Intimate Coalitions

Our Response to Crises in 2023

2023 was a year of expansion and contraction.

We took inspiration from feminist activists and human rights defenders who are constantly adapting to changing situations and ongoing, intersecting, and compounding crises to sustain and strengthen themselves and their movements. The innate ability of women, trans, and non-binary human rights activists to expand and contract, run and recede, evolve and transform in response to changing needs taught us to do the same.

UAF A&P’s purpose is to resource and power women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders and activists in their critical defence of people and the planet. After an intense 2022, where we received an overwhelming number of grant applications from Afghanistan and were one of the first funds to move money directly into the hands of defenders, 2023 was about responding to ongoing long-term crises and micro-emergencies that continue to need our attention and support. We took time to pause, assess the evolving contexts of our regions, reflect on our work and impact so far, and recalibrate our crisis-response so that it meets the diverse needs of women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders and activists. We streamlined and strengthened our internal processes, team capacity, and strategies to better support feminist movements in Asia and the Pacific.

Our understanding of the nature of crises expanded.

We recognised that some crises are immediate while others are ongoing, and we need to tweak our response to each based on the situation and evolving needs of defenders. We understood the importance of supporting defenders and activists in developing early warning systems that preempt risks and major crises, and continuing to support them after major crises — such as in the case of Afghan and Burmese defenders who were able to evacuate from their respective countries but continue to need support and accompaniment to survive and thrive in a new country.

Our understanding of who we considered a human rights defender also expanded, and we pushed ourselves to become more intersectional and build bridges with all social justice movements fighting for the well-being of people and the planet. This includes supporting Environment and Climate Justice defenders, artists working on human rights or cultural rights defence, and feminists in non-feminist-led groups.

“We can’t talk about resilience, whether its resilience in surviving or resiliency or sustainability in their campaigns, if the communities are heavily impacted by poverty and inflation.” – Environment and Climate Justice Activist

While a lot of organisations are now talking about the need for urgent action during crises and extending support before and after crises, we have been doing this since 2018 and understand the nuances of what it takes and what it means to be there for human rights defenders and activists taking bold risks. We come from the movements we fund and have direct relationships with them, which allows us to know early and respond proactively when situations worsen. Our team is from and based in Asia and the Pacific, and thus, have lived experience and a deep understanding of the complex socio-political and cultural contexts and challenges faced by women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders in the regions.

We proactively reached out to activists from underrepresented communities and regions to understand their evolving needs.

We listened to sex workers’ rights activists, environment and climate justice defenders, and LBTQI+ activists from across Asia and the Pacific, and designed our programs and grantmaking approach based on the feedback we received. While we had an inkling of their unique needs and concerns, we didn’t have adequate data to confirm the same. We created grant offerings (including dedicated rapid-response grant calls for sex workers’ rights activists and environment and climate justice defenders) based on the suggestions and insights shared by activist groups, grantees, and advisors during our proactive outreach.

Our first open call for proposals to support sex workers’ rights activists facing risks or in need of urgent support for reorganising, strategising, and capacity building used language and illustrations that empowered and uplifted the rights of sex workers in our regions. We supported 43 activists in 2023, a majority of them from the Pacific.

Based on our learnings from 2022, we experimented with multi-year Webs of Safety and Care grants and other participatory and collaborative forms of resilience-building this past year. We learned that the well-being of defenders cannot be achieved without having their essential needs met, which range from sustainable income for daily survival to healthcare provisions. Multi-year Webs of Safety and Care grants ensured activists could conduct comprehensive risk assessment in the first year and design sustainable initiatives according to the results of the assessment the following year.

Our outreach in the Pacific and presence at the Pacific Feminist Forum propelled our interactions and relationships with Pacific activists and organisations (some of who are now our advisors), and enabled us to move beyond the capital cities and connect with activists in places like Samoa, Vanuatu, Federated States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, and West Papua, among others. This deepened our understanding of the issues faced by Pacific islanders and activists, and grant applications from the region increased multifold.

We gave a Resourcing Resilience grant to an activist from West Papua who sought to provide business training to nine women activists living with HIV & AIDS so they could get back on their feet.

We deepened and widened our network of advisors, which enhanced our participatory grant-making capabilities and made us more responsive to crises.

As of 2023, we have 161 advisors based in 23 countries across Asia and the Pacific. They are activists themselves and come with deep knowledge and connections to local and regional women’s, LBTQ+, and human rights movements. They were recruited through targeted outreach and are rooted in and relevant to the diverse countries, regions, thematic sectors, and issues covered in our mandate. They also play a critical role as a part of our early warning systems and help us anticipate opportunities and crises that need urgent response. They give valuable insights on regional and local trends, provide applicant and partner referrals, advise us on convenings and strategic planning, and offer accompaniment to defenders with their grant application submissions. Their input and network have enabled us to expand to geographies where we didn’t have prior presence, and our country-outreaches in Indonesia, the Pacific, and Sri Lanka in 2023 would not have been the same without their guidance and participation.

We tried to mobilise philanthropic giving within our own regions — inviting, embracing, and sparking the generosity that lives in our cultures to disrupt the oppressive patriarchal forces that fuel crises worldwide.

We believe that narratives around women’s rights, LBTQI+ rights, and human rights defence need to shift to encourage more philanthropic support and funding. By reframing philanthropy as ‘sharing’ resources and power, we hope to cultivate more flexible, trust-based, and long-term funding for feminist activists and movements in the Asia and Pacific regions.

Australia is at a pivotal moment in philanthropy, with USD2.6 trillion being passed on to the next generation of Australians by 2040. In addition, the Australian Government has committed to doubling philanthropic giving by 2030. There is tremendous untapped potential to activate feminist philanthropy in Australia to support women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders, especially in the Pacific. In response to this, we formed a coalition of feminist funders who resource movements in the Pacific to influence the culture of giving and activate feminist philanthropy in Australia. Our initial experiments in 2023 were a series ‘Curated Conversations,’ co-hosted with our partners, International Women’s Development Agency and the Pacific Feminist Fund. We brought together an intimate group of Australian philanthropists and gender equality advocates to share good practices of feminist funding, reflect on barriers to change, and find practical ways to expand and unite the community of Australian philanthropists investing in feminist movements. What we learnt from the two conversations is that Australian philanthropists are generous to their local communities, state, and nation, but more persuasion is needed for them to align to their government’s commitment to their Pacific family, work together “to realise our shared vision for a stable, secure and prosperous region, and to support the aspirations of Pacific island countries.”

Our learning practices are an ongoing experiment in feminist ways of gathering, reflecting, and learning together.

External meetings and events (where more than four team members participated) offered us the opportunity to strengthen our team’s ability to use our feminist learning tools, such as the Before Action Review and After Action Review, to clarify our thinking and processes. In our annual team huddles, we continue to stretch the boundaries of collective thinking and offer grace and space for lived experiences to have their say.

We also champion alternate approaches of learning and accountability for the feminist ecosystem, reiterating that measurement is political. We are a part of the ‘Shift The Power’ movement, where we work with global and community-led organisations to interrogate power inherent in our Feminist Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning Approach and seek change in how we measure, evaluate, and understand the effectiveness of the work we do. We are also a part of several other learning groups that are looking to adapt and adopt feminist ways to learn and measure progress.

2023 also marked the end of our first five-year strategic plan (2018–23). We reflected on our impact in the last five years and carved out our vision, values, and commitment for the next five. We commissioned an Organisational Review that was designed as a participatory process and involved representatives from all parts of our ecosystem — from human rights defenders and their organisations to our advisors, funders, staff, and Board members.

UAF A&P’s vision for the next five years is to boldly resource and power women, trans, and non-binary human rights defenders and activists defending people and the planet.

The findings from our organisational review informed the creation of a new five-year strategic plan (2024–29) as a flexible framework built on our existing and newly-framed feminist principles of funding. It imagines the world we want to manifest through imaginative resourcing, building collaborations, and supporting defenders and organisations to hold the line against gender and climate injustice, among others. Our overarching values continue to ground our work and purpose, and allow us to respond to the evolving needs of activists, communities, movements and the contexts in which we work.

Our values:

In forging feminist futures, we put defenders first, always.
We meet defenders at the intersections of the democracy, gender, and climate related emergencies. Very often as their first line of defence.

We reforge risk and relationship with audacious care.
We cannot shy away from risk — we hold it with care and centre the authority of the defenders we work with.

We innovate and learn to evolve.
Our learning and unlearning is shaped by our accountability with and to the movements we work with.

We reform power.
We leverage our multiple positions to interrogate and innovate the power politics of redistributing privilege and resources.

Read our Annual Learning Report 2023.

Written by Ila Reddy, UAF A&P’s Philanthropic Communications Facilitator.