FREQUENTLY
ASKED QUESTIONS

The First Response Fund acknowledges the long-time, critical and largely unrecognized work that feminist movements have done to fill gaps in the humanitarian crisis response system. Working through women’s and feminist funds (W/FF), the First Response Fund reaches communities on the margins who often lack access to traditional humanitarian aid, including people with disabilities, and communities facing racism and discrimination. 

Despite existing government commitments to localization and resourcing women-led organizations, not enough resources reach women and girl-led groups in crisis settings. There is especially a deficit in flexible resources that can reach grassroots groups that are often filling critical gaps in crisis response. 

Women’s and feminist funds, traditional supporters of feminist civil society, struggle to meet even a fraction of the needs for humanitarian response identified by women and girl-led organizations. The First Response Fund is a complement to existing pooled funds and a vehicle that will attract more humanitarian funding to women and girl-led organizations leading humanitarian response. The First Response Fund works in close coordination with allied pooled funds, including the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund and OCHA Country-Based Pooled Funds.  

We were designed to close a systemic gap by shifting money and power to women and girl-led organizations, networks and movements. The First Response Fund provides governments and other donors looking to move resources at scale to these local organizations with a trusted destination for resourcing humanitarian response. Our aim is to support the urgent humanitarian response strategies of women and girl-led organizations as quickly as possible, while allowing space for participatory mechanisms to maximise inclusion outcomes. 

Women’s and feminist funds are public fundraising foundations that work to realize the power of grassroots women, girls, trans, non-binary, and intersex movements around the world by providing them with sustained financial and other resources to realize their vision of social justice. Women’s and feminist funds (W/FF) play a critical role in strengthening women and girl-led organizations and movements across the globe. W/FF are unique in that they advance feminist principles and practices, are led by staff who are grounded in the communities and movements they serve, and are able to respond to crises in timely, trust-based and flexible ways. 

Women’s and feminist funds offer a continuum of support – from providing core, multi-year flexible funding, to supporting organisations with non-financial and accompaniment support, to moving resources for emergencies, crises and responding to humanitarian events. Their funding seeks to address the core systems and structures that lead to crises and perpetuate injustice and ensure that recovery and rebuilding lead to more just, equitable societies. Women’s and feminist funds play a unique role in responding to crises, both in their capacity as individual funds and through their roles as part of an ecosystem of women’s funds and organisations that pool resources, knowledge, and advocacy during crisis moments.  

Women’s funds also have a range of different and complementary approaches to addressing crises and engaging in humanitarian response. The ecosystem of women’s funds includes national, regional, subregional and multi-regional funds; they collectively cover over 170 countries across the globe. Their uniqueness is that each fund can play a different and complementary role during a crisis. For example, national funds often have the deepest relationships and local knowledge, regional funds can monitor and respond to the ways that crises can force people to move and relocate across countries and contexts and global funds, especially those based in the global north, can use their privilege and positionality to raise awareness and fundraise. Women’s funds also have different ways of responding to crises. The Urgent Action Funds sister funds have a unique model – a feminist rapid-response approach to crises that moves money quickly to the most affected communities. Other funds offer core funds to prepare for crises, sustain work during shifting conditions, respond to the impact of crises, and rebuild societies that are more equitable following crises.  

The First Response Fund uses the following definition for girl-led organizations, as outlined by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Reference Group on Gender and Humanitarian Action:  

Girl-led organizations include (a) an organization whose primary focus is on advancing girls’ rights, girls’ empowerment, and gender equality, and (b) an organization led by girls, with demonstrated procedures, systems, and processes that affirm that girls’ voices dictate organizational priorities and decision-making, including clear safeguarding principles. A girl-led organization does not infer the absence of adult staff, leadership, or mentors to advance the organization’s girl-led mission.

Unregistered groups are eligible for funding, in line with the policies of women’s and feminist funds. Women’s and feminist funds have a track record in working with and supporting unregistered groups that ensures fiduciary responsibility along with flexibility and responsiveness.  As the fiscal host to the First Response Fund, Equality Fund has experience funding unregistered groups, including through the use of fiscal sponsors, and can provide support to any women’s and feminist funds who are positioned to support unregistered and grassroots groups, including assistance and accompaniment as needed. 

The vision of the First Respond Fund is to contribute to an ecosystem of robust, local organizations who are challenging and shifting power during crisis responses to ensure that the most urgent humanitarian needs of crisis-affected communities are met. The First Response Fund’s goal is to improve safety, human dignity, protection and to save lives in communities experiencing humanitarian crises.

The First Response Fund’s learning and impact strategy recognizes the fund’s primary focus on direct provision of critical, life-saving, gender-responsive services as well as assistance and protection to communities affected by crises. It is also designed to capture the fund’s unique value proposition, which is strengthening and supporting local responses by women and girl-led organizations that engage with their communities, deliver context-specific services, advocate for inclusion and gender equity, and effectively reach the most affected groups in crisis contexts.

The  First Response Fund’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework monitors and collects key indicators that document humanitarian impacts - including disaggregated data. The First Response Fund tracks women’s and feminist funds’ (W/FF) humanitarian access to communities at risk of being excluded, including Indigenous and Black women, refugees and internally displaced people, women with disabilities, sex workers, rural women, and those at the intersection of many of these identities. The First Response Fund utilizes a learning framework to document learnings of broader relevance to strengthening the overall humanitarian system. 

In the first year of operations, the First Response Fund is designing an impact evaluation to be carried out at the end of the three-year pilot. This evaluation aims to assess global humanitarian impacts of this mode of pooled fund; including its effectiveness in supporting service delivery with a focus on marginalized communities’ priorities, increasing women and girl-led organizations’ access to humanitarian funding, and engagement with the humanitarian system.