BUILDING FEMINIST MOVEMENTS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Background

Given the challenges present in the current global context, women’s organizations and movements must be stronger than ever to hold the line on past advances and continue to push for making women’s rights a reality. Negative external forces, limited resources, and other factors have all taken a toll on women’s organizations. Many women’s rights activists agree that organizational weaknesses and fragmentation have limited the possibilities for collective action. While there is a valid critique of the “NGO-ization” of women’s and other movements, organizations do play a critical role in social movements. How can we reshape the tools we use to strengthen women’s organizing—both within and beyond formal organizations— to advance feminist agendas and respond to diverse contexts?

Goals and Objectives

AWID’s Building Feminist Movements and Organizations (BFEMO) Strategic Initiative aims to:

• Produce, collect and disseminate information and analyses on organizational strengthening linked to movement building to increase the effectiveness and impact of women’s organizing;

• Compile and develop tools and political education methodologies, and convene a pool of resource people to actively support organizational strengthening and movement building processes in different regions from a feminist perspective.

Activities in 2007-2008

• Publication and dissemination of Building Feminist Movements and Organizations: Global Perspectives, a collection of 25 essays by activists from all over the world that explores what it means to be an effective women's organization, and what it takes to build the kinds of movements we need to transform women's lives.

• Initial research and writing conducted by an international team of activists and scholars to document dynamic women’s movements and organizations and their diverse movement building activities.

• Production of an anthology of approximately 12 case studies that provide examples of how diverse, vibrant women's movements in different regions of the world are actually doing movement building, and how they understand and see the relationship between organizations and movements.

• Development and testing of a conceptual framework with key definitions (how do we understand feminist movements, or feminist movement-building?) and tools to support organizing and organizational strengthening processes that focus on movement building.

• Compiling and sharing an extensive array of literature, bibliographies and other resources on feminist organizational strengthening and movement building, to be made available on this website.

Strategic Initiative team

Srilatha Batliwala – Associate Scholar and Lead Researcher
Cindy Clark – Strategic Initiative Manager
Karen Murray - Program Assistant