FemNews (January-April, 2023)

Summing up the past four months of its activities, the Women’s Fund Armenia is happy
to share with you the main events, meetings and news.

At the beginning of the year, we published “Collective Care։ Summary of Needs Assessment Data” report, which was aimed at highlighting the perceptions, practices and needs regarding healing, self-care and collective care among the partner organizations of the Women’s Fund Armenia. Read the English summary of the report here.

REMINDER: The Women’s Fund Armenia is creating a collective care and healing center in Ashtarak city, named “Gardens of Silihdar.” The re-designing of the center has already been completed, the renovation activities will begin soon. You can follow the center’s Facebook and Instagram pages to learn about publications on the topics of self-care and collective care.

During the past months, we have announced 4 calls for applications, including:
  1. Call for 40+ women’s ideas – To empower women at a later age and make their voices heard, we announced a grant call for women over 40 last year. We received 75 applications. As a result, 15 selected initiatives are ongoing or have already been completed.
  2. “Women’s Right’s Day – Every Day” – The aim of this call was to support feminist initiatives aimed at re-thinking the idea of March 8 and bringing back its real meaning. As a result, several initiatives received support and were carried out. You can learn about them here.
  3.  Feminist Essay Contest was announced in March with the theme “How wars affect women and structurally excluded groups.” 4 applications have been selected and the final essays will be ready soon.
  4.  “The impact of war and armed conflicts on women and groups neglected by systems” – this call for applications was announced in April. The purpose of the grant is to support the efforts of feminist organizations and initiatives to make women’s voices heard more in peace and security issues. The results will be announced during May.

 

One of the important news of 2023 was the mapping of Yerevan, based on the history of the feminist movement and the memories of feminists, within the framework of Femstory project of Women’s Fund Armenia. To view the map, open it on your computer or in the case of a phone, use Google Earth application. You can view the map by following this link.

Since the beginning of the year, with the financial support of the Women’s Fund Armenia, a number of programs are being implemented in different regions of Armenia, which are aimed at self-care of women over 40, opportunities for them, self-defense of young girls, women’s interpersonal relationships, etc. You can find out about all the programs that were implemented or are still in progress here.

We started 2023 with important meetings. On February 16, at the Women’s Fund Armenia, we hosted the colleagues implementing initiatives within the framework of the program for women over 40. During the meeting, a number of issues were discussed, which we try to constantly refer to in our daily activities. You can get acquainted with the details of the meeting by following this link.

On April 17, we organized a meeting with women living in the borderline communities of Armenia. Some of them were our colleagues, others were socially active women of their communities. The purpose of the meeting was to get to know the needs and issues of women living in the borderline communities, to create a safe space to talk about the issues that concern them and to come up with ideas for joint initiatives. In the near future, we are planning to hold more such meetings. Below you can see the graphic recording of the meeting.

And, finally, you can you can go through this link and find the list of books recommended by the WFA team, from modern Armenian literature to foreign feminist literature and not only.