In April 2026, the Urgent Action Sister Funds, longtime Channel Foundation partners, released two powerful and timely reports sharing the significance of feminist movements and collective care in responding to crises.
The Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism (UAF) published a report, “Putting Out Fires Till We Burn Out: Feminist Funding Lessons for Supporting Collective Care from the South Caucasus and Western Balkans,” which highlights the importance of collective care as practiced by feminist and LGBTQI+ organizers in a specific region in which UAF has long history of funding. The region’s human rights defenders have experienced war, the rise of authoritarianism and shrinking civic spaces.
Drawing from interviews, ethnographic observation and grant analysis, UAF writes how this report “serves as a case study for why and how crisis response should center care.” The report provides insight into an often underfunded and misunderstood geographic region.
Another report, a collaboration between all the UAF Sister Funds along with the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York in the UK, “Resourcing Strategies in an Age of Permacrisis: Critical Lessons from Feminist Philanthropy,” is more global in scale, and draws attention to the ways that feminist solutions, if resourced to their full potential, could be the answer to many global crises. In fact, the authors have created a microsite where one can delve more deeply into feminist crisis response.
This report was published in the lead-up to Women Deliver 2026, a four-day global program bringing together thousands of leaders for gender equality from around the world
Feminist activists are dependable sources of care, and they often show up as the first and only responders in the community, UAF writes in the permacrisis report. Nevertheless, ample evidence exists that these activists are not resourced at the level of other humanitarian responses and typically don’t have access to the tables at which major decisions are made about crisis response.
The UAF Sister Funds’ report examines rapid response grantmaking in 160+ countries to find what makes feminist movements special and how donors can best support their impact. The report serves as an example of powerful partnership between public foundations and academia, providing independent research, evaluation and analysis that serves to bolster UAF’s anecdotal claims.
From their findings, the UAF Sister Funds recommend that crises resourcing move away from adhering to donors’ priorities and instead be shaped by grassroots movements and local communities’ needs.
The report also emphasizes the need for responses to address the root causes of crises rather than only targeting emergency responses. This approach includes addressing injustices and inequalities over a stance of neutrality.
This combination of research reports from the UAF Sister Funds proves that while feminist movements are trusted and effective sources of care for communities, more effective support to the work of these first responders is needed.
UAF writes, “The problem here is not one of solutions but a question of the resourcing to scale the work.”
The UAF Sister Funds and several of Channel’s other grantee partners (including Alliance for Feminist Movements, Global Resilience Fund and Women’s Learning Partnership) will continue to explore ways to further evolve the field of feminist crisis response.
More highlights from the UAF Sister Funds’ report are explored in an April 2026 podcast episode, “Every crisis is political: Redefining humanitarian response” by Devex Partnerships.
