Lohana Berkins
Resourcing Feminist Movements
The “Where is the Money?” #WITM survey is now live! Dive in and share your experience with funding your organizing with feminists around the world.
Learn more and take the survey
Around the world, feminist, women’s rights, and allied movements are confronting power and reimagining a politics of liberation. The contributions that fuel this work come in many forms, from financial and political resources to daily acts of resistance and survival.
AWID’s Resourcing Feminist Movements (RFM) Initiative shines a light on the current funding ecosystem, which range from self-generated models of resourcing to more formal funding streams.
Through our research and analysis, we examine how funding practices can better serve our movements. We critically explore the contradictions in “funding” social transformation, especially in the face of increasing political repression, anti-rights agendas, and rising corporate power. Above all, we build collective strategies that support thriving, robust, and resilient movements.
Our Actions
Recognizing the richness of our movements and responding to the current moment, we:
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Create and amplify alternatives: We amplify funding practices that center activists’ own priorities and engage a diverse range of funders and activists in crafting new, dynamic models for resourcing feminist movements, particularly in the context of closing civil society space.
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Build knowledge: We explore, exchange, and strengthen knowledge about how movements are attracting, organizing, and using the resources they need to accomplish meaningful change.
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Advocate: We work in partnerships, such as the Count Me In! Consortium, to influence funding agendas and open space for feminist movements to be in direct dialogue to shift power and money.
Related Content
Snippet FEA Criminalization of sex workers (EN)
Most Member States of the European Union have laws and practices that either criminalize or control sex workers in ways unacceptable to them. Criminalization of sex workers and/or their clients only contributes to increase the vulnerability of sex workers, who are already facing stigma, discrimination and exclusion from society on a daily basis. In Spain for example, the government is currently trying to pass an Organic Law for the Abolition of Prostitution, which will result in more clandestiny and violence. Let’s dive into the stories of sex workers and union organizers fighting to decriminilaze sex work and advance their labor rights.
Snippet Kohl - Plenary: She is on her way | AR
جلسة عامة | إنّها قادمة: بدائل وأشكال متعددة من النسوية وعالم آخر
مع د. فاندانا شيفا ود. ديلار ديريك ونانا أكوسوا هانسو
Snippet FEA Principles of work Education and Learning (EN)
EDUCATION AND CONTINUOUS LEARNING
#3 - Sexting like a feminist Tweets Snippet AR
بصراحة…
رغبتي في الانقضاض على جسدك تعادل رغبتي بالانقضاض على كراهية النساء المتجذرة في التسلسلات الهرمية للشركات
Ofelia Maria Mosquera Usuga
Snippet Forum Stories Story 1 (EN)
Case study 1 - Three Boats, a Horse and a Taxi: Pacific Feminists at the AWID Forums
This story is about how an increasingly diverse group of feminists from the Pacific organized through the years to attend the AWID Forums and how that process changed them personally, as organizations, and as a movement through what they learned, discovered and experienced. It illustrates the importance of the Forums as a space through which a region that tends to be marginalized or ignored at the global level can build a strong presence in the feminist movement that is then replicated at other international women’s rights spaces.
Snippet Feminist Propositions for a Just Economy EN
AWID, the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), and the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), offers this think piece to challenge mainstream understandings of development and put forward initial propositions for a feminist agenda for development, economic and gender justice.
Learn more about where this project comes from
The propositions
These propositions are intended to be just that - proposals, to be discussed, debated, added to, taken apart, adapted, adopted, and even to inspire others.
Yoryanis Isabel Bernal Varela
Related content
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Will you be opening a call for proposals?
Yes! Please read the Call for Activities and apply here. Deadline is February 1st, 2024.
Orouba Barakat
Will there be a young feminist space? A disability justice space? A digital/tech hub? Funder coffee hours? Wellbeing and healing spaces?
We will share information about the program, the spaces, and the way for everyone to participate in shaping them, as soon as we can, and ways for you to participate in shaping them - on the road to the Forum, and during the Forum. Please stay tuned!
Jane Julia de Oliveira
CFA 2023 - Suggested Activities Format - EN
Suggested Activity Formats
Panel: In Panel discussions, explore an issue or challenge from different perspectives, or share a learning or experience, followed by audience questions if time allows.
Talk Show: Have a more spontaneous conversation in Talk-Show style. Talk Shows can be a conversation among several people, facilitated by a talk-show host. Audience questions can determine the conversation’s direction.
Discussion: These can take the form of world cafes, fishbowls, and other methodologies that facilitate participants’ active involvement in conversations. Highly participatory.
Workshop: Interactive sessions that invite participants to build new skills in any and all areas of life and activism.
Strategy Session: This is an invitation to think through an issue or strategy, in depth, with others. A space to learn from each other: what works, what doesn’t, and how do we develop new and collective strategies to create the worlds we dream of.
Sharing Circle (also known as “Birds of a Feather”): Ideal for small groups, in a more intimate setting, to hear from each other, spark discussion and carefully address topics that may be specific, sensitive and complex.
Arts – Participatory Workshop: Participatory activities involving arts and creative expression. Whether through visual art, theater, film, mural, dance, music, collective craft or artmaking, etc., we welcome all ideas celebrating feminist art and creativity as forms of social change, healing, expression and transformation.
Arts – Performances, Installations and Exhibitions: We welcome submissions that offer Forum participants new experiences and perspectives, expand our horizons, and challenge and inspire us to think, feel and organize in new ways.
Healing: Diverse activities tailored both for groups and individuals, from learning relaxation techniques to discussing burnout prevention, from trauma-informed practices of care for our body, mind and soul to healing rifts within our movements.
Teresa Scalzo, Esq.
CFA 2023 - Hubs - ar
جديد
محاور جديدة: السفر إلى الفضاء عبر الحدود
سيجتمع المشاركات/ون فعليًا في عدد من المواقع خارج مكان انعقاد المنتدى في بانكوك، في أجزاء مختلفة من العالم، في كل يوم من أيام المنتدى. وستكون جميع هذه المواقع ذاتية التنظيم مرتبطة افتراضيًا لموقع انعقاد المنتدى في بانكوك. كما هو الحال مع الأفراد المتواصلون عبر الإنترنت، سيتمكن المشاركون/ات من تسيير النشاطات والمشاركة في المحادثات والاستمتاع ببرنامج غني ومتنوع.
سيتم الإعلان عن مواقع التجمعات في عام 2024.
AWID in 2016: Co-Creating Feminist Futures
AWID is pleased to share our 2016 Annual Report.
2016 was an incredible year for AWID, we convened the 13th International AWID Forum in Bahia, Brazil, a space for strategizing and alliance building with feminists and other justice movements, which was attended by over 1800 participants from 120 countries and territories across the globe.
We know that women’s rights and feminist movements are key actors in creating sustainable transformative change. Within our movements, organizing, resisting and responding to the challenging context is sharpening, and in our increasingly connected world, the potential for collective action across diverse movements has dramatically grown.
This is the crucial work that AWID seeks to amplify and support every day.
What we achieved in 2016
We expanded solidarity and joint action across diverse movements
A highlight of 2016 was our ground-breaking 13th International Forum with the theme: “Feminist Futures: Building Collective Power for Rights and Justice”, where we harnessed the thinking and energy of nearly 500 partners, presenters, panelists, moderators, artivists, writers, facilitators, IT innovators, and performers, many of them leaders in their movements. We also supported the convening of the first and historical Black Feminisms Forum (BFF) organised by a working group of Black Feminists from across the world.
We strengthened knowledge of issues and strategies
- On challenging corporate power - we produced ‘Challenging corporate power: Struggles for women’s rights, economic and gender justice’ with the Solidarity Center, revealing the scale and scope of corporate power and outlining how corporations in collusion with elites and other powerful actors, are impacting the lives of women and oppressed peoples.
- On feminist economies - we released ‘Feminist Propositions for a Just Economy’ with the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) and the African Women’s Development and Communication Network FEMNET.
- On Young Feminist Activism - we published ‘Brave, Creative, Resilient: The Global State of Young Feminist Organizing’, a young feminist mapping project.
We contributed to collective advocacy
AWID, in partnership with other feminist and women’s rights organisations, engaged in advocacy and dialogue to explore better solutions for women’s rights agendas including our work with the Count Me In! consortium .
We increased the visibility of movements
The experiences of women with disabilities, Black and Afro-descendant women, sex workers, Indigenous women, trans and intersex people, domestic workers and how their lives are impacted by multiple oppressions and violence were placed front and center of the Forum process.
We also launched the 2016 WHRD Tribute to commemorate defenders who are no longer with us, during the 16 Days of activism, and thanks to the contributions from our members,
We drove attention to groups and issues that do not usually receive adequate mainstream media coverage through our partnership with The Guardian and Mama Cash.
Our members
Barin Kobane
Barin was a member of the all-women fighting unit of the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG)
She was killed while on active duty.
Lebanese journalist Hifaa Zuaiter wrote: “Barin represents everything we have heard about the courage of the Kurdish female fighters, and her death is far more than the killing of a rival, or the result of a political or ethnic struggle. The horror of displaying her body only because she is a woman stems from the fact that she dared to threaten male hegemony by becoming a female fighter on a battlefield meant for men”.
CFA 2023 - breadcrumbs Menu _ cfa-forum-ar
Inna Michaeli
Biography
Inna is a feminist queer activist and sociologist with many years of deep engagement in feminist and LGBTQI+ struggles, political education and organizing by and for migrant women, and Palestine liberation and solidarity. She joined AWID in 2016 and served in different roles, most recently as Director of Programs. She is based in Berlin, Germany, grew up in Haifa, Palestine/Israel, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and carries these political geographies and resistance to colonial past and present into her feminism and transnational solidarity.
Inna is the author of “Women's Economic Empowerment: Feminism, Neoliberalism, and the State” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), based on the dissertation which earned her a doctoral degree from the Humboldt University of Berlin. As an academic, she taught courses on globalization, knowledge production, identity and belonging. Inna holds an MA in Cultural Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a Board Member of the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Germany), and previously of +972 Advancement of Citizen Journalism. Previously Inna worked with the Coalition of Women for Peace and she is passionate about mobilizing resources for grassroots activism.
Position
Co-Executive Director
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