Sentimos Diverso was born on 12 March 2006, in Bogotá, Colombia. Since 2010, the collective has established itself in Quito, Ecuador, where it currently carries out its activities. The group defines itself as a “feminist collective that mobilizes to create and to develop projects and actions aimed at empowering women, young people and people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, to demand their human, sexual and reproductive rights.”

In the face of discrimination: action, unity and solidarity

Sentimos Diverso was created after witnessing how two boys were targeted  one night in Chapinero, a locality in Bogotá. “We saw how two boys, very young boys, were chased after by a band of bone-heads (a derivative of the skinheads, with neo-nazi sympathies), when they were trying to get into Teatrón, a very trendy gay bar. We never found out what happened to them, but we understood the importance of opening a place for homo-socialization. Something different from the rumba, a place that could become a safe space, where we could trust, where we could be who we are. We believe art and literature as a way to allow young people to express their personal searches and interests, a way to find themselves and to meet other people.”

When they formed the collective, their objective was that the society in which they lived, the youth movement, the  lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people in the city, could “understand what it meant to be a diverse young person, we wanted to be understood as subjects of rights, we wanted to transform the idea of politics, to focus it on daily life and to make those experiences visible”.

Then, six friends – Catalina, Nikita, Viviana, Marleny, Eduardo and Gabrielle – put themselves to work. The first activity they organized was the “Literary canelazo” (canelazo is an alcoholic drink with cinnamon), because “it just combined our  interest for performance and literature; developing workshops on themes such as the body, the city and diversity”. They brought together a number of young people who didn't define themselves solely as LGBTI or for whom it was dangerous to do so.

“We played with the names – heteroconfused, lesboflexible, bicurious, transindecisive and many others, to make people understand that we were not so different”.

By 2010, the six had taken many different paths in life, and only one person remained from the original group, migrating to Ecuador and taking the organization with them.

The new place, the new and different context, posed new challenges which led to widening the scope of work, now including issues of sexual and reproductive rights. They focus on women, teenagers and young people “with whom we also work on empowerment, awareness  raising about their context, their rights and how to demand them. This work is done through the methodologies of popular education, non-formal education, the arts (theater, photography, video, painting) and communication”.

Strategies for transformative work

Sentimos Diverso develops its activities and its commitment to social transformation through four lines of work.

Firstly, a pedagogic line, in which the collective uses playful, experiential and artistic strategies such as painting, theater of the oppressed, photography, creative writing and video. These strategies have helped develop methodologies for their work on disseminating and addressing themes of sexual and gender diversity, sexual and reproductive rights. They offer workshops to many different populations such as teenagers, young people, LGBTIQ people, women, refugees, migrants, victims of violence, teenage mothers and teachers.

They have also produced publications in this line of work, such us “From tale to tale I tell myself diverse”, which arose from the work they did  with young people in Bogotá; “12 things about me” is the result of almost four years of activities with teenagers in Quito; and “Cirila and Silbato are friends”, are materials used as a strategy to prevent sexual violence in risk zones affected by natural disasters.

Secondly, they have a research line, developed to gain a deeper analysis of the realities faced by the populations with which they work.

“We are currently in the process of writing the conclusions of research titled 'Eyes that don't see: teenage motherhood, violence and life strategies’, in which we explore the activities of  teenage mothers-  how their work is exploited, their jobs in domestic work and care work, whether they attend school, their family and couple relationships and the new vulnerabilities they face”.

Within this area they also work on “creating the feminist hacker space in Ecuador, aimed at the security of activists and the development of self-care strategies in cyberspace. We are currently in the process of knowledge sharing and developing tools for disseminating this information.”

Another line of work is communication, an area of high interest, and in which they are very active, regularly updating the collective's web page, where they publish think pieces and interviews about what's going on in Ecuador, and in the region, related to  sexual and reproductive rights, women's rights and LGTBIQ rights. “Now in 2017 we are developing  journalistic work, analyzing these issues from a regional point of view, as a follow up to the Millennium Development Goals, especially the one linked to gender equality. We have already published our first article, "No nos pidan que volvamos al silencio" [in Spanish].”

The fourth key line of the collective’s work  is about inter-institutional relationships, focused on establishing networks with public agencies, social organizations and activists. “We believe joint work can make a difference, and that's why we have been able to establish a  network with other organizations from the region. For instance, we have been actively involved in the Campaign for an Inter-American Convention on Sexual and Reproductive Rights. We have also developed works such as Al Borde (On the edge) Audiovisual School-Ecuador, led by Mujeres al Borde (Women on the Edge) from Colombia. We are also advocating in local spaces such as the Feminist Meeting of Ecuador, to be held during 2017.”

Inspiring us to reflect

The work done by Sentimos Diverso invites us to think once again about how to dismantle heteropatriarchy. Its most creative mark seems to be related to education.

They very proudly talk about one of their most recent publications, “12 Things About Me”, a notebook compiling some of the work they carry out with teenagers and youngsters, in schools and children's shelters in the city of Quito.

“The notebook is based on creativity and tries to move people to reflect, and though it has been thought of for teenagers and young people, people of all ages can get involved in the activities it proposes. We took the training books for creative writing as a starting point and then we added our own artistic and pedagogical perspective. In this way, we got 12 generative questions to think about identity, memory, gender, self-esteem, empowerment, sexual orientation and the life project. This teaching tool came out of our workshops with teenagers. We planned to edit some educational handbooks, but after a creative process we had inside Sentimos Diverso, we reached this idea, which has been very well received and launched during the 13th AWID Forum in 2016. Currently, we are using it as a tool for our work with high school students in Quito.”

“We are aware that often times it is mobilizing and getting resources that determines how long an organization or a collective can persist.”

In the beginning the members of the collective funded the organization themselves. Since 2007 they have been supported by Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, who “have believed in our work, in the activities we carry out, and they have been a key part of our growth as activists and as a social organization, because they have supported us, not only by providing funding, but also through trainings and meetings which have been crucial for Sentimos Diverso to remain active”.

Since 2014, the support given by Mama Cash has had  a great influence on  the growth and institutionalization of Sentimos Diverso in Ecuador. “We have some projects now which are growing, and we are aware that they must have their own budget, so little by little we get people who believe in us and take the risk of supporting us. Now, we are in that process with the International Women's Health Coalition (IWHC), who has decided to support us with a project temporarily called “special Editorials”, focused on strengthening our capacities in the area of communications”.

As part of AWID member profile stories, Ngozi Cole tells about her journey and how she found her identity as a feminist.

My earliest joyful memories were being on my mother’s back. The cozy warmth of her cotton wrapper was comforting.

Up until I was five years old I would always jump on her back so that she would patiently wrap me up into a cocoon, even when she would mumble that I was getting “too big” for that. Around that time, our lives changed forever. In 1997, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels invaded Freetown, and home as I knew it was ripped away from me. 

My mother fled with me and my older sister to neighboring The Gambia, where we would start life as refugees. I was only five when we fled and had little understanding of why I had to leave behind my friends, cousins, father, and toys. I tried to adapt to a new home and my mother made sure her daughters were shielded from the many realities of marginalization and hardship that come with being a refugee in a foreign country. I learned how to speak wolof, made friends quickly and soon many things became familiar - smells and sounds started to feel like they could be my piece of home.  

The following year we moved back to Sierra Leone after a brief respite of peace, and it seemed as though peace had finally come, even though it was a shaky stillness. We tried to settle into our old life again, hoping that a peace agreement between warring factions would work out. Life seemed stable for a while and for a moment I started to forget my life in The Gambia - until January 6th, 1999 when the rebels re-entered Freetown. 

To become unsettled again, to face the trauma of war again, was much worse than the last time I experienced it. This time I was more aware and slightly older, and it left a feeling of trying to catch something that was floating away from me. We fled to The Gambia again, and for two more years there it seemed like I had found home, and settled into my identity as a refugee, or as an “alien”, as we were called in The Gambia. 

In 2002, we decided to return to Sierra Leone again, for good this time, we hoped.  

My identity shifted again when I started high school in Freetown at the Annie Walsh Memorial School. I didn’t know my own national anthem, I had forgotten some of the words in the national pledge, and I knew that my accent wasn’t “quite right”. In the first grade of high school, some of my classmates asked if I was really Sierra Leonean. Even though the security of home and the familiar had been snatched, dangled in front of me, only to be snatched away from me again, I was desperate to lose that feeling of displacement, of feeling less than, not a full citizen, a refugee.

After formal high school in Sierra Leone I won a scholarship to attend a pan African school -The African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg. Afterwards, I went on to Wooster, a small town in the middle of Ohio, to attend the College of Wooster, a small private liberal Arts School not too far from Cleveland. I took some classes in philosophy and political science which, along with the academia, gave me the tools to articulate another part of myself - my identity as a feminist. 

During my early teenage years, I had been fully convinced feminists were women who harbored anger toward men, man-haters.

At around 16, I had started thinking very radically about my position as a young girl, in what I considered (and still do) a predominantly patriarchal society. I was inspired by women’s rights activists, women who constantly fought for political equality in Sierra Leone, equal economic and property rights, and rallied against female genital mutilation. But I still considered “feminism” too extreme. In 2013, I got the chance to be part of a fellowship in Ghana, of young African women living on the continent and in the diaspora, many of them feminists, who were making a change in their respective communities. 

During my time in Ghana, I met Leymah Gbowee and Taiye Selasi, brave women who had also battled with identity, and solidly identified with feminism. Upon my return to the United States that summer, I started to blog about my journey as an African woman living in the mid-west, and also about my fully embracing feminism. I was able to find a voice for myself, a voice that was no longer shy to debate and argue with my peers about issues affecting women, both on campus and the outside world. Feminism influenced my writings, and I was featured on an African women’s podcast to talk about the stifling of African women’s sexuality. My blog posts on body shaming and rape culture and shame were widely shared on social media.  

Even after college I continued to find ways to embrace this part of myself, and as I am growing and fully embracing it, I know now that feminism isn’t a “part” of me, it is fundamental to my survival as I navigate life’s journey as a young Sierra Leonean woman. These days I find outlets to write about women’s rights concerning mental health and reproductive rights in Sierra Leone.

We are searching for a post-extractivist, eco-feminist development alternative

The women of the Somkhele and Fuleni communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa have taken matters into their own hands. As primary caregivers and livelihood creators, women have been impacted the most and worst by the water crisis that is a combination of drought and heavy coal mining not far away from their homes.

“The first thing that disturbed us about the mine is, where it’s built, where they are extracting coal and where they have built their offices. That’s where we used to live. That’s where we farmed and that’s where we drew our water. They arrived and blocked our rivers, so now we can’t fetch water. Right now we don’t have water anywhere, we buy water.”

– Smangele Nkosi from Somkhele, featured in “No Good Comes from the Mine”, a documentary by WoMin

With the involvement and support of WoMin, an African gender and extractives alliance, women from these two communities have been collectively strengthening their organising and resistance against coal mining and, specifically the Tendele mine. 

According to WoMin, this kind of local organising by community-based working class and peasant women should be on the agenda of the 61^st session of the Committee on the Status of Women, currently taking place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. It is imperative to “building an analysis of what women’s empowerment in the changing world of work should look like” as well as having a clear and sharp assessment of the current contexts, so that our movements’ work has a stronger influence.

Gendered Impact

“Extractivism’s impacts on women’s bodies, sexuality and autonomy cannot be underestimated… Extractive industries have a huge impact on land and water – the communal resources women use to sustain the livelihoods of their families and communities. “

WoMin explains that “because of inequality and gendered divisions of labor” women take on a social reproduction role (unpaid labor) within the African working class communities and among peasant women.  As such, they are heavily affected by extractive industries.

The alliance also highlights that regional policy analysis has firmly neglected the gendered impact of extractive industries, specifically the link between mining, extractivism and violence against women.

This violence manifests itself in different ways, for example through conflict as corporates and States employ divide and rule tactics to force community decisions in favour of extraction. Land dispossession that forces communities off their lands to make way for extractive interests and then left with scarce resources to support their lives and livelihoods. This means there is need for development alternatives that address high levels of interpersonal violence against women in families, communities and draw the links to state and corporate-sponsored violence that take place in areas where extractives industries. Another major impact of mineral-based industrialisation is climate change, causing drought and water scarcity, which also negatively impacts agricultural production. And because of the gendered divisions of labor division and women’s reproductive role, they experience disproportionate negative impact.

“It often seems, from women’s perspectives and that of communities, that the costs of mineral and oil extraction outweigh the benefits, principally enjoyed by the local and ruling elite, corporates and investors.” 

Relevant and Urgent - Women must lead and define the change and alternatives

WoMin’s work is both extremely relevant and urgent in the current global context. The alliance not only focuses on exposing the negative impacts mining has on women, but they also work to provide eco-feminist and post-extractivist development alternatives.

“The current development paradigm is not designed to take into account the voice of women, let alone communities most directly affected by minerals-based industrialisation and other extractives industries (including corporate agriculture).”

Women that organise locally, and are part of grassroots movements “must lead and define the change and alternatives.” Working with national and local organisations, communities, and movements in countries including South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Nigeria, this is an extremely important component in WoMin’s work. Even though the communities in these countries deal with diverse forms of extractive industries, “they each tell a similar story of corporate impunity alongside state collusion that is constantly violating the rights to lives and livelihoods of communities and women.”

Resistance and resilience

In order to develop resilient and effective local organising, create strategies for the ‘now’, and strengthen analysis to inform a long-term transition to a post-extractivist society, WoMin strives to craft national and regional campaigns and projects.

The Women Building Power booklets provide practical solutions to energy issues affecting communities so they can sustain themselves, while also organising for wider changes, including climate justice. The seven ‘how-to’ booklets are research, information and tool all in one.

It is also a pre-cursor to the upcoming African women-led regional campaign on Energy, Fossil Fuels and Climate Justice. “The campaign aims to build a women’s movement to make deep change in the way energy is produced and distributed in our countries and in Africa more widely.”

To showcase the powerful resistance of Somkhele and Fuleni women and of women in communities in Uganda and potentially Niger or DRC, WoMin is working on “No Good Comes from the Mine” a character-driven Pan-African documentary.

“It tells the story of women whose lives are being negatively affected by mining and other forms of extractives. It also tells the story of their struggle to protect and reclaim their land, their livelihoods, their bodies and their lives. The film shows their day to day realities and how they are mobilising to resist and protest the injustices…”

Watch the documentary trailer: