Resourcing Feminist Movements
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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.
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للجنسانيّة تدفّقات متعدّدة ومتبدّلة كحال الغمد الملتهب بين فخذَيّ
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"My dreams and objectives have always been the same as those of Lohana Berkins: for the cooperative to continue standing and not to close. To continue to give this place to our travesti comrades, to give them work and a place of support"
Brisa Escobar,
president of the Cooperative
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A Festival For Feminist Movements
Do you want to be inspired by the creative resistance strategies of feminists from all over the world? Do you want to discover feminist initiatives that show us how we can all live in a more just world? Do you want to learn about models of feminist care and healing to bring to your own community? Is that a resounding yes that we hear? YES!
Then check out Crear | Résister | Transform: a festival for feminist movements. This festival took place virtually throughout the month of September 2021 across all of AWID’s platforms, and now you can experience it on your own time.
The Festival was a multicultural and multilingual experience.
The panelists participated in their preferred language and at AWID we included subtitles on the videos for your accessibility.
Guadalupe Campanur Tapia
Guadalupe was an environmental activist involved in the fight against crime in Cherán, Mexico.
Guadalupe helped to overthrow the local government in April 2011 and participated in local security patrols including those in municipal forests. She was among the Indigenous leaders of Cherán, who called on people to defend their forests against illegal and merciless logging. Her work for seniors, children, and workers made her an icon in her community.
She was killed in Chilchota, Mexico about 30 kilometers north of her hometown of Cherá.
Snippet FEA Union Otras (EN)
UNION OTRAS
The Sex Workers' Trade Union Organisation (Organización de Trabajo Sexual, OTRAS) is the first union of sex workers in the history of Spain. It was born out of the need to ensure social, legal and political rights for sex workers in a country where far-right movements are on the rise.
After years of struggles against the Spanish legal system and anti-sex workers groups who petitioned to shut it down, OTRAS finally obtained its legal status as a union in 2021.
Its goal? To decriminalize sex work and to ensure decent working conditions and environments for all sex workers.
The union represents over 600 professional sex workers, many of whom are migrant, trans, queer and gender-diverse.
Snippet FEA Tanta Gente sem casa (EN)
So many people without a home, so many homes without people.
Anna Campbell (şehid Hêlîn Qerecox)
Anna grew up in Lewes, Sussex (UK) and, after deciding not to pursue her English degree at Sheffield University, she moved to Bristol and became a plumber.
She spent much of her time defending the marginalised and under-privileged, attending anti-fascist rallies, and offering support to the women of Dale Farm when they were threatened with eviction. A vegan and animal lover, she attended hunt sabotages and her name is honoured on PETA's 'Tree of Life' Memorial. Anna went to Rojava in May 2017 with a strong commitment to women's empowerment, full representation of all ethnicities and protection of the environment.
Anna died on March 15, 2018 when she was hit by a Turkish airstrike in the town of Afrin, northern Syria. Anna was fighting with the Women's Protection Forces (YPJ), when she was killed.
Snippet FEA No feminist economies without feminist unions (EN)
No feminist economies without feminist unions!
Through labor and union organizing, Sopo, Sabrina and Linda are not only fighting for the rights of essential workers, women workers, migrant workers and sex workers, but the rights of all workers.
The fight to end workers’ exploitation is a feminist struggle, and shows us that there are no feminist economies without feminist unions.
Snippet FEA Metizneres (EN)
Metzineres
When walking in the heart of the Raval district of Barcelona, you might come across Metzineres, a feminist cooperative by and for womxn2 who use drugs surviving multiple situations of vulnerability.
Imagine a place free of stigma, where womxn can be safe. A safe place that provides shelter, support and accompaniment for womxn whose rights are systematically violated by the war on drugs and those who experience violence, discrimination and repression as a result.
Right outside the entrance, passers by and visitors are greeted with a massive chalkboard that outlines tips, tricks, wishes and drawings by drug users. There is also a calendar that boasts a range of activities self-organized by the Metzineres community. Whether it’s hairdressing and cosmetics workshops, radio shows, theater, communal meals offered to the community, or self-defense classes - there is always something going on.
The cooperative provides safe consumption sites as well as utilities that cover people’s basic needs. There are beds, storage spaces, showers, toilets, washing machines and a small outdoor terrace where people can chill or have a goat gardening.
Metzineres operates within a harm reduction framework, which attempts to reduce the negative consequences of using drugs. But harm reduction is so much more than a set of practices: it is a politics anchored in social justice, dignity and rights for people who use drugs.
2 Womxn is a term used by the collective to describe cis and trans women as well as non-binary peopleShireen Lateef
Shireen was an inspiration to many feminists in Fiji and a powerful ally to the women’s movement. She advocated tirelessly for gender equality locally and regionally.
She began her career as a junior gender specialist at the Asian Development Bank and brought about drastic changes to the institution’s gender policies.
Her research, “Rule by the Danda: Domestic violence amongst Indo Fijians” was one of the earliest pieces of research on domestic violence, marriage and women in Fiji. This seminal work has been a catalyst for feminist work in this area.
Shireen’s legacy lives on as many remember her influence, commitment and support to the women’s movement in Fiji and the Pacific.
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.
Marceline Loridan-Ivens
Born in 1928, Marceline worked as an actress, a screenwriter, and a director.
She directed The Birch-Tree Meadow in 2003, starring Anouk Aimee, as well as several other documentaries. She was also a holocaust survivor. She was just fifteen when she and her father were both arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. The three kilometres between her father in Auschwitz and herself in Birkenau were an insurmountable distance, which she writes about in one of her seminal novels “But You Did Not Come Back.”
In talking about her work, she once said: "All I can say is that everything I can write, everything I can unveil — it's my task to do it.”
Will you be opening a call for proposals?
Yes! Please read the Call for Activities and apply here. Deadline is February 1st, 2024.
Yamile Guerra
Yamile Guerra was a well-known lawyer, community leader and political activist in the Santander region of Colombia.
She was actively working to resolve disputes between local communities and developers, advocating against illegal land appropriation. Yamile had occupied various political posts, including as the Secretary General for the Santander government in Bogota and also aspired for the Mayor’s Office of Bucaramanga. In the last few years of her life, Yamile became increasingly active in environmental causes, particularly in the defense of the biodiverse wetlands of Santurbán against development, a region which supplies nearly 2 million people with freshwater.
According to her family and friends, Yamile received daily threats against her life and had asked the authorities for protection.
“She was very very aware of this issue [land litigation] and she said many times that she felt insecure.” - Alixon Navarro Munoz, journalist and friend of Guerra family
On July 20, 2019 Yamile was shot to death by two men in Floridablanca, Santander. She had just finished discussing a land dispute with them. A suspect was later arrested for her murder and admitted to being paid to carry out her assassination. According to reports, Yamile was the third member of her family to have been killed in relation to land disputes. Her father, Hernando Guerra was murdered several years previously.
Yamile’s assassination is part of a wave of violence and systematic killing of hundreds of social activists and human rights defenders in Colombia. According to the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ), at the time of Yamile’s death, over 700 community leaders and human rights activists had been killed since the country signed a peace agreement in August 2016. Most were murdered for confronting illegal drug trafficking and mining operations, with indigenous people, Afro-Colombians and women human rights defenders being most at risk.
Less than a week after Yamile’s death, thousands of Colombians marched all over towns and cities, holding up black and white photos of activists who had been killed, with signs that read: "Without leaders there can be no peace" and "No more bloodshed”.
Yamile Guerra was only 42 years old at the time of her assassination.
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!
Roxana Reyes Rivas
Roxana Reyes Rivas, philosopher, feminist, lesbian, poet, politician and LGBT and women’s rights activist from Costa Rica. Owner of a sharp pen and incisive humour, a laugh a minute. She was born in 1960 and raised in San Ramón of Alajuela, when it was a rural town, and her whole life she would break away from the mandates of what it meant to be a woman.
With El Reguero (Costa Rican lesbian group) she organized lesbian festivals for over a decade, fun-filled formative spaces to come together at a time when the Costa Rican government and society persecuted and criminalized the lesbian existence. For hundreds of women the lesbian festivals where the only place they could be themselves and come together with others like them.
Roxana would often say founding political parties was one of her hobbies. “It’s important for people to understand there are other ways to do politics, that many issues need to be solved collectively”. She was one of the founders of the New Feminist League and VAMOS, a human rights focused political party.
“The philosophical trade is meant to jab, to help people ask themselves questions. A philosopher who doesn’t irritate anyone is not doing her job”. For 30 years Roxana taught philosophy at several Costa Rican public universities. Through her guidance, generations of students reflected about the ethical dilemmas in science and technology.
Roxana’s favourite tool was humour, she created the Glowing Pumpkin award, an acknowledgement to ignorance that she would bestow upon public figures, through her social media channels, mocking their anti-rights expressions and statements.
An aggressive cancer took Roxana at the end of 2019, before she could publish a compilation of her poems, a departing gift from the creative mind of a feminist who always raised her voice against injustice.