Guatemala - Rural Women Diversify Incomes and Build Resilience
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Priority Areas
Supporting feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements to thrive, to be a driving force in challenging systems of oppression, and to co-create feminist realities.
Building Feminist Economies is about creating a world with clean air to breath and water to drink, with meaningful labour and care for ourselves and our communities, where we can all enjoy our economic, sexual and political autonomy.
In the world we live in today, the economy continues to rely on women’s unpaid and undervalued care work for the profit of others. The pursuit of “growth” only expands extractivism - a model of development based on massive extraction and exploitation of natural resources that keeps destroying people and planet while concentrating wealth in the hands of global elites. Meanwhile, access to healthcare, education, a decent wage and social security is becoming a privilege to few. This economic model sits upon white supremacy, colonialism and patriarchy.
Adopting solely a “women’s economic empowerment approach” is merely to integrate women deeper into this system. It may be a temporary means of survival. We need to plant the seeds to make another world possible while we tear down the walls of the existing one.
We believe in the ability of feminist movements to work for change with broad alliances across social movements. By amplifying feminist proposals and visions, we aim to build new paradigms of just economies.
Our approach must be interconnected and intersectional, because sexual and bodily autonomy will not be possible until each and every one of us enjoys economic rights and independence. We aim to work with those who resist and counter the global rise of the conservative right and religious fundamentalisms as no just economy is possible until we shake the foundations of the current system.
Our Actions
Our work challenges the system from within and exposes its fundamental injustices:
Advance feminist agendas: We counter corporate power and impunity for human rights abuses by working with allies to ensure that we put forward feminist, women’s rights and gender justice perspectives in policy spaces. For example, learn more about our work on the future international legally binding instrument on “transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights” at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Mobilize solidarity actions: We work to strengthen the links between feminist and tax justice movements, including reclaiming the public resources lost through illicit financial flows (IFFs) to ensure social and gender justice.
Build knowledge: We provide women human rights defenders (WHRDs) with strategic information vital to challenge corporate power and extractivism. We will contribute to build the knowledge about local and global financing and investment mechanisms fuelling extractivism.
Create and amplify alternatives: We engage and mobilize our members and movements in visioning feminist economies and sharing feminist knowledges, practices and agendas for economic justice.
“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”.
Arundhati Roy, War Talk
Related Content
Могу ли я поделиться информацией об опросе с другими?
Да, пожалуйста! Мы просим распространить ссылку на опрос среди своих коллег по сети. Чем больше различных точек зрения мы соберем, тем более полным будет наше понимание финансового положения феминистских организаций.
The AWID Forum Access Fund
We strive to make the AWID Forum a truly global gathering with participation from a diverse array of movements, regions and generations. To this end, AWID mobilizes resources for a limited Access Fund (AF) to assist some participants with the costs of attending the Forum.
The 14th AWID International Forum will take place 11-14 January 2021, in Taipei, Taiwan.
How will the Access Fund be allocated?
For this AWID Forum, there will be no application process.
Access Fund grants will be allocated by invitation only to:
Two persons per activity selected for the Forum program (decided by those organizations, groups or individuals organizing the activity)
Participants who identify as part of Priority Forum Constituencies (PFCs) recommended by the organizations, networks and groups who are co-creating the Forum with AWID.
PFCs are those which we consider would strengthen our collective power as movements, are not centered in mainstream feminist movements, and whose Feminist Realities we would like to honor, celebrate and visibilize:
- Black feminists
- Indigenous feminists
- Trans, gender non-conforming and intersex feminists
- Feminists with disabilities
- Feminist sex workers and informal workers, including migrant workers
- Feminists affected by migration
- Women affected by drug policy
- Feminists from the Forum regions (with a focus on the Pacific and mainland China)
In addition, AWID will fund approximately 100 participants from the Forum’s location. Forum Committee Members (Content and Methodology, Access and Host) as well as those in the Artists Working Group [link] are also granted Access Fund support.
What does the Access Fund cover?
For selected participants, the Access Fund will cover the cost of their:
Flight
Accommodation
Visa
Local transportation in Taipei
Travel medical insurance
The Access Fund will NOT cover their:
Forum registration fee
Transportation to and from the airport in their city of departure
Other incidental costs
Apart from the Access Fund, how can I fund my participation at the Forum?
We have listed other ideas on how to fund your participation at the AWID Forum on the Funding Ideas page.
When people come together on a global scale, as individuals and movements, we generate a sweeping force. Join us in Bangkok, Thailand and online in December 2024.
Snippet - CSW69 - Feminist Solidarity Space 12 - EN
Feminist Solidarity Space
✉️ By registration for larger groups. Drop-ins for smaller groups. Register here
📅 Wednesday, March 12, 2025
🕒 2.00-4.00pm EST
🏢 Chef's Kitchen Loft with Terrace, 216 East 45th St 13th Floor New York
Organizer: AWID
Anti-Rights Actors
Chapter 4
A complex and evolving network of anti-rights actors is exerting increasing influence in international spaces as well as domestic politics. Often backed by obscure funding, these actors build tactic alliances across issues, regions, and faiths to increase their impact.
We are witnessing fascist and fundamentalist actors that, while nationalist in their discourse, are completely transnational in their ideological underpinnings, political alliances, and networks of financing. In some cases these groups are backed by obscure funding flows, linked with big business, or far-right political parties. However, they also create strategic alliances, including, in some cases, with segments of the feminist and women’s rights movements, and distance themselves from more outwardly extreme elements to appear more legitimate. Anti-rights actors are also spreading and replicating their brand of anti-rights organizing - be that campaigning and lobbying or strategic litigation - across the globe.
Table of Contents
CitizenGo
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)
Funding of Anti-rights Actors
The Links Between Anti-trans Feminists and Christian Fundamentalists
Exercise: Let’s Map the Landscape
Movement Resistance Story: Catolicadas, a Powerful Communication Tool to Promote Gender Equality and Sexual and Reproductive Rights
Yannia Sofía Garzón Valencia I am a Black woman and a community weaver. I live in Santander de Quilichao in Cauca, Colombia. I am interested in the creative processes that organize sustainable collective life. I like exchanging thoughts and cooking, investigating and analyzing, planting seeds and learning from plants, reading and playing. I am currently coordinating the observatory of gender-based violence against afro-descendant communities in Colombia (@VigiaAfro).
The three of us were “sharing” the afternoon in a neighborhood south of Bogota.
There was an unusually large green playing area and we sat on little wooden stools under an elderberry tree. We were finally experiencing that other form of love – that pleasure of being together and listening to each other. For me, these kinds of chats are among the expressions of love that life had only recently allowed me to enjoy. I had not known this other form of love – the kinds found outside workshops, activist spaces, classrooms, or workplaces – to be possible. Yet we three friends spent the afternoon amongst ourselves and we did not pretend to be blind to the color of our respective skins. Rather, it was a lived factor that allowed us to intimately discuss the similarities and differences in our childhood and youthful experiences.
Those chats were unrelated to any upcoming activities of the Black movement in Colombia, but they still nourish me and acquire new meanings. Our closeness was woven through coming together, recognizing each other, and identifying the uniqueness of our liberations. And by realizing there is not just one but many paths to liberation – those paths we inhabited every time we said “no” and rebelled. Far from feeling discomfort, we met in an authenticity made of weakness and strength, one which brought us closer instead of separating us.
Our purpose on that beautiful afternoon was to just be – to have an awareness of simply being amongst ourselves. We walked through our pasts so that the memories that stayed with us were those we decided to keep as ours, and not those that fear let through and found a place for. We remembered exact fragments of TV shows, and sang songs written by artists who had taught us about loving well, hating well, cursing like the worst villain, and suffering like the best leading lady.
We told each other about our school pranks, and what remained in our subconscious after being exposed to the many ways the media repeats the same thing – after the teachers and nuns at school overexposed us to stories so that we would identify with and appropriate Cinderella’s aspirations for our own lives. This would set the tone for the rest of our story: the drama of the impoverished and diminished girl who is yet to achieve her full value through an act that redeems her condition. And that act can only be brought about by the gaze of a male who, at the very least, is white, hence deserving of what is between our thighs – his “main aspiration” – and the “perfect realization of our dreams,” which we are told should then be our main aspiration.
There were three of us there that afternoon. Each had been brought up in a different part of the country, but it was fascinating that we could all still quote fragments and situations from songs and soap operas that often – as we realized by getting to know each other – shared codes or symbols that were replicated, with a few variations, in our homes, in our first relationships, and in our neighborhoods and schools. Brought up by “dramas” (is that what that very successful genre is called?) where the more you suffer, the more you deserve, the issue of “how and in which situations it is acceptable and legitimate to suffer” becomes an important mandate on how the person who suffers should be seen, what they should do, and whom they should be. Some of us managed to liberate ourselves and “learn” a definition of love that could only be learnt in adulthood, shattering illusions, and accepting natural sin. And becoming aware of the industrial production of a virgin, which we may refuse to look like as she has no place in our understanding, and the disappointment this alienation brings.
After singing, we reviewed our early sexual explorations. I never thought that most people experienced them before the age of nine and that even in adulthood, those experiences, those memories, remain a heavy burden. Even today, in thousands of places, millions of girls and boys see their innocence curtailed by lack of trust and the ignorance we present them with when they try to explore their bodies. Blaming curiosity is a most efficient control mechanism. We went back to the brief conversations we had when we changed the history of our lives from cursed Black beings to a perspective that rebirthed us. We remembered how many of our aunts and female cousins left their homes, their core, their roots, to seek a future outside, elsewhere.
The future comes with a price: it demands that those relationships that marked our childhood are reshaped and confined to oblivion. They are our foundations, but they are not relevant if we want to move ahead. For us, advancing was to learn by heart what we do to ourselves with the opportunities we find elsewhere. That it is elsewhere, and not within us, that opportunities lie, that we are available, that we need to be outside. However, for many of our aunts and female cousins, the few opportunities to enroll and stay in an evening class or take a sabbatical from domestic work were paid for by becoming the first sexual experience of relatives living in the future. A future for which others before them had also paid for, and whose price they had already forgotten. The demand for this payment arrived with the same inevitability as a public utility service bill. We will not take up that legacy.
In Colombia and Latin America, there was an etiquette manual called La urbanidad de Carreño (Carreño’s Etiquette Manual). It was mandatory reading until the 90s in both public and private schools. The manual conditioned how bodies were perceived and my mother, taken in and brought up by Carmelite nuns, knew it by heart. The first time I read it I had to stop more than once to rub my stomach, which hurt from laughing so much. It has ridiculous instructions such as: take a shower with your eyes closed and turn off the lights to wear your nightclothes. Different chapters address how one is to behave at home, in the street, and during a dinner or lunch party – in short, the norms of good taste and etiquette. The ethical core of good citizens was the urbanity that allowed one to distance oneself from rural life. The same manual indicated that shouting a greeting to an acquaintance on the other side of the street was indecorous; good manners dictate that you must cross the street. By the same token, men must remove their coats and place them over puddles of water if accompanying a woman whose shoes should not get wet. I thought about greeting someone across a river, and how it is so hot where we live that we don’t require coats.
"She learned that to care for her belly, she needed to keep her tissues warm, to avoid the cold that comes through the soft spot on the top of the head, through the feet, the ears, so it would not hurt particularly at moontime. For that, you need to be careful about what you eat and what you don’t eat, how you dress and how you walk, as all that has to do with girls’ health. The woman elder says that, from her devoted grandfather, she learnt that cramps became more common when houses no longer had floors made of mud and/or wood. When concrete and tiles came, when the material making up the house allowed the cold to come in through the feet, tension also grew in the belly tissue."
The manual’s author, Mr. Carreño is the opposite of the grandfather of a woman elder born in Turbo. She told me once that her grandfather was a wise man, that he told her about birthing and how to take care of her body. She learned that to care for her belly, she needed to keep her tissues warm, to avoid the cold that comes through the soft spot on the top of the head, through the feet, the ears, so it would not hurt, particularly at moontime. For that, you need to be careful about what you eat, how you dress, and how you walk, as all that has to do with a girl’s health. The woman elder said that, from her devoted grandfather, she learnt that cramps became more common when houses no longer had floors made of mud and/or wood. When concrete and tiles came, when the material making up the house allowed the cold to come in through the feet, tensions in the belly tissue also grew.
Surprised again. Such a distance between Don Carreño and the wise grandfather in terms of being aware of life – as distant as the mandates of proper behavior that stifle your impulses and senses, even the most common sense that values health. At that moment, I was able to understand one of the many ways that concrete obstructs the earth’s breathing, and our own as part of her. I had not realized there was, and still is, the architecture and materials for taking care of our bodies. In Colombia, as well as in other countries, the materials used to make houses are taken as indicators of multidimensional poverty. A house built with concrete moves the home away from being considered poor. This is just one disappointing example of how progress pushes us to abandon the relationship between our environment and our body. Good taste and urbanity pushes us outside: to move forward, they lie, you have to go out there.
It bothered us to realize that neither our mothers nor fathers had spoken to us about menstruation, except when the brown stain had already smeared our knickers. They failed to preserve us from the shame that was supposed to be a natural feeling once menstruation had come. Along with menstruation came the belly cramps often endured in silence, because there was work to be done; some cramps were due to cysts, hematomas, or fibroids that killed the grandmothers who had discovered and forgotten the healing treatments, and then were forgotten themselves. That our mothers and fathers’ breaths turned colder and colder, but the Outside froze familiarity and, instead of warming our bellies, passed judgment with advice similar to warnings of the only thing men care about. This was applied to all men – legitimizing the plundering role of the phallus, as if its only option was to take what we have between our legs. The multiple versions of that truth were replaced by an unmovable and deeply-set naturalization: telling all women that we must preserve ourselves for one of them, for the one that will first introduce his penis inside us, for the one that will give us something in exchange, and that we are women only because we aspire to and let him put it inside us. As a girl I explored little penises and clitorises and, in between games among girls, the question was whispered: whose turn is it to play man and whose turn is it to play woman? And the answer: the beginnings of little orgasms, regardless of with whom. I guess the same must happen among male bodies.
The experiences and explorations of our aunts, female cousins, and acquaintances focused on the body and its nudity as taboo. They avoided expressing and naming it, to the point of covering it up, assigning new names to its excreting, expelling, procreating, and, just for us women, its receiving functions. Once I heard a woman elder in a workshop say that when she was living with her grandmother, her memory was of this old woman sleeping with one eye open, the other closed, and a rifle by the mattress. The softest night sound was enough for her to grab the rifle and aim. This is a common situation in the Colombian Pacific, where some harmful behaviors are normalized. Married and single men who like a young woman would enter her room at night – we call it gateada. It was a risk: if those with authority in the home realized what was happening, abuse or not, the man could be hurt or even killed.
This practice of taking the law into one’s own hands has failed to put an end to gateadas, even today. In that same workshop – as I kept telling my sisters – other participants said that neither they nor their mothers would leave their daughters alone with their fathers at bath time, unless the girls were wearing underwear. I remembered then my father’s voice saying, when I was seven, your mother never let me bathe you. After sharing this, another woman responded that, in contrast, her father would give her a bath naked in the courtyard of her childhood home until she turned seven, and then her eldest brother did it until she turned nine. She never felt anything strange in the way they looked at her; for them, it was just another task in caring for the most spoiled child in the home. She remembered being seen for what she was: a daughter child, a sister child, who did not like the water.
Once again childhoods, yesterday and today. We were surprised by that story, and it comforted us. Even I had seen things being different elsewhere; my daughter’s father bathed her in the tub until she was almost two. Even before turning two, he would give her a few soft slaps upwards on her bum, to make it bigger, as he said. Here, we could also speak of other dimensions of how we construct our bodies, but that is a different story. For me, it was one care task, among many, that we agreed to divide between ourselves before the baby was born. And the decision to not see every man as a lurking rapist does not mean they are not rapists, but instead that they can stop being so. There are also men and male bodies that have been brought up to never be rapists.
This is still happening. It happened to a friend of ours and to my own daughter. I thought: how can it be that some women are coupled with men they cannot trust to care for their daughters? I am sure that my mum loved my dad. And even though we seldom speak about the woman she was before becoming my mum, I know her experiences of abuse cannot be compared to the brutality and over-tolerance of those of today. But that is still a decision many women in many places make, and that leads to other questions. How often, how repeated were cases of abuse in our extended families to make women openly, or in indiscernible ways, forbid their partners from bathing their daughters? Is it related to the media overexposure we are subject to almost from birth? What makes family ties blur and turn into just bodily-satisfaction exchanges? Is it the proximity to urban values that cares so much about the right shapes of female bodies as objects of desire, and pushes male bodies to behave like owners and conquerors, fulfilling the mandate to mimic media representations so they feel safe in their identity? Is it concrete and other codes, like the Carreño etiquette, that sustain it? Is it encouraged by the need to forget certain relationships as the price of progress, that insistence on “doing for the outside?” What happens to what we learned in our times, those of us who, in secret or not, undertook sexual explorations as children? Were they erased by guilt? Were they the seeds of mistrust and shame in nudity? Were they the seeds of mistrust and shame of being inside oneself? Indeed, aren’t these learnings possibilities to trust in, understand the nudity of bodies as part of respecting oneself and others? These questions emerge in trusted spaces, where the fear to say what one thinks and feels is driven away by the intention of accompaniment. I imagine how many of us there are in all corners of this planet and I am certain these are not new questions, that messages in them are repeated, and that we find ourselves living the answers.
ExploreTransnational Embodiments
This journal edition in partnership with Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, will explore feminist solutions, proposals and realities for transforming our current world, our bodies and our sexualities.
نصدر النسخة هذه من المجلة بالشراكة مع «كحل: مجلة لأبحاث الجسد والجندر»، وسنستكشف عبرها الحلول والاقتراحات وأنواع الواقع النسوية لتغيير عالمنا الحالي وكذلك أجسادنا وجنسانياتنا.
Filter your search by funders’ priority support areas that speak to your organizing efforts
Love letter to Feminist Movements #1
Dear gorgeous beings,
I know you are so close. You can feel it can't you? How things need to shift and you need to centre yourself.
This is a letter to tell you to do it. Choose your healing. Choose to be OK. Better than OK. Choose to be whole, to be happy. To cry tears for yourself and no one else. Choose to shut out the world and tell them that 'you will be back in 5 mins'. Or five days. Or five years.
Or never.
Choose to not take it all on. Choose to take none of it on. Because none of it is yours. It was never yours. They told you since you were born that it was yours. Your family's problems. Your lovers' problems. Your neighbours' problems. The globe's problems. The constant whisper that these problems belong to you. They are yours. Yours to hold, yours to shoulder. Yours to fix.
That was a lie.
A bamboozle
A long con.
A scam.
The problems of the universe are not yours.
The only problems that are yours are your own. Everyone else can take a hike.
Allow yourself to drop everything and sprint off into the jungle. Befriend a daisy clad nymph, start a small library in the roots of a tree. Dance naked and howl at the moonlight. Converse with Oshun at the river bed.
Or simply drink a cup of tea when you need to take a moment to breathe.
Give yourself permission to disappear into the mist and reappear three countries over as a mysterious chocolatier with a sketchy past and penchant for dramatic cloaks and cigars.
Or stop answering work calls on weekends.
Let yourself swim to deserted island with a lover and dress only in the coconut shells from coconut rum that you make and sip at sunset.
Or say no when you don't have the capacity to create space for someone.
The options for holding yourself are endless.
Whatever you do, know the world will always keep spinning. That's the beauty and the pain of it. No matter who or what you choose over yourself and your soul the world will always keep spinning.
Therefore, choose you.
In the morning when that first light hits, choose you. When it’s lunchtime and it’s time to cry on company time, choose you. In the evening, when you are warming up leftovers because you didn’t have time to cook again, choose you. When anxiety wakes you up and existence is silent at 3:45 am.
Choose you.
Because the world will always keep twirling on a tilt and you deserve to have someone always trying to make it right side up for you.
Where is the Money? An Evidence-Driven Call to Resource Feminist Organizing
This new report shines a light on the resourcing realities of feminist and women’s rights organizations amid unprecedented political and financial upheaval. Drawing on over a decade of analysis since AWID last Where is the Money? report (Watering the Leaves, Starving the Roots), it takes stock of the gains, gaps, and growing threats in the funding landscape.
The report celebrates the power of movement-led initiatives to shape resourcing on their own terms, while sounding the alarm on massive aid cuts, shrinking philanthropy, and escalating backlash.
It calls on funders to invest abundantly in feminist organizing as essential infrastructure for justice and liberation. It also invites movements to reimagine bold, self-determined models of resourcing rooted in care, solidarity and collective power.
Imagine opening a door which takes you into a conversation with feminist activists in other continents. This portal will transcend the barriers of UN CSW by pushing beyond language barriers, unaffordable travel, unequal protection from COVID19, and racist visa regimes.
This week, we’re putting a virtual spin on CSW by connecting and amplifying feminist activists' voices, to challenge the discriminatory barriers that limit participation and influence. By setting up connecting “portals” in New York City, Nairobi & Bangalore, we'll host a physical-virtual hybrid space for feminists to connect their struggles and build collective power.
Snippet - COP30 - Feminist Demands for COP30 col 2
What We Demand:
Climate finance as reparations: grants, not loans
Direct funding to frontline communities
Phasing out fossil fuels NOW
Defunding military and prison complexes
Corporate accountability mechanisms
Enabling environments for feminist alternatives to thrive
The liberation of Palestine, Congo and Sudan
Debt cancellation and an end to austerity
Rapid, direct and flexible funding to frontline communities
Decolonial feminist just transitions
The 2026 AWID Feminist Calendar
Consider this calendar a gift, one that goes out to you and 9,500 members of our global feminist community. A gift of hope, renewed connection, action and community in a time of immense injustice and violence.
Let its stories remind you that across borders and struggles, we are many, we are powerful, and together we are building the worlds we deserve.
In September 2016, the 13th AWID international Forum brought together in Brazil over 1800 feminists and women’s rights advocates in a spirit of resistance and resilience.
This section highlights the gains, learnings and resources that came out of our rich conversations. We invite you to explore, share and comment!
What has happened since 2016?
One of the key takeaways from the 2016 Forum was the need to broaden and deepen our cross-movement work to address rising fascisms, fundamentalisms, corporate greed and climate change.
With this in mind, we have been working with multiple allies to grow these seeds of resistance:
Movements can also benefit from new methodologies on Visioning Feminist Futures (Coming up soon!)
And through our next strategic plan and Forum process, we are committed to keep developing ideas and deepen the learnings ignited at the 2016 Forum.
What happens now?
The world is a much different place than it was a year ago, and it will continue to change.
The next AWID Forum will take place in the Asia Pacific region (exact location and dates to be announced in 2018).
We look forward to you joining us!
About the AWID Forum
AWID Forums started in 1983, in Washington DC. Since then, the event has grown to become many things to many peoples: an iterative process of sharpening our analyses, vision and actions; a watershed moment that reinvigorates participants’ feminisms and energizes their organizing; and a political home for women human rights defenders to find sanctuary and solidarity.
« Je sais maintenant que nous sommes toutes et tous simplement des enfants de l’univers. »
Le parcours de Menke Meijer a été semé d’embûches. « On m’a mis une quantité inimaginable de bâtons dans les roues, de nombreuses personnes ont tenté de m’arrêter. Mais ils ont seulement réussi à me faire déployer davantage d’énergie pour aller encore plus loin », déclare-t-elle. Son existence a été faite de force, de dévouement, de vision, de patience, de libération et, pour cela, elle a dû surmonter de multiples obstacles.
« Je dirais que je me bats sur deux fronts : le premier étant la lutte pour l’égalité de genre et le second, la lutte contre toute une histoire de colonisation et de racisme. »
Menke sur la Grande Muraille de Chine
Femme de la nation métis (lien en anglais) et « d’origine très pauvre », Menke a été confrontée à de nombreux obstacles, le défi le plus grand qu’elle ait eu à relever étant « le simple fait d’être une femme et, dans certains cas, d’être une femme aborigène ». Elle a souffert du sexisme et du racisme. La stigmatisation et les dangers qui prennent leur source dans le racisme ont pavé le chemin qui lui a permis de se positionner et de définir son identité de femme aborigène. « Les membres de ma famille étaient réticent-e-s à parler de nos origines » mais finalement, grâce aux efforts déployés par Menke, ils/elles ont « commencé à s’ouvrir sur ce sujet ». Pendant ses études universitaires de premier cycle et des cycles supérieurs, Menke a choisi de suivre tous les cours existants sur le thème des peuples des Premières Nations du Canada, dans le but d’en apprendre davantage sur ses origines.
« J’ai travaillé dur pour me décoloniser par moi-même et pour aider ma famille à se réapproprier son identité. »
Pour accomplir ce travail, Menke a notamment dû prendre des décisions, parmi lesquelles la plus grande et la plus importante a été « la décision de poursuivre (s)es études ». Elle était consciente du fait que ce choix « étaient un pari risqué, parce que les prêts étudiants créent un lourd endettement ». Mais elle savait aussi que, en comparaison avec les emplois au salaire minimum qu’elle avait occupés, le chemin qui s’ouvrait devant elle serait beaucoup plus gratifiant.
« J’ai fait le choix de vivre mes passions, quel qu’en soit le prix. Cela m’a changée dans le sens positif du terme, et cela a changé ma vie. »
Menke a obtenu une licence en histoire à l’Université Concordia de Montréal, et a remporté la bourse Gordon Ritchie, une récompense fondée sur le mérite. Mais, en étudiant l’esclavage, les guerres et les génocides, elle s’est sentie frustrée. En plus de se plonger dans les livres, elle voulait « agir ». Elle a donc décidé de préparer un master en études de la paix et des conflits à l’Université de Waterloo, son mémoire de master portant principalement sur les thèmes suivants : le genre dans les conflits et la consolidation de la paix, le genre dans l’aide humanitaire et, plus particulièrement, les femmes en Chine.
« Je suis la première femme des deux branches de ma famille à être titulaire d’une licence universitaire et d’un master. J’ai brisé les barrières du genre et de la race. Je ne me suis jamais sentie aussi vivante et aussi accomplie. Je me sens libérée. »
En Chine, Menke a effectué un stage de cinq mois au sein de l’ONU Femmes, « une expérience extraordinaire dans un environnement extraordinaire », déclare-t-elle. Pendant cette période, elle a été invitée par la Tsinghua University de Beijing à s’exprimer lors d’un événement Lean In destiné aux étudiant-e-s de MBA. Par le biais de sa propre histoire, elle a évoqué les moyens de forcer les « barrages » qui empêchent les femmes de poursuivre leurs études. Elle a notamment partagé sa propre histoire en ces mots : « j’ai été élevée dans la pauvreté par une mère célibataire. J’ai dû surmonter de nombreux obstacles pour parfaire ma formation. »
Dans son travail sur les moyens de surmonter des difficultés multiples et de tendre vers le changement, Menke a été motivée par la colère, celle qu’elle a ressentie face aux difficultés qu’elle a elle-même dû surmonter. « Le peur peut détruire, mais elle peut aussi être source de création. Les défis auxquels j’ai été confrontée m’ont mise en colère, mais ils m’ont aussi poussée à tendre vers le meilleur. »
C’est précisément parce qu’elle tend vers le meilleur que Menke a de nombreux rêves « pour toutes les femmes, qu’elles soient blanches, noires, asiatiques ou de n’importe quelle couleur, peu importent leurs convictions religieuses et leur chemin de vie. » Menke veut que « le monde reconnaisse les femmes », car « rien n’est plus touchant que de s’entendre dire qu’on est juste un être humain ».
Quelques éléments complémentaires au sujet de Menke
Elle a eu la possibilité de faire partie de l’équipe qui a contribué à la création du Global Peace Centre Canada (GPCC) de Waterloo, un projet mené à l’initiative du directeur du programme de master en études de la paix et des conflits, Ziauddin Yousafzai (le père de Malala Yousafzai). La vision et la finalité du GPCC sont la paix et l’éducation pour tous les garçons et toutes les filles.
Menke est née en Colombie-Britannique, a grandi à Québec et vit maintenant dans l’Ontario, au Canada.
Lisez la nouvelle écrite par Menke
Menke a écrit une nouvelle intitulée « Feeding Wolves » (Nourrir les loups). Elle est basée sur sa vie de femme de la nation métis et sur le vécu des peuples aborigènes du Canada. À ce sujet, Menke a déclaré : « seuls trois des personnages sont des femmes… il s’agit d’un parti pris volontaire car je voulais aller plus loin que de simplement traiter du patriarcat, un thème encore très présent dans la société coloniale. Je voulais montrer que les femmes sont absentes du récit. »
“Now I know we are all simply children of the universe.”
Menke Meijer’s path was often rocky. “I had mountains of sticks put in my wheels, people trying to stop me, but it has only helped me push harder and further”, she says. Her story is one of strength, dedication, vision, patience, liberation, and one of breaking down multiple barriers.
“I would have to say I’m fighting two fronts: the first being the fight for gender equality and the second being the fight against a history of colonization and racism.”
Menke at the Great Wall of China
As a Métis woman from a “very poor background”, Menke faced numerous obstacles, seeing her biggest challenge as “simply being a woman, and in certain cases being an aboriginal woman”. She has been confronted with sexism and racism. The stigma and dangers rooted in racism have influenced her way in finding her position and identity as an aboriginal woman. “My family was quite reluctant to speak about our origins” but eventually through Menke’s efforts they “started to open up on the subject.” During her undergraduate and graduate studies, Menke took all the courses she could on the subject of First Peoples in Canada in order to learn more about her origins.
“I’ve been working hard on decolonizing myself and helping my family in reclaiming our identities.”
Part of this work were decisions Menke took, and the biggest and most important being her “decision to pursue education”. She was aware that this “meant a dangerous gamble with hefty student debt” but she also realized that, in comparison to her previous experience in minimum wage work, this was a much more rewarding journey for her.
“I picked to pursue my passions no matter the hardship. It has changed who I am positively, as well as my life.”
Menke obtained a Bachelor’s degree in History from Concordia University in Montreal, winning a merit-based Gordon Ritchie Award/Scholarship. Yet, while studying about slavery, war, and genocide she felt frustrated and in addition to books, she wanted to “take action”. Menke decided to pursue a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Waterloo, focusing her Master’s work on gender in conflict and peacebuilding, gender in humanitarian aid, and especially on women in China.
“I’m the first woman to hold a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree on both sides of my family. I’m breaking down gender and racial barriers. I’ve never felt so alive and accomplished. I feel liberated.”
In China, Menke completed a five-month internship with UN Women, for her “an extraordinary experience in extraordinary settings.” During this time, she was invited as a guest speaker at Tsinghua University in Beijing for the Lean In MBA event where, through her own story, she spoke about overcoming ‘roadblocks’ women face in seeking education. As part of her story she shared, “I was raised by a single mother in poverty and had to face many challenges to further my education”.
Much of Menke’s work towards overcoming multiple challenges and striving for change has been pushed by anger, coming from obstacles that were in her way. “Anger can be destructive, but it can also be creative. My challenges anger me, but they also push me to strive for better.”
Striving for better also means having many dreams “for all women, no matter they be white, black, Asian, or any colour, creed or walk of life”. Menke wants “the world to validate women” as “nothing is more moving than being told that you are just a human”.
A bit more about Menke
She had the opportunity to be part of a team that helped establish the Global Peace Centre Canada (GPCC) in Waterloo, initiated by the director of the Master’s of Peace and Conflict Studies program Ziauddin Yousafzai (and Malala Yousafzai’s father). The vision and goal of the GPCC are peace and education for all boys and girls.
Menke was born in British-Columbia, grew up in Quebec and is currently living in Ontario, Canada.
Read Menke’s short story
She wrote a short story entitled “Feeding Wolves”, based on her life as a Métis woman and aboriginal peoples’ experiences in Canada. About the story Menke said that “only three characters are female…I did this on purpose to not only expose a theme of patriarchy that is strongly present in settler society even to this day, but to show how the women are missing from the narrative...”
«Ahora sé que somos simplemente hijas e hijos del universo».
El camino de Menke Meijer a menudo fue escabroso. «Tenía muchísimos palos en la rueda, gente que intentaba detenerme, pero todo eso me sirvió para poner más empeño y llegar cada vez más lejos», afirma. La suya es una historia de fortaleza, dedicación, visión, paciencia, liberación y superación de múltiples obstáculos.
«Diría que doy batalla en dos frentes: el primero es la lucha por la igualdad de género y el segundo la lucha contra una historia de colonización y racismo».
Menke en la Gran Muralla China
Como mujer métis de un «entorno muy pobre», Menke enfrentó numerosos obstáculos; para ella, el principal desafío fue «tan solo ser mujer, y en ciertos casos ser mujer indígena». Debió hacer frente al sexismo y al racismo. El estigma y los peligros que se derivan del racismo incidieron en su forma de encontrar su lugar y su identidad como mujer originaria. «Mi familia era bastante renuente a hablar de nuestros orígenes», pero finalmente gracias al esfuerzo de Menke, «comenzó a abrirse al tema». Durante sus estudios de pregrado y de grado, Menke tomó todos los cursos que pudo sobre los Pueblos Originarios de Canadá para aprender más sobre sus raíces.
«He trabajado profundamente para descolonizarme y ayudar a mi familia a reivindicar nuestras identidades».
Parte de ese trabajo fueron las decisiones que tomó, y la más grande e importante fue la de «estudiar». Sabía que eso «constituía una apuesta peligrosa, porque implicaba asumir una deuda abultada», pero también se dio cuenta de que, en comparación con su experiencia anterior de trabajar por un salario mínimo, con el estudio se le abría un camino más promisorio.
«Escogí seguir mis pasiones sin importar las dificultades. Eso cambió para bien no solo la persona que soy, sino mi vida entera».
Menke obtuvo una licenciatura en Historia en la Universidad de Concordia (Montreal), con una Beca/Distinción por mérito Gordon Ritchie. Sin embargo, mientras estudiaba la esclavitud, las guerras y los genocidios se sintió frustrada y quiso «entrar en acción» más allá de los libros. Por eso, decidió hacer una maestría en Estudios sobre Paz y Resolución de Conflictos en la Universidad de Waterloo, enfocando su trabajo de tesis en género, conflictos y consolidación de la paz; género y ayuda humanitaria; y sobre todo en las mujeres de China.
«En las dos ramas de mi familia, soy la primera mujer en obtener una licenciatura y una maestría. Estoy rompiendo barreras de género y raciales. Nunca me había sentido tan viva y realizada. Me siento liberada».
En China, Menke realizó un pasantía de cinco meses de duración con ONU Mujeres, que en su opinión fue «una experiencia extraordinaria en lugares extraordinarios». Durante ese tiempo, fue convocada por la Universidad de Tsinghua en Beijing como oradora invitada para el evento Lean In MBA donde, a través de su propia historia, habló (disponible en inglés) de la superación de las barreras con las que tropiezan las mujeres cuando quieren estudiar. Contó que «Fui criada en la pobreza por una madre soltera y tuve que hacer frente a muchos desafíos para avanzar en mi educación».
La motivación de Menke para superar diversos desafíos y luchar por el cambio fue, en buena parte, la ira que le despertaron los obstáculos que se le presentaban en el camino. «La ira puede ser destructiva, pero también puede ser creativa. Los desafíos me enfadan, pero también me empujan a luchar por algo mejor».
Luchar por algo mejor significa también tener muchos sueños «para todas las mujeres, sin importar si son blancas, negras, asiáticas o de cualquier otro color, credo o condición social». Menke desea que «el mundo valide a las mujeres», pues «nada es más movilizador como que te digan que eres un ser humano como cualquier otro».
Algunos datos más sobre Menke
Tuvo oportunidad de formar parte del equipo que ayudó a crear el Global Peace Centre Canada [GPCC, Centro Mundial para la Paz de Canadá] en Waterloo, fundado por el director de la Maestría en Estudios sobre Paz y Resolución de Conflictos, Ziauddin Yousafzai (padre de Malala Yousafzai). La visión y el objetivo del GPCC son lograr la paz y la educación para todos los niños y las niñas.
Menke nació en la Columbia Británica, creció en Quebec y actualmente reside en Ontario, Canadá.
Lee un cuento escrito por Menke
Menke escribió un cuento titulado «Feeding Wolves», (disponible en inglés) basado en su vida como mujer métis y en las experiencias de los pueblos originarios en Canadá. Sobre el cuento, Menke expresó que «Solo tres de sus personajes son mujeres ... Eso lo hice a propósito no solo para poner en evidencia el tema del patriarcado que está muy presente en la sociedad de los colonos incluso hasta hoy, sino también para mostrar de qué manera las mujeres están ausentes de la narrativa...».
