Summarizing the past four months, the Women’s Fund Armenia presents the important events, activities, and publications.
In 2023, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the activities of the Women’s Fund Armenia. On that occasion, we have summarized the number, amount and geography of the grants provided during these 5 years, from 2018 to 2023. More here.
The previous year was full of crises and challenges. These trials forced us to reconsider and focus on the humanitarian needs of women and girls. Taking a look back at our activities over the past year, we present a summary of 2023, which includes all the highlights of the previous year: events, publications, grants and much more.
During these 4 months, we have announced 4 grant call, as a result of which the selected initiatives are in progress or have already been completed. More details about each below:
- Call for Inter-Regional Cooperation Projects: The purpose of this announcement was to bring together 2-3 regional women and feminist groups and/or organizations that together can bring changes in the lives of women in their communities and, why not, in their communities as well. As a result of the grant, 6 initiatives were selected.
- Small grants for adolescent girls living in Armenia: This grant gives teenagers the opportunity to realize their ideas and make their goals come true. With this grant, 6 teenagers were supported.
- Women’s Rights Day Every Day։ The purpose of this grant was to support the implementation of feminist events on March 8, giving the opportunity to implement ideas and plans related to that day. As a result, 8 initiatives were implemented.
- Strengthening Women, Peace, and Security Initiatives։ The purpose of the grant was to enhance the efforts of women’s organizations, feminist informal groups, activists, journalists, researchers, and artists to address peace, conflict transformation, and security from intersectional and gender-sensitive perspectives. The applications are in the PGM process. The results will be announced later.
At the beginning of the year, we also continued our partnership with the women over 40 group, providing 9 more new grants aimed at addressing the various needs of women over 40.
The recently published Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds Yearbook 2023 presents the most significant challenges encountered by our membership and the milestones celebrated by the women’s and feminist funds that make up our network, of which the Women’s Fund Armenia is also a member.
As a member of the network, we had meetings with our partner organizations in Belgrade and Brussels, participated in a series of advocacy strategic meetings with representatives of various departments of the European Commission. Read more about the visit to Brussels on our website by following this link.
Since 2020, the Women’s Fund Armenia has been part of the “On the Right Track” project, which aims to promote collaboration among women’s funds to protect the values of freedom, democracy and diversity in Europe and Latin America from fundamentalisms and far-right’s attacks.
It is based on the conviction that the feminist movement is making democracy and human rights advance, leading the way toward a hopeful picture of a new society, and that it is now more than ever important to support that process.
Now the initiative has reached its end, but we hope that it will continue in the future.
The aim of the partnership assessment was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the partner relationships established between the Fund and sub-grant groups.
The main goals of the report were to assess the level of satisfaction of the partners with their partnership with the Fund, to identify the challenges and areas for improvement in the established partnership.
We believe that collective care, connection and support between women’s groups is an important part of individual well-being.
Collective healing and well-being-oriented work is one of the important directions of the Women’s Fund Armenia. We continue to hold various meetings and courses on collective care and healing, the purpose of which is to build trust between partners, implement a strategy aimed at the importance of self-care and collective care, overcome emotional burnout and other problems. We also encourage our partners to have a collective care component in their projects.
You can watch a video about our collective care model on our YouTube page.
The renovation works of the Silihdar Gardens, our healing center, are also actively going on. And before we have the opportunity to organize our self-care and collective care meetings there, we suggest watching the video presenting the concept of the center.
By following this link, you can see in the video what the center will look like if we continue our efforts of mobilizing resources. You can support us with your donations here.
We recently published the document “WFA grantmaking trends 2023”, which aims to provide a concise overview of the grant-making trends observed at the Women’s Fund Armenia throughout the year 2023.
This document is crafted for both internal and external stakeholders, including the team members, donors, and the broader community associated with the Women’s Fund Armenia.
Last year, we initiated the participatory grant-making method, giving our partners the opportunity to be more involved in this process. The opinions of the participants indicate a successful experience. We share some of them with you.
On March 7, the event “Mapping Women’s Rights” took place, during which three themed maps were presented about the works of female architects in Yerevan, the stories of female street artists, women and coffee in public and private spaces. The maps were created through the collection of oral histories with the support of the Women’s Fund Armenia. The video of the event is here.
Here you can find the “Women architects in Yerevan architecture” map.
Reminder: the map must be opened on a computer, or in the case of a phone, with the Google Earth application.
And here you can read the research “Academy and the coffee table: Women and coffee in the public and private worlds” carried out within the same project.
On April 18, we had an online discussion on the impact of climate change on women and girls in Armenia. The invited speaker was environmental activist Ani Khachatryan, who shared her activist experience as a woman and the challenges she faced. The meeting was for WFA colleagues to discuss together the environmental issues we have and especially their multidimensional impact on women. We will have other meetings and discussions on this topic in the future.
