Before the holiday hustle and bustle, let’s dive into the Women’s Fund Armenia’s main activities for the past 4 months. Although these months were full of difficult events, we have also collected some positive news that we are happy to share with you.
During these months, we had two Femtalks on very different topics. Lilit Hakobyan’s closed Femtalk “The gender aspect of events dedicated to national days in public schools” was about the interaction between gender and nationalism in public events in public schools. You can watch Ani Barseghyan’s femtalk “From desecration to the culture of violence: the extremism of concepts related to gender in everyday life, media and humor“ on our YouTube page.
During this period, we have also presented the programs supported by our international partners in the first half of 2023. You can get acquainted with them with the links below:
Projects supported by the Equality Fund
Projects supported by The Sigrid Rausing Trust
Projects supported by the Kvinna Till Kvinna
Projects supported by the filia foundation
Projects supported by the Calala foundation
This year the Women’s Fund Armenia became a member of the Human Rights Funders Network.HRFN is a network of funders in the Global South, East, and North for almost 30 years dedicated to resourcing human rights action around the world. We are happy to share the ideas and goals of our partners to build a peaceful future and make the world a better place.
On September 11, we presented the modern issue of “Hayastani Ashkhataavorouhi” journal. It was prepared within the framework of the “Femstory: Archive of Feminist Oral Stories” projects and is an attempt to imagine what the modern issue of the newspaper “Hayastani Ashkhataavorouhi” (1924-98) – published during the Soviet years – would look like. With the slogan “New issue for new times,” the newspaper is dedicated to the class and feminist issues faced by women and other marginalized identities in Armenia today and around the world.
You can get your free copy from our office on Saryan 24/5.
This year, the renovation works of “Silihdar Gardens”, our space for collective healing, have been actively going on. During the next year, we will already be able to use the space for our meetings, collective care practices and other purposes. Keep following Silihdar’s pages on Facebook and Instagram to keep up to date with developments.
October 16-19 we hosted the European Regional Meeting of the Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the activities of the Chapter, analyze the events and discussions held during the year as well as update each other on the news about each fund.
Despite all the difficulties we are facing now, our partners remained in solidarity with us and decided to visit us and show their support. We are very thankful for that.
Due to gender stereotypes and economic reality, most women over 40 in Armenia bear primarily the burden of taking care of their families, engaging in unpaid labor of care with little choice on voicing their own interests. The aim of our grant program was to empower these women and make their voices heard. Watch the full video about them on YouTube.
Finally, we present to you the feminist essays published as a result of the grant announced in spring. Read (the first three in Armenian) with the following links:
Also, read “Waved Stories from Syunik” (in Armenian) by Gayane Ghazaryan, about the perceptions of war and peace among teenage girls living in the border communities of Syunik.
This year, we completed another important research: “Where is the money for women and feminist organizations in Armenia?” The purpose of this research was to build a unified picture that would show the state of women’s and feminist organizations financially, and what can be done to attract more resources for their activities. As a foundation, this will enable WFA to understand where the Fund’s role is in attracting these resources and what are the expectations from the Women’s Fund itself. You can read the research here.
Within the framework of the “Femstory” project, we translated another article dedicated to the oral story method and published the collection “Anti-gender movements in the words of women human rights defenders: Stories of five activists”, which includes excerpts from five oral stories collected on the topic of anti-gender movements. On December 15, a meeting was held with the activists included in the collection.
Read on our website, following the links below.
- Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Issues for Qualitative Researchers
- Anti-gender movements in the words of women human rights defenders
On December 5-7, a three-day healing meeting for our partners took place in Dilijan. The meeting was intended especially for those partners who actively work with forcibly displaced women and girls from Nagorno-Karabakh. During those days, we tried to break away from the busy routine, apply collective care practices, discuss our needs and try to address them.
On September 19, Azerbaijan initiated a large-scale offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, resulting in the forced displacement of more than 100k ethnic Armenians. Responding to this critical situation, the Women’s Fund Armenia started a fundraising campaign to gather resources and provide emergency support to forcibly displaced women and girls. We prepared a video featuring our partners working on the frontlines of this crisis. We highly appreciate their work and are constantly trying to find resources to support them. Watch the video here.
