December 2017: Letter from the Editor

Dear Sisters,

Recently we invited you to share your thoughts on our movement newsletter, Bold Together, through a survey we sent out to our subscribers. We are incredibly grateful for all of you who took some time out of your very busy lives to engage with us in order to help us better understand who our audience is and how to be more relevant for each one of you. We received over 300 replies, and we will use this information to improve and adjust the stories we share in Bold Together. For now, we are honored to share with you the initial analysis of your responses.

Most of our sisters who have responded to the survey stated that they live and work either in Latin America and the Caribbean or Sub-Saharan Africa. Asia Pacific and Europe and Central Asia come next, followed by the Middle East and North Africa. Only 3% of our subscribers live and work in North America. The vast majority of those who responded have identified as activists with women’s funds or women human rights organizations, most of whom are current grantee partners of Global Fund for Women. We also asked you to tell us the type of content you would like to see in Bold Together.

The key priority, according to the responses we have received, are for more stories that relay achievements, impact, and lessons learned from our grantee partners, in addition to using the newsletter as a platform to disseminate your own stories and reflections about your work and activism. We would love to collaborate with you, and invite you to share ideas, activism opportunities, and news with us at [email protected]. We will also be sharing more specific calls for submission and collaboration in future newsletters, so please stay tuned.

As we prepare to bid farewell to 2017, we were proud to share the many accomplishments of the global women’s movement with our broader audiences in our story “Top 10 moments for women’s rights in 2017.”  As we welcome 2018 with hearts full of hope and minds full of revolutions, all of us at Global Fund for Women would like to wish each and every one of you a New Year that we one day remember for its goods more than for its bads. May it be a year in which some of our dreams come true and many of our wounds are healed.

My final thought is for our sisters who are no longer with us—those who left in 2017 or before—and whose presence is so very dearly missed. Their life and strength we promise to honor and remember.

In love and solidarity,

Zahra Vieneuve
Program Director, Freedom from Violence