Anit-Racism Movement (ARM) / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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.
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:
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.
Build knowledge: We explore, exchange, and strengthen knowledge about how movements are attracting, organizing, and using the resources they need to accomplish meaningful change.
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
2014: Intergovernmental preparatory process for the 3rd FfD Conference is launched
Launch of the Intergovernmental preparatory process for the 3rd Financing for Development Conference, October 2014
A preparatory process, co-facilitated by Ambassador George Wilfred Talbot of Guyana and Ambassador Geir O. Pedersen of Norway, was put in place to lead discussions ahead of the 3rd FfD conference to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July 2015.
As part of the preparations, two rounds of substantive informal sessions were held at the UN headquarters in New York to provide input to the drafting sessions of the outcome document.
The WWG on FfD was re-activated with the aim of bringing feminist and women’s rights perspectives to the discussions and deliberations ahead of and during the 3rd International FfD Conference. AWID, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and the Feminist Task Force (FTF) are currently acting as co-facilitators of the group.
The WWG on FfD’s submitted two oral statements during the first round, and written input to the second round of substantive informal sessions, which highlighted that gender inequality was not visible, nor was the inclusion of other types of discrimination and inequalities. The WWG’s submission highlights gender power relations and the intersections with other categories such as race, disability, ethnicity, age, wealth and sexual identity, which underpin the unequal distribution of opportunities and resources in societies around the world.
Civil society organizations raised concerns about the space for their engagement in the two substantive informal sessions, including the risk that civil society space to engage in negotiations on the outcome document in January 2015 might be constricted.
Meet Aura Roig, the visionary feminist activist, anthropologist, director and founder of the Metzineres cooperative.
She spent the last two decades researching, designing and implementing drug policies from the perspective of harm reduction, human rights and intersectional feminism.
Having experienced and learned from communities who use drugs around the world, she returned to Barcelona and created Xarxa de Dones que Usen Drogues (the Network of Women Who Use Drugs, XADUD). XADUD was a space of mutual support and solidarity with the struggle to secure rights for marginalized groups, which later became the Metzineres cooperative.
Aura is currently working on expanding the Metzineres model to provide support to bigger constituencies, while also extensively documenting their prolific journey and learnings.
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This year we are honoring 18 Women Human Rights Defenders from the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Alone 15 of those were murdered, among which 6 are journalists and 4 LGBTQI and/or sex workers’ rights defenders. Please join us in commemorating the life and work of these women by sharing the memes below with your colleagues, friends and networks and by tweeting using the hashtag #AWIDTribute.
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