Carmela Elisarraraz Mendez
Co-Creating Feminist Realities
While we dream of a feminist world, there are those who are already building and living it. These are our Feminist Realities!
What are Feminist Realities?
Feminist Realities are the living, breathing examples of the just world we are co-creating. They exist now, in the many ways we live, struggle and build our lives.
Feminist Realities go beyond resisting oppressive systems to show us what a world without domination, exploitation and supremacy look like.
These are the narratives we want to unearth, share and amplify throughout this Feminist Realities journey.
Transforming Visions into Lived Experiences
Through this initiative, we:
-
Create and amplify alternatives: We co-create art and creative expressions that center and celebrate the hope, optimism, healing and radical imagination that feminist realities inspire.
-
Build knowledge: We document, demonstrate & disseminate methodologies that will help identify the feminist realities in our diverse communities.
-
Advance feminist agendas: We expand and deepen our collective thinking and organizing to advance just solutions and systems that embody feminist values and visions.
-
Mobilize solidarity actions: We engage feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements and allies in sharing, exchanging and jointly creating feminist realities, narratives and proposals at the 14th AWID International Forum.
The AWID International Forum
As much as we emphasize the process leading up to, and beyond, the four-day Forum, the event itself is an important part of where the magic happens, thanks to the unique energy and opportunity that comes with bringing people together.
We expect the next Forum to:
-
Build the power of Feminist Realities, by naming, celebrating, amplifying and contributing to build momentum around experiences and propositions that shine light on what is possible and feed our collective imaginations
-
Replenish wells of hope and energy as much needed fuel for rights and justice activism and resilience
-
Strengthen connectivity, reciprocity and solidarity across the diversity of feminist movements and with other rights and justice-oriented movements
Learn more about the Forum process
We are sorry to announce that the 14th AWID International Forum is cancelled
Given the current world situation, our Board of Directors has taken the difficult decision to cancel Forum scheduled in 2021 in Taipei.
Related Content
Snippet FEA Nous Sommes la Solution (EN)
Nous Sommes la Solution is a rural women 's movement for food sovereignty in West Africa. Founded originally as a campaign against hyper-industrialized agriculture, Nous Sommes la Solution has grown into a movement of more than 500 rural women’s associations from Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mali and Guinea.
Together, this women-led movement is building and strengthening food and seed sovereignty across West Africa. They feed communities, strengthen local economies, amplify the knowledge of women farmers and mitigate the devastating effects of climate change through agroecological practices. They also organize workshops, forums and community radio broadcasts to share their messages, their traditional knowledges and agroecological practices across rural communities.
In collaboration with universities and public research centers, Nous Sommes la Solution works towards restoring traditional Indigenous varieties of rice (a staple food in West Africa) and promoting local food economies based on agroecological principles, influencing national policy-making, all the while supporting women in creating farming associations and collectively owning and managing farmland.
Our partners
This project is built in collaboration with:
Martha Araceli Chagoy Valdes
Snippet FEA This is the story of the Nadia Echazú (EN)
A workplace does not have to operate on competition and profit. It does not have to exploit people for the benefit of the owner and a small elite either.
Instead, communities on the margins of formal economies are building cooperative models based on autonomy, cooperation, shared responsibility, self-management and solidarity.
Worker-controlled cooperatives and workplaces have always offered alternative ways of generating employment opportunities, income, social security and savings - while distributing revenues in more communal, sustainable and safer ways.
But it is more than an employment opportunity: it is the making of dreams into a reality, and the building of feminist economies based on solidarity and care for each other. It is about creating a world where our lives, our labor and our communities matter.
This is the story of the Nadia Echazú Textile Cooperative, the first social enterprise managed by and for travesti and trans people in Argentina.
Snippet Feminist Art Walk_fest (EN)
Feminist Art Walk
As part of our commitment to engage more deeply with artists and the practice of co-creating Feminist Realities, AWID collaborated with an Artist Working Group to advance and strengthen feminist agendas and realities in their communities and movements through their creative expression. Our intention here is to bring feminist creatives together in a powerful and brave space where they grow and live freely, and where they shatter toxic narratives to replace them with transformative alternatives.
Gloria Carolina Hernández Vásquez
Rosalinda Pérez
Snippet FEA Meet the Solidarity Network (EN)
SOLIDARITY NETWORK
Meet the Solidarity Network, a health and service union mostly led by women. Emerging as a response to increasing precarity, severe underpayment and hostile work environments faced by workers in Georgia, Solidarity Network fights for dignified compensation and work places.
Its goal? To create a national worker’s democratic movement. To do so, it has been branching out, organizing and teaming up with other local and regional unions and slowly creating a network of unions and empowering women workers to become union leaders.
Its political approach is a holistic one. For Solidarity Network, labor rights issues are directly connected to broader national political and economic agendas and reforms. That’s why they are pushing for tax justice, women and LGBTQIA+ rights, and fighting against the dismantling of the Georgian welfare state.
The Solidarity Network is also part of Transnational Social Strike (TSS), a political platform and infrastructure inspired by migrant, women and essential worker organizing that works to build connections between labor movements across borders and nurture global solidarity.
Wan Aihua
Snippet FEA Otras Union meetings and demonstrations (EN)
Otras Union meetings and demonstrations
Shifa Gardi
Related Content
Al Jazeera: Shifa Gardi: Tributes paid to reporter killed in Mosul
BBC News: Mosul Battle: Kurdish reporter Shifa Gardi killed in Iraq
Prudence Nobantu Mabele
Related content
African Women's Development Fund: Remembering a Warrior: Prudence Mabele
BBC: Prudence Mabele: The life of the South African HIV campaigner
Mail and Guardian: The Pied Piper of the broken-hearted: HIV activist Prudence Mabele
Face2Face Africa: Prudence Mabele, 1st Black SA Woman To Reveal HIV Positive Status Dies At 46
Ms. Prudence Mabele - I'm committed to respond to HIV! (Video)
AWLN Interview with Prudence Mabele of South Africa (Video)
Sangoma: Why I take ARVs (Video)
Snippet Stories of Change Full - Download (EN)
2024: Strengthening Movements, Sustaining Change
From the rising right in many countries and the flurry of funding cuts hitting hard civil society of the Global Majority, to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the intensification of violent conflicts in Sudan, and climate crisis in many parts of our planet, we are facing real forces of fascism and a world order of impunity. This makes our opportunities to come together and build solidarity particularly valuable and imperative for our survival as a global feminist community. Of course, in 2024, the 15th AWID International Forum finally happened, and what a powerful space it was.
Download the full 2024 Annual review
As we look ahead, we build on the powerful calls to action made by feminists at the AWID Forum; Together we can build a world where justice, liberation and care are not aspirations but realities.
Miriam Bottassi
When can I register for the Forum? How much does it cost to register? What does Registration Include?
Registration will start early 2024. We will announce the exact registration date and registration fee soon. Registration will include participation in the Forum, plus lunch and snacks (breakfast to be provided at the hotels), and one onsite dinner.
Claudia Montserrat Arévalo Alvarado
Biography
Claudia is a feminist psychologist with a Masters degree in Development Equality and Equity. She has been a human rights activist for 30 years, and a women’s rights activist for the last 24.
Claudia works in El Salvador as the co-founder and Executive Director of Asociación Mujeres Transformando. For the past 16 years she has defended labour rights of women working within the textile and garment maquila sector. This includes collaborations to draft legislative bills, public policy proposals and research that aim to improve labour conditions for women workers in this sector. She has worked tirelessly to support organizational strengthening and empowerment of women workers in the textile maquilas and those doing embroidery piece-work from home.
She is an active participant in advocacy efforts at the national, regional and international levels to defend and claim labour rights for the working class in the global South from a feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchy perspective and class and gender awareness raising. She is a board member with the Spotlight Initiative and its national reference group. She is also part of UN Women’s Civic Society Advisory Group.
Position
Co-President
Add to stories
Off