Women responding to emergencies

In August 2026, the fourth in-person meeting of the Nodes Network was held in Cuernavaca, Morelos. As a reminder, the Network is an alliance of 13 grassroots organizations led by diverse women, with extensive experience in responding to crises and emergencies. In 2023, Fondo Semillas supported the creation of the Network with the aim of amplifying the territorial work that different groups were already carrying out to provide rapid and context-appropriate responses to different types of emergencies.

Throughout this period of accompaniment, the Network has helped coordinate responses on multiple fronts, while recognizing and making visible the community knowledge, organizational capacities, and strategies developed by organizations and communities themselves. In addition, one of the most important aspects of its work has been the deeply political perspective it has brought to the way we understand crises.

This meeting marked an important milestone in the Network’s path toward autonomy, as it was the last in which Fondo Semillas served as its main facilitator. Formal accompaniment to the Network will conclude over the next six months, although Fondo Semillas will maintain a relationship increasingly based on horizontality and peer-to-peer collaboration.

In this context, sustainability, understood in all its complexity, was a central theme of the meeting. Discussions addressed not only financial sustainability, but also internal challenges, including the different ways of understanding and practicing activism and sustaining collective work. For Fondo Semillas, this process has provided an important learning opportunity about the breadth of the concept of sustainability and the importance of also investing resources in strengthening the capacities of those who lead these processes.

During this period, we also followed up on two Rapid Response Fund (RRF) processes: one grant was awarded during the second half of the year, while another organization presented the results of its grant. The first grant was awarded to Brigada Callejera, which requested resources to provide emergency medical care to sex workers who experienced harassment and displacement in Mexico City during June and July.

Among those most affected were people over the age of 40, as well as transgender people. Thanks to the grant, the organization was able to provide timely care and help reduce the economic and social pressures faced by those affected, particularly those in situations of heightened risk.

The second RRF was awarded to an organization in Guerrero, which requested resources to conduct workshops on earthquake prevention and response. Topics included what to do during an earthquake, post-traumatic stress management, community risk mapping, developing a timeline of climate-related contingencies, and stakeholder mapping.

A key aspect of this process, and one that aligns with the perspective that Fondo Semillas seeks to promote, was that the activities took into account the needs of different populations, including children and adolescents. This approach also allows their experiences and perspectives on how emergencies are lived to be taken into consideration when developing prevention and response tools.

Finally, as part of an effort to ensure the continuity of grassroots organizations’ work, three groups that participated in Women Rebuilding Guerrero were selected for a second funding cycle, allowing them to deepen their work on community resilience, socio-environmental justice, and women’s participation. The selected organizations are Creadoras de Sueños, Mujeres Tejiendo Esperanza, and Ser Mujer.

Creadoras de Sueños seeks to ensure that the municipalities where it works in Guerrero have access to drinking water, particularly in neighborhoods with high levels of marginalization. The organization also plans to restore water wells through desilting, cleaning, maintenance, and reconstruction. Mujeres Tejiendo Esperanza will work to strengthen the leadership and active participation of women, youth, and children, while also developing violence prevention and community protection initiatives for emergencies.

Finally, Ser Mujer will continue strengthening the response capacity of the community of San José, Guatemala, Guerrero, which experiences frequent flooding. The organization aims to consolidate an integrated feminist model for prevention, mitigation, and response. To achieve this, it will strengthen the community’s organizational and technical capacities while promoting actions focused on environmental restoration, territorial conservation, and socio-environmental resilience.