Financing a gender justice infrastructure to counter anti-gender ideology and anti-rights movements
A parallel event to the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)
March 19 - March 19, 2024
5:00 am - 7:00 am (GMT-05:00)
Reception: 12:00 p.m. to 1 p.m.
Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice, New York, USA
The Ford Foundation and Global Philanthropy Project hosted an event co-convened with Countering Backlash at the Institute for Development Studies that brought together key stakeholders for a timely discussion on countering anti-gender ideology and anti-rights movements in order to realize a more gender-just world. The online and in-person event took place on March 19 as a parallel event of the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
Through two dynamic panel discussions, speakers addressed how gender is being weaponized across contexts as a means to undermine human rights and threaten democracy. The event explored the current philanthropic response and identified critical strategies – and the resources required – to meet the urgency of the moment and respond at scale to this threat.
The event was welcomed and closed with words by Hilary Pennington, Executive Vice President of Programs, Ford Foundation.
Speakers
Highlights from the speakers:
Conservatives, religious, and economic state actors are weaponizing gender by targeting women, girls, and LGBTQ people, making it seem they are threatening the established order rather than an essential part of human dignity, society, and human rights.
The fight goes beyond gender; of course, it is essential to consider the gender-specific rights rolled back, but this is part of other events related to climate justice, economic justice, workers’ futures, etc.
When we are together, we are more imaginative and build better communities. We strengthen collective work, while the extreme right promotes individualism. We all have different agendas but must work on a common agenda to fight what is coming.
We must be agile and nimble and think expansively and differently as movements.
We need to fund ideas, we need to fund feminist analysis of power, we need to fund communities and movements, and we need to fund at the intersection.
We are getting stuck in our own loops. Working to mainstream gender, including LGBT, will not dilute our impact; all the opposite, it will strengthen our impact, and it’s the only way we will survive.
We need to trust that trans communities know what they need.
We are trying to create space for us to learn together, fail together, support each other, and influence each other.
For us to be successful, we need to work with others. I want to invite government institutions, philanthropic partners, partners in the gender funders collab, and our partners in the feminist movement to come together to resource and strategize to try to be more coherent in our work.
