Since 2022, Women’s Fund Armenia has been part of the Resilience for Women’s Organizations project, implemented in partnership with filia Fund (Germany), Women’s Fund in Georgia, FemFund (Poland), and Uranian Women’s Fund. Through this collaboration, Women’s Fund Armenia supported 20 organizations across Armenia in strengthening their financial and psychosocial resilience.
In May 2026, partner organizations from across the project gathered in Poland for the final convening of the initiative. Representatives from our partners at Women’s Resource Center, Jazve Talks, and Space for Women’s Solidarity joined the gathering, which brought together feminist activists and organizations from different countries to reflect on their experiences, share lessons learned, and strengthen transnational feminist solidarity.
The gathering created a space for participants to nurture a sense of belonging to a broader feminist movement while honoring the diverse realities, struggles, and experiences that shape their work. Over several days, participants unpacked challenges, shared failures, collectively grieved losses, and explored what it means to build hope-based resilience amid uncertainty, political challenges, and exhaustion.
Discussions focused on how activism can be sustained without isolation or burnout. Participants reflected on the importance of acknowledging difficult emotions, creating space for grief and healing, and grounding their work in cultural practices, histories, and everyday traditions that strengthen community connections and collective resilience.
One of the central sessions, Honoring Our Pain for the World – Holding Grief: Feeling, Witnessing, Learning Together, explored grief as a communal experience rather than an individual burden. Through somatic, nature-based, and narrative practices, participants honored what has been lost while reconnecting with shared values, sources of strength, and visions for the future.
Another session, Connecting Through Deep Time, encouraged participants to reflect on their place within broader historical and ecological timelines, fostering conversations about continuity, memory, responsibility, and belonging.
The program also included creative and reflective workshops. During Comedy as Transmutation, facilitated by Kate Cheka, participants explored humor as a tool for self-expression, confidence, and transformation. The session invited participants to reframe difficult emotions such as shame, embarrassment, and guilt through creativity and collective laughter.
The gathering concluded with Navigating Political Melancholy & Hopeful Pessimism, a session that examined political grief, democratic backsliding, and contemporary crises through a feminist lens. Participants reflected on how to confront uncertainty with honesty and clarity while continuing to act with collective determination, solidarity, and hope.
As the project comes to a close, the gathering served as a reminder that resilience is not built individually but collectively—through relationships, shared learning, mutual care, and feminist solidarity across borders.
