Support Feminist Activists Around the World

Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism (Urgent Action Fund) is deeply grateful for the partnership of the GlobalGiving Girl Fund. Your critical support is helping us to build the resilience of women’s rights and LGBTQI rights movements around the world through grantmaking (issuing security and opportunity grants to frontline feminist activists), global and philanthropic advocacy, coalition-building (working transnationally to strengthen alliances that drive frontline work forward), collective care (funding holistic healing and social change solutions that genuinely ensure the care, protection, and safety of activists and marginalized communities); and monitoring, learning, and evaluation (MEL) efforts rooted in a feminist praxis. We are thrilled to provide a report to GlobalGiving detailing our organizational work over the grant period. 

Feminist movements are navigating volatile political landscapes across the globe, facing heightened violence and oppression directed at the most marginalized among us—women, trans and nonbinary individuals, migrants and displaced populations, sexworkers, and disabled people. Across our grantmaking, we also see the devastating effects of migration and displacement driven by conflict, as well as crackdowns on feminist activism, food insecurity, political crises—including coups, uprisings, and electoral violence—and the mounting toll of natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. To date, Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism has provided 320 grants for a total of $1,919,371 to support women, trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive feminist activists across all of the regions we support: Canada, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the United States. 

Below are two organizational updates and focus areas from this period: 

• Deeping Our Commitment to Disability Justice: Urgent Action Fund partnered with Women Enabled International (WEI) on an assessment that mapped disability justice movements across Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, and countries in Eastern Europe. This project reached a wide network of women, gender nonconforming (GNC), and trans human rights defenders working at the intersection of disability and gender justice. As a result of this mapping, Urgent Action Fund and WEI launched an interactive Disability Justice report: Activists from Strength: What You Need to Know to Be a Disability and Gender-Inclusive Funder. Additionally, a workshop was held at the 2024 AWID Forum to discuss key recommendations from the report, and then the report was shared more broadly during an April 2025 webinar that looked at the intersections of gender and disability while spotlighting the challenges that organizations and activists in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe are facing. Together with Women Enabled International, we shared key findings on the barriers that disabled feminist activists face when accessing funding, while offering actionable recommendations for funders to provide meaningful support for disability justice movements. Looking ahead, we plan to disseminate the report throughout the year at key events such as UNGA, and we are leveraging the report as a tool for philanthropic advocacy to encourage greater investments in work at the intersection of gender and disability.

• Building Collective Care Infrastructure: Investing in collective care is central to our global grantmaking strategy because we believe it is essential to the survival, resilience, and sustainability of movements. As such, our grantmaking supports community well-being, transformative justice, alternative systems of care and safety, and healing justice. In addition to integrating collective care into our rapid response grantmaking—such as funding spaces for respite, healing, and psychosocial support—we are also piloting larger, multi-year investments. Specifically, we are providing two-year grants to grassroots organizations across the U.S. to help them build durable regional collective care infrastructure. Many of these grantee partners are actively documenting their work and sharing insights, tools, and practices—contributing to a growing body of knowledge about what it takes to build community-rooted care systems at scale. For example, one of our grantee partners created a digital archive of 35 oral testimonies from movement leaders, organizers, health workers, healers, and spiritual practitioners. This archive–including a resource library and political education tools– forms a living tapestry of healing justice: holding the wisdom, contradictions, and radical practices that help us survive and imagine what’s next. Another grantee partner that operates a movement laboratory and dream space, produces a podcast and educational platform that takes a Black, queer feminist, and anti-statist lens to understand the rise of fascism in the United States and how processing trauma is central to resistance. We are excited to see how the work of our partners continues to evolve.

In conclusion, on behalf of Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism, thank you again to GlobalGiving for your generous support, which has been integral to keeping grantees safe and sustaining global feminist activism during such a volatile period.