This year for our WHRD Tribute, we worked with visual artist Vienna Rye who brought her heart and soul to create beautiful pieces of art dedicated to the memory of 60 activists featured in our online tribute. In her own words, Vienna tells us about her passions, interests, artwork and activism.

Like feminism, harm reduction is a philosophy that encourages us to do away with the false distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women.

At AWID, we spend a lot of time thinking about power, and how it functions not only in the world at large but also internally within our own organization. It is this commitment to building collective power that inspired us to begin experimenting with a practice of sharing leadership.

From self-governance to soccer tournaments, Zapatista women show how another world is possible at the first international gathering of women in struggle.

The US and recent undermining tactics at the Human Rights Council

The Human Rights Council (HRC) is the UN’s main “political” human rights body, meaning it’s the main place where governments discuss and negotiate human rights issues, challenge one another about their national contexts and hold one another accountable for violations. The HRC meets a few times a year, and as we reflect on its recently-concluded September session, it is important to revisit some of the details of the June convening to better understand how some states seek to avoid scrutiny and undermine the entire s

Amid the spread of industrial farming, transgenic crops and seed patents, rural women are conserving native varieties and teaching others about agro-ecology.

In August 2015, Luisa Lozano, a Kichwa woman from the Saraguro people joined an indigenous mobilisation to defend their right to land from corporation takeovers and demand increased protection of indigenous rights. It is during these protests, that military and police “beat a pregnant women with truncheons, dragging her about 30 meters and spraying her with pepper gas.” Soon thereafter, Luisa Lozano was arrested for defending the pregnant woman and was sentenced to 4 years in prison alongside other women.

Mayan weavers are organising to defend their art, pushing for new legislation to recognise and protect their ‘collective intellectual property’

After the June 14th vote that approved the bill legalizing the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancies, various groups and institutions ramped up their opposition. Out of arguments, they began resorting to violence.

If you’ve spent any time in a feminist space in the last decade or so, you’ve heard the question, “Where is the money for women’s rights?”