Starting with the people already responding

Nafissatou Hassane Alfari from Niger grounded the conversation in the everyday actions of communities welcoming people displaced by insecurity and climate-related crises. Families arriving in a village may find their first support through neighbours sharing land, food, clothing and access to water, healthcare and schools.

“The first response does not always come from an actor officially recognised as a humanitarian organisation. Organisations may be present, but the first help often comes from communities.” — Nafissatou Hassane Alfari from Women in Nexus Niger

Her contribution also drew attention to the needs of host communities themselves. When displacement lasts for months or years, sharing resources becomes a sustained responsibility. Recognising that contribution means asking what support these communities need to continue caring for others without exhausting their own resources.

For Nafissatou, funding must strengthen the solidarity already sustaining these responses while respecting communities’ ownership and the limits of what they can carry.

“The question is how we support community solidarity without changing its meaning or taking control, and without transferring to communities the responsibilities that humanitarian actors must fulfill.” — Nafissatou Hassane Alfari

Community solidarity, sustained on its own terms

Howida Minallah brought the experience of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms into the discussion, describing a response rooted in longstanding traditions of mutual support. Communities have drawn on these practices during the war to help one another survive, with volunteers taking on responsibilities the state has been unable to fulfil.

“The Emergency Response Rooms are not simply a mechanism for distributing shelter materials or food. They are interconnected survival networks and centres of community management, taking on roles that the state has been unable to fulfil.” — Howida Minallah from Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms

Howida recognised the volunteers carrying out this work under bombardment and security restrictions, many while urgently needing assistance themselves. She also highlighted women and young women as key actors in the response, organising and sustaining services within their communities.

External funding can strengthen these efforts, helping volunteers organise and supporting grassroots initiatives. But Howida urged funders to judge their contribution by what it enables communities to do and the independence it preserves.

“External funding cannot be measured by the volume of assistance alone. It is measured by how it strengthens communities’ capacities while preserving their independence in carrying out their roles.” — Howida Minallah

The Emergency Response Rooms began through community solidarity before external assistance arrived, and their networks have spread even to places funding has not reached. Supporting them requires donors to coordinate with the people already managing protection, health, education and other services, allowing communities’ priorities to guide funding decisions.

“Funding does help volunteers and youth initiatives organise. But it requires some coordination with grassroots initiatives so they can identify their needs and priorities, and donor interventions can be based on those.” — Howida Minallah

Her contribution made clear that financing mutual aid carries responsibilities: sustain the work, respect grassroots decision-making, and ensure donor interventions respond to the needs communities themselves identify.

The role of funders looking to support mutual aid

Building on Nafissatou’s and Howida’s contributions, Aluel asked how money could enter mutual aid without becoming what holds it together.

How could funding preserve its foundations of solidarity, community care and reciprocal support?

Kate Moger challenged the assumption that external funding creates the relationships that sustain mutual aid. Communities contribute their own time, energy, money and resources long before a grant arrives. Funding enters relationships and practices that already exist.

“When a crisis hits, communities are already responding and contributing enormous amounts of their own time and energy, money and resources.” — Kate Moger

Drawing on Resilio Fund’s emerging evidence, Kate explained that for every $1 given by external funders like Resilio, communities were contributing roughly 50 cents through their own cash and in-kind support. This matching of resources means that external funding adds to a much larger collective effort.

This recognition changes a funder’s role. Kate described Resilio’s approach as “moving capital with care”: responding quickly while remaining conscious of the power that accompanies money.

Drawing on an example from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she described working through an established feminist funding network whose relationships and contextual knowledge enabled it to shape its own response.

“We as an external funder trusted them to dream, to design, to deliver a response that made sense to them based on their understanding of that context. So our role is to make … resources available and not prescribe how they should be used.” — Kate Moger

Her response to Aluel’s question placed trust in practical terms: make resources available and allow the people experiencing the crisis to decide how those resources can strengthen what they are already doing.

What needs to grow is the capacity to support

Juliet Parker shared emerging insights from ALNAP’s research with national research organisations on the relationship between formal humanitarian institutions and mutual aid.

Flexible support can help communities, she explained, particularly when funders respond to their priorities, share risk and relinquish control over decisions. But external resources can also change relationships, priorities and the ways decisions are made.

That makes the language of “scaling mutual aid” worth examining.

“The distinction between scaling mutual aid itself … and scaling support to mutual aid. Mutual aid is already infinite. It exists everywhere. It does not need scaling. That’s not the question. The question is: can humanitarian actors scale their own capacity to recognise, connect with, and appropriately support the forms of collective action that already exist?” — Juliet Parker

Juliet described examples of individuals and institutions acting as protective buffers between mutual aid networks and the demands of the international humanitarian system. These efforts can make support possible, but they also reveal how much still depends on people finding ways around institutional rules.

“We’re in a kind of era of workarounds at the moment, where people are cunningly finding ways to navigate and protect what’s important about mutual aid approaches.” — Juliet Parker

The larger question, she argued, is whether international actors are prepared to challenge and change their own practices. Lasting change requires organisations to examine the requirements they impose and the power they retain.

Funding the relationships that make response possible

Aluel pushed the conversation beyond how funding arrives to the responsibilities funders carry when it ends.

“What responsibility do funders have for what happens after the funding ends, and how should that shape the way support is provided from the beginning?” Aluel asked.

Wei San Lee’s response placed individual humanitarian grants within a longer relationship of support. She explained how the First Response Fund works through women’s and feminist funds already connected to grassroots organisations. Humanitarian resources reach groups through relationships that also provide core funding, accompaniment and other support.

“We’re not looking at short-term crisis response only. Feminist funds are already providing core support, accompaniment support, all of the other kind of holistic, multi-layered support that grassroots organizations are asking for.” — Wei San Lee

This approach also helps protect core resources from being diverted to humanitarian activities that dedicated crisis funding could cover. An emergency grant becomes one part of the support available to an organisation, within a relationship that extends beyond the immediate response.

Wei San also highlighted a recurring request from partners: fund their networks and their relationships. Those connections allow organisations to exchange information, identify needs and reach communities through people they know and trust.

“Once you fund these networks and their connections and that kind of resilience building among groups, you already have an infrastructure in place.” — Wei San Lee

Her response offered a direction for the responsibility Aluel raised: invest from the beginning in the relationships and support that sustain community organising beyond an individual grant. Although the discussion did not set out a specific process for ending funding, it showed why responsible financing must look beyond the grant period.

Sharing power without transferring the burden

Throughout the discussion, speakers returned to the responsibilities of humanitarian institutions and governments.

Recognising community leadership must not become a reason to expect people already living through crises to carry more responsibility without adequate resources or protection. Aluel made that boundary explicit:

“Mutual aid cannot solve all the humanitarian problems, and it cannot be the new system that the humanitarian system wants to transfer to the communities that are already burdened.” — Aluel Atem

Juliet reinforced the need for different actors to fulfil distinct, complementary roles. Community networks bring contextual knowledge, relationships and trust. Formal institutions retain duties that cannot simply be passed to volunteers.

“It would be absolutely inappropriate to expect volunteer networks to take on financing major infrastructure, providing specialized services, assuming responsibility for protection. It would not be okay or workable.” — Juliet Parker

An audience contribution sharpened this concern: could growing interest in mutual aid turn it into another inexpensive way to extend humanitarian coverage, while leaving the distribution of power untouched?

For us at The Global Resilience Fund at Purposeful, these questions connect directly to the recognition and resourcing of girls’ and young feminists’ crisis response efforts. Supporting their leadership requires funding that respects their decisions, invests in their relationships and responds to the realities they face.

Aluel’s questions kept those responsibilities in view throughout the conversation: what should grow, who should decide, and what remains when a grant ends? Across the panel, the responses pointed towards funding that strengthens existing solidarity, supports lasting relationships and leaves communities with the freedom to determine their priorities.

The discussion at AidEx left humanitarian actors with a concrete challenge: change the conditions under which support is offered.

Make resources accessible, share decision-making power, and take responsibility for how funding affects the communities receiving it. That is where commitments to community leadership must become practice.