We aren’t surprised by the sham that was the impeachment trial. But I was so moved by Romney’s testimony, his calm reasoning for (hmm) witnesses, his grace. -Nanci
Reclaiming consciousness and collective action online
What organizing and resident-run community land trusts make possible....
An inspiring news story for a change. A collective of single parent mothers, Moms 4 Housing, reclaimed a home they were about to be evicted from. They paired up with the Oakland Community Land Trust. The Mayor and Council gave them first rights of refusal for all of the properties from the company they were fighting, Wedgewood.
This is what is possible with strong organizing- heat from the bottom that leads to heat from the top!
Moms 4 Housing Collective. Photo: Guardian
Studying Economics? Read outside the box. The box is part of the problem.
Someone asked what they should be reading that is interesting in terms of economics. I’d recommend first reading something close to the ground and organizing, social movements. This is paper on feminist economics put out by Womankind Worldwide. This is what social and feminist movements globally have analyzed with respect to macroeconomics, the Bretton Woods institutions, illicit financial flows, corporate accountability, decent work, social protection, public services and human rights. The first thing to know is that these are all economic issues. https://world-psi.org/uncsw/word...
Then, get beyond Friedman and Smith. Elinor Ostrom (only woman to have received the Nobel prize for economics), Henry George, Karl Polayni have shaped our economic-political understanding of “commons” and more solidarity approaches to economics. For more contemporary writers, I would add feminist economists Silvia Frederici, Naila Kabeer as well as Kate Raworth.
Silvia Frederici, Italian-american scholar, activist. She critiques Marx and explores links between capitalist accumulation, women’s reproductive labour and bodily exploitation. Also alternative pathways and the political philosophy of the commons and public freedoms. See “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
Naila Kabeer is an London School of Economics scholar, originally from India. She has shaped a lot of practice and thinking around women’s economic empowerment. That it isn’t, first of all, only about financial and economic matters. It includes and is intimately tied to gender-based violence and other structural gendered norms. It includes policy levers like social protection, child care policy, recognition and supports for the care economy.
A more mainstream economist doing some interesting work is Kate Raworth from the UK. She founded the idea of doughnut economics. Instead of simple measures of wealth, even linear trends, she explores environmental and climatic thresholds in combination with human and economic development measures. The country closest to finding the sweet spot in these is Vietnam, so the question is: could we all live like Vietnam? In Canada or Turtle Island, we’re doing well on the social and abysmal on the bio-physical transgressions. What are we each willing to give up, willing to risk is the big question here?
(Source: Kate Raworth, The Earthbound Report).
Report on Initial Dialogue on Outcome Mapping with Halifax Food Policy Alliance
A three-hour session was externally facilitated with the Halifax Food Policy Alliance on October 29, 2019. The purpose of the session was to advance collaborative visioning of draft outcomes for the Food Action Plan based on the vision and principles developed through the Halifax Food Charter. Steering Committee members who were involved represented public health and nutrition, a federation of farmers, a food bank agency, the Halifax regional municipality, research on collaborative food governance, an environmental organization involved in food literacy, leadership and policy engagement.
The session began with a short personal food story to help everyone think about change and influence. The group then did some collective analysis around the gendered food system and leverage points.
Many leverage points were identified. Smaller groups started an outcome mapping process with three intermediate outcomes that had been identified as having some energy and momentum on which to build. The following draft or initial outcomes were identified as outcomes characterizing a vision of change by the year 2030. Important to note that these were just preliminary discussions. These are not final, but begin the dialogue:
Increased political and public will to destigmatize poverty (food insecurity) and treat food as a human right
Actions, priorities, resources and decisions are informed by community experience and wisdom
Our food system has adapted and contributes to measurably less to climate change
Food is a cool movement –there is a feeling of abundance, opportunities*
Good green livelihoods from food have grown*
Note: these two outcomes were added from the dialogue workshop, previous consultations and agreed-upon Alliance principles
Outcome mapping is particularly useful to support dialogue across different stakeholders to align around their different understandings of change and influence. Outcome mapping has gained popularity because simple language can be used to see where different groups are coming from. What do they expect to see? What would they like to see? What would they love to see? Expressing the changes in these simple terms as if they have already occurred helps different stakeholders talk about a shared vision where each group can share their road path to get there.
Positioning Research for Influence
An unfortunate reality of research is that it often fails to connect with real work and influence on the ground. Research that is too narrowly academic may be published in peer-reviewed journals, but may never be used. Some research is applied and policy-focused, but may not be well positioned for influence.
The disconnect between research and influence was among the questions examined in our recent learning evaluation of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)’s Employment and Growth (EG) program. We assessed research quality for a representative sample of projects supported by the EG program between 2014 and 2018. IDRC defines research quality widely, considering not only methodological rigor but also importance, legitimacy (gender and contextual grounding), and positioning for use. These factors are often tied. Research alone is not enough.
In positioning for use, what strategies and partnerships can research teams pursue to better the chances for systemic influence? It’s contextual but some considerations seem critical to influence: gendered social norms; the state of research and practice on the ground; political will and the policy environment (often distinct areas).
Sometimes, the best research can do is shine a light on what is possible such as the care-giving research in China that allowed home day cares. In other contexts, action research can leverage a multi-stakeholder network as in the case of social protection and financial inclusion in Latin America.
This brief was prepared by Nanci Lee and Neale MacMillan based on findings from the Employment and Growth Learning Evaluation carried out by Sisters Ink Ltd. in 2018. The evaluation looked at the drivers of rigorous and grounded influential research, and likely impact on the economic empowerment of women and youth.
How to monitor and evaluate collective impact?
We did some work with the Public Health Agency of Canada on monitoring the key elements of vested partnerships or networks that affect system change. That is, how to monitor what the network can do that is greater than the sum of the individual partners? The work was based on a review and assessment of PHAC-Innovation strategy’s work in food systems and mental health initiatives. We found that live vested health partnerships and networks have the following characteristics that can be monitored:
diverse partners who are a fit for the system they are trying to change
a public and focused sectoral agenda
partner alignment allowing each to do what it does best
pooling of assets (financial and talent as well as extended networks)
A live network assumes strength in diversity ad governance of the partnership as well as demonstrating collaborative systems change. I tis important to monitor and measure not only the partners but the synergy and collective impact of the partnership. Outcome mapping can render pathways and assumptions explicit for partner deliberation around their common agenda.
Sophisticated partnerships and networks act like a murmuration of starlings, acting in concert to push learning, change practices and affect policy and societal norms. Capturing the movement of the flock is as important as counting the birds.
The changing landscape of organizing and learning online
The following is an excerpt of work that we did for Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) for their membership strategy. Helpful to think about how to reclaim online space for critical learning and organizing.
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Increasingly, organizing is finding creative tactics online to reinforce face to face mobilisation. Power and gender dynamics, of course, exist in these spaces too so it is important to enter these critically. Feminist and critical writers help others to navigate these spaces with intention. Aristea Fotopolou (2016, p. 360) talks about the importance of online feminist space “embodying activist practice” as important for both challenging current power structures and negotiating our identities within and across communities. She urges us not to fall into the trap of replicating the fast-based business cultures online. Digital spaces and social media platforms are not the only spaces where we dialogue and learn. It is where we represent ourselves, belong, labour, build and negotiate within and across communities. She reminds us what it means to enact feminist and queer activism in an accelerated digital age when culture, economy and politics are so intertwined and there is such a diversity of feminisms.
How to navigate these tensions, spaces and communities while understanding that people learning, organize and network differently now because of these spaces? Movement organizations such as Mama Cash, Movement Strategy Center, Move to end Vioelnce, Greenpeace have adapted their way of interacting with members to take into account the fluidity with which we now move. This is not to dilhute campaign messages or learning but to acknowledge that online spaces between convenings tend to be most impactful as microlearnings that are provocative, inspiring and relevant yet minimal. Strong movements and alliances account for the fact that their members are fluidly moving across many communities, in and out, deep and skimming, depending on relevance and urgency. We are often, by default, part of many communities with lots of flexibility in how to engage.
It is also increasingly possible to trace and make sense of online organizing in order to improve and deepen organizing opportunities within these spaces. Some movements have explored how they negotiate and frame campaign issues including how online spaces helps to frame shifts in thinking and narratives (McAdam et al, 2004). Hollaback! an online platform to crowd-source stories of harassment and gender-based violence uses this space to help shape gender narratives, campaign strategies and for women to feel less alone in their struggles. Similar online spaces in the Nordic context share gender-based insults and harassment using ”shamelessness as a feminist tactic of resitance.(Sundéna & Paasonen, 2018). HarrasMap in Egypt has found intersectional differences in perspectives and also found that anonymity helped uncover more severe forms of sexual harassment.
Feminist activism that takes place in face to face ways will always be used to advance movement and cross-movement agendas. It is critical that offline organizing and cross-movement building is harmonized and each type of space leveraged for what it can do. Josephson et al. (2017) describe the powerful role that face to face activism has in mobilizing protests and calling attention to injustice. Newsom and Lengel (2012) found the ‘Arab Spring’ a joint operation of online awareness-raising and offline action. Both are, of course, critical. While women were integral to the face-to-face organizing of the uprising they have not really been recognized as part of the mass movement.
For a global cross-movement organization like AWID, it is helpful to consider how issues and voices of different feminist movements, both global and local, are harmonized. Contemporary feminist movements have shifted to a more diverse cross-movement that integrates international standards and ideologies while establishing local precedence. Newsom and Lengel (2012) found that online helps women and trans people bring their different backgrounds and locales to their movements as well as be part of broader organizing. How AWID balances emphasis on their own strategic priorities versus amplifying the diversity of issues and campaigns arising from movement partners is a critical consideration for cross movement-building and co-creation.
Networking and Learning Online
Critical reflection exercises
A key element of transformative learning is experimenting with real-world problems. David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle continues to be pivotal. Yet cycles, even spirals, don’t capture the dynamism (and dangers) now available with online and blended learning. Informal means of learning such as podcasts and viral social media posts abound. On one hand, frames have never had more possibility to engage with such a diversity of experiences, bodies, identities, and communities. How to bring feminist and critical pedagogy to these spaces? This paper works to critically frustrate and extend the learning cycle with a hologram which helps to capture online multi-dimensionality as well as distortion.
Online there is both performance and projection. Holographic visualization offers multiple dimensions, movement, refraction, frustration, doubt. But online learners can be supported to move more consciously to meaning and their own deliberations while embedded in life, work, negotiations. This messiness and muddling is key to the transformative potential of online deliberations. Three key conditions seem to facilitate more transformative learning in online spaces and platforms:
allow multiple paths
piece the learning well into micro-learnings
embrace doubt and contested realities
Online spaces can be shallow and harmful. However, they also have potential to collapse gender and power dynamics in interesting ways as learners shape their own reflective paths at their own pace. These gendered power dynamics are not removed but can be fore-fronted in the learning. The lag between experimentation and insight can be used. Facilitators and peers can act more like coaches, real-time in real messiness.
Sisters Ink has worked with AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development), the University of New Hampshire and the Coady International Institute on blended networking and learning strategies. Nanci presented a paper at the International Transformative Learning Conference, Columbia University on the experience with the University of New Hampshire “Frustrating the Experiential Learning Cycle.” Write us for a copy.
Feminist and Gender-transformative research
Source: This work above represents the work of Harassmap. http://harassmap.org/en/ The diagram is adapted from Rao & Kelleher’s gender work (2005) with additions from the power and gender work by Cornwall (2014), Batliwala & Pittman (2010), Gaventa (2006), Veneklasen & Miller (2002) and Kabeer (1999).
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Sisters Ink did a review of IDRC’s research for the last ten years to support dialogue and understanding of what makes gender-transformative research. Having rated 42 projects, 6 case-studies of IDRC research were selected for more in-depth analysis of what make gender-transformative research. These include research that:
- Introduced fish processing and gender relations through participatory dialogue in Zambia and Malawi
- Influenced gender narratives and power relations and policies in small scale and artisanal mining in Central and East Africa
- Enhanced Indigenous engagement, intercultural health practices and policy in Peru
- Supported dialogue between women, their communities and local governments for more accountable and gender-equitable settlement services and water and sanitation infrastructure in India
- Provided a digital crowd-sourcing platform for reporting gender-based violence, raising awareness and changing norms in Egypt
- Empowered girls, youth clubs to dialogue negotiate with others in their community around early marriage in West Africa
Though the cases had very different contexts, gendered issues, influence strategies and actors involved in the research, there were some common principles.
Gender-transformative research:
· Addressed root causes. Intersectionality, how gender intersects with other aspects of social identity, is key to understanding root causes.
· Engaged systemic partners. Actors and partners engaged were a fit for the system and context being changed. Influence is situated. In some contexts, the best partner was a women’s movement organization. In another a mix of stakeholders including elders were involved. In others, media and social media were the strongest influence.
· Embedded and embodied the change in gender relations locally. Even in the time-frame of funding early influence is possible. Some focused on building local research capacity or negotiating power. Some on beginning early dialogue across different actors.
· Revealed that structural gender analysis is a muscle. A diverse mix of capacities is needed for researchers and IDRC staff to practice. Structural gender analysis is key of course. Other important skills include: deliberative dialogue, brokering effective partnerships, systems analysis, conflict mediation, and positioning evidence for use.
Transforming gender relations is not just an issue of inclusion or individual agency, not even of good structural gender analysis. Research can play a role in this process where it is a much deeper situating of evidence in ways that influence underlying norms and institutions, and power relations that perpetuate unequal access, agency and control. Gender-transformative research goes beyond access and technical issues, and even goes beyond research papers to embed and embody the change being sought through effectives processes. Even in a shorter time-frame this embeddedness, influence and engagement of key actors is not only a way to redress inequities through the research. It is an investment in longer term changes in perceptions, norms, as well as institutional changes and uptake in policies, laws, budgets and markets.
Changing the Gender Narrative
I worked with The Story Kitchen and the Coady Institute in Nepal to co-facilitate with an inspiring leader, Jaya ji Luintel. We connect on the power of the Rao/Kelleher framework to ground our work in analysis of gender and power dynamics. Power analysis is overlaid [and we'll be back with a longer piece on that topic].
The work of The Story Kitchen (TSK) demonstrates what is possible in using change in one area to leverage it in others. They are "driven by the passionate belief that upholding the stories of women can unravel systems of gender oppression and patriarchy that continue to exist in Nepal. The domination of stories from men's perspectives leaves women out of the history of Nepal and fails to recognize the extent to which women are currently contributing and have always contributed to the development of the country." Aside from supporting stories of survivors of armed conflict from women of different castes, ages, communities and cultures, they train justice reporters and influence media in changing gender narratives. The survivors have now formed a network that has managed to begin discussions with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the President around transitional justice. Storytelling, in this case, is healing, awareness raising, changing the gender narrative and an advocacy tool. All of these pieces are critical and reinforcing.
Like SEWA Bank taught me years ago, StoryKitchen reinforces so many of the key lessons in addressing gender and power dynamics. All realms of change and influence are gendered and intersectional. We need healing and connecting not just "agency" because marginalization from the norms and the ensuing violence is so internalized. Formal strategies, particularly organizational, are not enough. Media, social media, artists, elders have a critical role to play in the informal work on gendered social norms and exclusions. Networks and movements have the potential to affect both formal and informal systemic change.
http://thestorykitchen.org
Yours ever in the struggle to understand change and influence,
Nanci
Researching women's economic empowerment
Sisters Ink has just been awarded a contract to support IDRC with an internal learning evaluation on the research funded to support youth and women’s economic empowerment. Nanci led a Mid-Term Evaluation for part of this program, GrOW. There were 14 research partnerships between North-South, South-South research agencies and universities.
Highly rated research partnerships (quality; building local capacity; positioning for policy influence) had strong coherence between qualitative and quantitative methods, clarity on policy uptake and good governance marked by complementarity of partners, a mix of scientific rigour and context knowledge with at least one partner having a track-record for evidence-based policy research. Smaller mixed North-South partnerships with two partner institutions both academe and practitioner as well as academic North-South partnerships demonstrated stronger early results than larger consortiums and research projects only based in the South.
What is the role of research in redressing power dynamics? The program demonstrates that the three outcomes (quality research; building local capacity; policy influence) can be mutually reinforcing but cannot be assumed.
Reducing vulnerability in HIV vulnerable youth, orphans and vulnerable children
Sisters Ink did a contract for FHI360 to review evidence related to evaluations and research on financial education for HIV vulnerable youth, orphans and vulnerable children. Evidence was limited in both scope and strength. However, a combined effect was found on HIV-related outcomes particularly programs integrating financial education with sexual and reproductive health supports.
Not nearly enough is known about the various program and contextual “levers” that led to improved economic or health outcomes. Sometimes they are related. For example, we know that peer and trusted adult counselling can help. However, we don’t know how community-based programs compare to schools, for example. We need more studies to better understand the role that “self-efficacy” or agency plays in linking economic strengthening supports with asset building.
