Strategies
Move from donor-led to movement-led resourcing
Provide resources to frontline-led movements that directly address harms and apply community-informed solutions, rather than top-down, donor-led approaches.
Why It Matters
Traditional donor-driven funding often fails to reflect communities’ strengths, needs, and cultural context, obscuring the best crisis response.
Funders should support and amplify frontline-led movements’ pre-existing strategies, knowledge and skills, providing them with flexibility and opportunity to navigate the inevitable risks of crisis response.
What It Looks Like In Practice
During Covid-19, Urgent Action Fund-Latin America & the Caribbean responded to both immediate health and economic needs, while nurturing long-term community and territorial care infrastructures. They supported the casas de farinha (collective spaces for manioc flour production) in Brazil, Black women’s cooperatives in Ecuador, and agroecology projects in Mexico. The support looked beyond immediate needs to promote sustainable forms of production grounded in solidarity, the recovery of ancestral knowledge, and the defense of territories.
In another example, Urgent Action Fund-Latin America & the Caribbean followed the needs of communities in Bahia, Brazil, after heavy flooding caused by the climate crisis. In January 2022, floods displaced nearly 100,000 people and killed or injured over 500. The crisis especially impacted Afro-descendant communities and LGBTQI+ people, who had little access to government aid due to structural racism and homophobia. Urgent Action Fund-Latin America & the Caribbean supported Afro-descendant and LGBTQI+ groups to collectively reconstruct destroyed homes and provide psychosocial and healing support to displaced community members.