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In response to the wave of racist and Islamaphobic far-right violence that took place across Britain in August 2024, a pooled fund was rocketed into being in record time. It was called the Emergency Action Fund.

The Emergency Action Fund had numerous funders and partners, but it was hosted, administered and willed into existence by the Civic Power Fund (CPF). Their Director of Organising and interim Executive Director Mohammed Afridi kindly took the time to give us a bit of an inside picture about what happened.

We thought other grantmakers might be interested in what it takes to spin-up a new pooled fund and then make 75 grants through it in under ten days.

Sharing credit is vitally important to CPF. This emergency fund was a huge team effort involving lots of different organisations, many of whom we name below. But we wanted to look at what happened through the eyes of one organisation because it is easier to learn from one funder’s choices than it is from many at the same time.

As soon as the CPF team understood the threat that the rioters represented, they came up with a simple plan: give extremely fast £1000 grants to community organisations representing people who were actually or potentially under attack.

This £1000 sum, and the fact that it wasn’t adjusted for different grantees, was deliberate and considered. CPF already had experience of giving grants of this size as ‘wellbeing grants’ - they knew this sum was meaningful for grassroots organisations, and generally was well used. And by deciding on a fixed grant size the entire process of negotiating over quantities of money could be completely circumnavigated, and could be replaced by the most critically important factor in a crisis, speed.

The CPF then reached out to its existing funders with a clear proposal: grant to the CPF today and we will work with our network of on the ground activists and movement partners to get the money where it is most needed tomorrow. 

Because CPF already had deep, trusting relationships with larger funders like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Legal Education Fund and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, this request was met with positive responses. And because CPF had already received previous grants from these organisations, there were no due diligence hurdles to assessing whether CPF itself was an acceptable vehicle. This use of an intermediary allowed bigger funders to move faster than they ever could alone. 

But to get the money out to the right organisations extremely fast required more than just a collaboration of funders. In order to know who should be given the grants, across the country, at speed, CPF needed to work with organisations that already knew and had built trust relationships with a very diverse group of organisations working with and for refugees, migrants and racialised communities. Happily CPF already had strong relationships with organisations that had the relevant knowledge of who was who and what was what: its own grantee partners, networks of movement activists and other intermediaries like the Funders for Race Equality Alliance, Justice Together Initiative, and Migration Exchange.

By working with these organisations CPF could delegate the trust issue - who to grant to.  Thanks to this collaborative mentality and the trust placed in the CPF by their partners to get the job done and done well, the Emergency Action Fund has now distributed grants to 110 organisations across the UK. 

CPF were super keen to emphasise how important their partners were at every stage of the process, and that they absolutely could not have made these grants so fast without lots of support. But the crucial thing about those partners were that the relationships that allowed the CPF to move at speed were not forged in the hot moment of a crisis - CPF had been patiently building up strong, trusting relationships with both funding organisations and alliance organisations from within the sector since its launch just two years prior to the rioting. This investment of time is expensive and energy consuming, but there is no replacement for it if you want to be able to move fast in an emergency.

Second, CPF told us that “It was possible because our strategy made it possible”. At the moment of need and crisis CPF could look to their strategy and it told them what to do - find community organisers, trust them, help them, and fund them. The only major shift for the CPF was speed, their strategy is slow and based on long term investment but in a time of crisis their clarity on the who and the why meant that there was no time wasted agonising over "Is  this the sort of thing we should be responding to?".  We encourage readers to ponder on this - would your current funding strategy give you strong steer on how to act at a moment of crisis?

Third, CPF also told us it takes a huge amount of admin work to construct and run even the leanest grantmaking programme in a massive hurry, for example it is not easy to phone people for bank details when those same people are trying to manage chaos on their own streets. So the moral is this: say yes to every offer you get for extra hands on deck.

And finally, we were told that one key lesson is that “Martha’s a F***** Legend”, referring to CPF’s Executive Director Martha MacKenzie. You may not be directly able to copy this particular aspect of this emergency response, but we thought we’d just drop this in there for the record.

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