Earlier this year on a trip to India, I met Aniruddh Vasudevan, a phenomenal gay rights activist in my home city of Chennai. Aniruddh's infectious zest to transform India’s pervasive homophobia and decriminalize homosexuality in Chennai energized me at a time when I was struggling to see how my perspectives and capacity as an activist based in the global north could support movements and work back home in India.
The World Cup may have ended this week in South Africa, but thanks to the Global Girl Media (GGM), the voices and life experiences of South African girls will live on.
San Francisco—Thanks to generous donors and skillful financial stewardship, women’s groups around the world can continue to count on the Global Fund for Women to support their work. Our June docket of grants totaling $1.89 million will support 151 women’s groups in 67 countries. This brings the total amount given to women’s organizations in the 2009-2010 fiscal year to more than $8.5 million, in the face of lingering economic recession both domestically here in the US and globally.
On a Tuesday evening in June, my colleagues and I modeled five different costumes that reflected the different ways militarism affects our lives. The fashion show was part of the Transnational Feminist Organizing to Resist Militarism event at our office, which also included grantees from Guam and Colombia who shared how their communities were being impacted by militarism.
The Global Fund joins hands with the Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) campaign to celebrate the approval for the creation of UN Women, the new gender equality entity at the UN.This new agency is poised to be a larger, more coherent and coordinated UN agency to advance women’s rights.
The GEAR campaign comprises a network of over 300 women’s, human rights and social justice groups around the world, including several sister groups and grantees of the Global Fund. GFW Board Member and founding member of the GEAR campaign Charlotte Bunch stated in a news release, “We have high expectations for this new agency to be a solid foundation for advancing the human rights of women as central to global policy efforts to reduce poverty and move toward greater realization of peace and democracy in the world. The coalition of women’s groups and other social justice, human rights and development organizations that played a pivotal role in this effort will now turn its efforts toward ensuring that the new body has the human and financial resources necessary to succeed.” This move has been sought by women’s organizations and other civil society organizations around the world since the UN established a System-Wide Coherence Panel for UN Reform in 2006.
Earlier this year on a trip to India, I met Aniruddh Vasudevan, a phenomenal gay rights activist in my home city of Chennai. Aniruddh's infectious zest to transform India’s pervasive homophobia and decriminalize homosexuality in Chennai energized me at a time when I was struggling to see how my perspectives and capacity as an activist based in the global north could support movements and work back home in India.
On a Tuesday evening in June, my colleagues and I modeled five different costumes that reflected the different ways militarism affects our lives. The fashion show was part of the Transnational Feminist Organizing to Resist Militarism event at our office, which also included grantees from Guam and Colombia who shared how their communities were being impacted by militarism.
