our experiences.
We build our resources with politics and ethics.
As we work to transform the politics of resourcing, we leverage our collective strength to address geopolitical inequities in the funding landscape. We strategically assess the ethics of potential funding sources, recognizing that while sometimes we can affect greater change by entering into a relationship with a funder, other times we will have to decline funding in solidarity with defenders. We work to activate philanthropy in our regions, diversifying who gives and shifting who sets the agenda.
We challenge dominant narratives of efficiency and time.
Our founding impulse – to get urgently needed funds into the hands of women and LBTQI+ defenders quickly and with ease – underscores our commitment to deconstructing traditional notions of efficiency and time. We can turn around a grant in a matter of hours. We have also learned the importance of pausing – of moving slowly, listening carefully, and seeing each other as our whole selves. This is how we build the relationships we will need when it is time to move quickly again.
We learn and evolve.
We recognize that learning is about power: the power to define what changes are sought, what data is seen as valid, who shapes the story the data tells us, and what lessons will be acted upon. As we bring a feminist lens to learning, we lift up the regular pauses we take to reflect, integrate, and evolve as a political practice on our part. Some of our most powerful work, from collective care to disability justice, emerged from these reflections.
Urgent Action
Sister Funds
We are uniquely positioned to sustain feminist movements worldwide.
Stand with us.
Urgent Action
Sister Funds
We are uniquely positioned to sustain feminist movements worldwide. Stand with us.
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Photo Credit: Rucha Chitnis
