Gender Justice Initiative Co-Creation Space
The Gender Justice Initiative Co-creation Space provides a space for the EDGE GJI participants to present ideas, projects and to promotes spontaneous initiatives and collaborations. Each month, we gather around co-organized conversations to spark knowledge sharing and more aligned practices in our network.
2024 Conversations
November 26th:
Sept 4th:
July 22nd: Spotlight on Fascism, militarism, and war, Migration, Blended finance and Accountability between funders and movement partners
May 14th: Spotlight on JASS and the importance of movement building in this political moment.
April 3rd: The pervasive challenges impacting gender justice movements globally featuring discussions on obstacles that include the rising right-wing ideologies and public policies that undermine civil society and human rights.
March 5th: Priorities for Gender Justice for those in the room, introducing the current co-chairs of the group, and discussing events participants are attending.
More Conversations
Reinforcement of violence against women by populist governments
On Thursday, June 24th, 2021 the EDGE Gender Justice Initiative hosted the first Co-Creation Circle. Facilitated by Aleyamma Mathew (Collective Future Fund), Anna Spurek and Morgan Janowicz (Green REV Institute) the conversation focused on analysing the role of conservative and populist governments in perpetuating gender based violence all over the world, and the role that philanthropy should have in uplifting the work of social justice movements fighting against it.
Grassroots Feminist Communications: Capire Echoing the Voices, Struggles and Organizing Processes of Women in Movement Around the World
Learn from the experience of the grassroots feminist media platform Capire, launched by the World March of Women in 2021. Capire echos the voices of grassroots women in movement through sharing analysis, interviews, videos and podcasts in four languages, focused on the themes of movement, feminist economy, environmental justice, food sovereignty, demilitarization, and autonomy. Capire serves as a global feminist connector to strengthen international grassroots feminist movements.
Older Women Victims of Violence: Improving Identification, Support, and Protection
Building Community and Mapping
Rachel Thomas (HRFN),Tenzin Dolker (AWID) and Annie Hillar (PAWHR) joined us to kick off a conversation about mapping funding for gender justice, including the challenges and lessons learned. During the conversation, all participants were invited to share their experiences undertaking mapping projects around gender justice.
In the second part of the session, we focused more on getting to know each other better, what we work on, our needs, projects and what we’d like to offer to the rest of the community.
Dismantling Patriarchal Power & Imagining New Institutions
We have just entered the most consequential decade in humanity’s history when our decisions about how we fix the broken structures of our lives will determine whether we have a future or not. At the moment, new conversations are emerging around how we can transform how we live and work and new alternatives are being created for climate justice, social justice and economic revisioning, and hard questions are being asked again about the institutions that can support new visions. Gender at Work has worked over the past 20 years to uncover and change the deep structures of inequality and discriminatory social norms that undergird organizations and are held in place by unequal power dynamics. An important learning is that the principles, culture, power dynamics, systems and institutional forms into which we pour our work have remained 19th century constructs following the logic of the very systems we seek to change and are ill-suited to the transformative change needed to deal with the exigencies of our current 21st century world. Our efforts to rewire existing organizational cultures have met with some success but the struggles with and slide back to patriarchal, colonial and racist default has never been far from the horizon. It’s no longer possible to try to infuse our new visions of economy and society into the cracks of broken institutions filled with broken people. It’s time to dismantle these institutions and build anew. As Mona Eltahawy observes, patriarchy is the head of the octopus and racism, sexism, rapacious capitalism, homophobia, ableism and other curses are its limbs. Cutting off the limbs won’t get us where we need to go. Those limbs will quickly regenerate. We need to cut off its head.
Building on their Medium article, Centering Care and Connectivity in Organizations, Aruna Rao and Joanne Sandler will present the Gender at Work Framework as a tool to focus on deep structures of inequality, engage us in exploring alternatives to patriarchal power that we are seeing in organizations, networks and movements, and lead us in a discussion on how we can collaborate to amplify these new ways of working and understand what it takes to sustain them to build a broader feminist vision.
Aruna Rao is the co-founder of Gender at Work and co-host of the Gender at Work podcast
Joanne Sandler is a Senior Associate at Gender at Work, former Deputy Director of UN Women and co-host of the Gender at Work podcast
Engaging with diaspora – how to turn it feminist?
In this session led by Djurdja Trajkovic & Galina Maksimovic (RWF), we explored the challenges and opportunities in mobilizing the diaspora to support feminist movements. Through role play, participants were able to imagine and enact different tools of funder engagement.
Strengthening Grassroots Feminist Movements
During this last session of the year, led by Lydia Simas (Grassroots International) & Graça Samo (World March of Women), the group explored different ways to organize among feminist organizations and potential challenges.