On March 18, we presented our Network at an online event in the framework of the Committee on the Status of Women. Our team talked about the history of how the Network was founded, what it means for each of us, and which work is enabled through the Network. We centered the efforts of grassroots feminist groups and discussed what principles enable a more flexible, caring, sustainable, and feminist infrastructure of moving resources. We will share our key remarks and advocacy recommendations in a series of three articles.
Part two, written by our member Lesia Berezdetska, discusses principles for building communities of care that we want to share with the global feminist movement. Find part one (funding for resilience) in the previous article and follow us for part three (on feminist visions of the future).
My name is Lesia Berezdetska, I am a feminist activist from Lviv – this is the western part of Ukraine – I want to share with you how our work with grassroots activists is focused on changing the paradigm of collaboration and partnership, rooted in principles of solidarity, care, and horizontal ties.
After the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine, I organized internally displaced persons (IDPs) in an integration and resource center called “Poryad” (Near) for economic (professional orientation courses), social, and cultural integration, and women’s recovery through art therapy. After my burnout and several months of recovery and self-care, I joined the Ukrainian Feminist Network for community building.
A few words about our members: we have quite an inclusive community of activists from different backgrounds – different ages, from different parts of Ukraine, cis women, lesbians, non-binary person, left queer feminists, activists who are organizing communities with ID women through art therapy, educating girls and women on how to prevent gender-based violence, professors at universities, feminist artists (poetry and textile decolonial artworks), activists who are working with the contemporary experience of migration as sources for history, especially in museums, helping women to gain professional skills for economic independence, activists who are working close to the frontline and organizing women who migrated from close villages which are becoming occupied by Russians. So now we have fifteen initiatives or individual activists in the community. It is important for us to have such intersectional and diverse experiences and identities represented in the network, as this creates the spaces for dialogue, learning and expanding our political agenda.
The work of our network focuses on building the community with grassroots feminist initiatives and individual activists by providing subgranting for the activities (which is what Anastasia talked more about) and creating spaces for mutual learning, exchange and collective advocacy. We also integrate aspects of care, wellbeing and critical understanding of self-care into all of our work.
The first year of work with building the community was taken for the analysis of a common context, naming it, acknowledging our work, identifying common challenges and ways to deal with them. During the first year of invasion, feminist activists were at the frontline of helping those who were displaced. So our community is the place where activists share experiences and get validation and appreciation for the work of each other and put it in the bigger picture of the processes of resistance.
It is also a place where we can practice alternative ways of recovery and wellbeing. Here is what I mean:
Quite a lot of activists are struggling with burnout. And it is provoking dissatisfaction with oneself and self-flagellation that a person could not be effective during the war time, which needs a lot of work for supporting and organizing other women. Also, the context of Ukraine, especially for women who were affected by patriarchy and Russian economic and cultural colonization (from our parents who were grown in the Soviet Union and from other forms of neocolonialism). These oppressions and conquests affect them psychologically in different ways, like over-responsibility and being unappreciated, losing identity, by suppressing and criticizing themselves and other people. So during two meetings in the Carpathian mountains, which were also part of recovering, we were identifying external challenges and our feminist answers to it. Through this, we were building trust between each other and were giving the appreciation of our the work.
Also, we shared our knowledge and practices because of different experiences – freegan practices, skills of women self-defense, a theatrical feminist performance on victim-blaming, queer non-binary stand-up about non-binary experience from Ukrainian refugee, art practices of making Ukrainian traditional jewelry and other art-therapy practices. Sharing the knowledge and experiences, like kinds of the resources – is also part of resistance and sustainability – becoming more inclusive and sensitive to the experiences of each other in the community. And also that’s how we are providing feminist subjectivity. So, the needs of feminist activists from our Ukrainian Feminist Network, that we shared, are connected to the culture of self-care, caring for our mental health. This is our mutual agreement with each other.
After the request from activists of our community, we provided resources to care for mental health by supporting financial security for covering basic needs, including rent payment, psychotherapy, and food in cases of unemployment from burnout.
This support for wellbeing and burnout recovery is an important component of our work and we see it as a political commitment. Along with providing money, we create conversations among our participants about the roots of burnout which lie in systems of labour exploitation and bureaucracies of large donors, and in this way we try to shift the responsibility from individuals to systems. We also cultivate among ourselves the idea that we are valuable as we are, even if we are not productive. One of our members, who received a security grant, told us later: “It was the first time in my life, when I realized that my wellbeing is my main project – not some external outcome. It really shifted the way I see myself”.
Also, we provide these principles of solidarity, care and horizontal ties in the online community which we are building through chat and online meetings and organizational development workshops. In the chat, we are sharing our experiences, specifying challenges, looking for answers to that, sharing the opportunities, and supporting each other. Additionally, we carry out organizational development – there was already training on managing organizations and initiatives, which included strategic planning, project management, event management, and event facilitation. Now we are planning to organize more thematically specified events, like the school of decolonization, training for learning facilitation of events, events for preparation of advocacy campaigns.
We see these practices as decolonial forms of resistance. We want to share them with the feminist movement globally and shift the culture of grassroots organizing.
This is how these practices are implemented for us on the individual level:
We prioritize creation of spaces for dialogue and experience sharing. We focus on agency – supporting our capacity to be proactive and take initiative, rooted in our subjectivity. We understand that physical and psychological security is our basic need that enables us to be agentic. We also pay attention to validating each other’s work, , including seeking fair compensation for it and avoiding the expectation that activists should work for free. We are empathetic to each other, support our visibility and need of being heard, make safe space for practicing our confidence, and we perceive each other as equals. In the end – we stand in solidarity with each other.
While analyzing the context of our activism, we shared experiences of exploitation from the practice of colonization which also included relationships with the Western donor structures, and in the NGO sector, where quite a lot of us are working. We, feminists from Ukraine, want to change our fields of work, environment, and relationships, which in general could be described as a path from exploitation to a human-centered approach. This includes changes in our work that relate to:
Organizational level:
- Communication: non-violent ecological communication, without passive aggression, more empathy
- Policies in the organization, which include approaches in management with caring for the team and mental health of the people, relationships between members, non-violent work processes in the same attention to tasks,: transparency, and work dividing, making visible this care work in teams
- A return to focus on feminist principles of power relations, question of exploitation, and mental health in numerous women’s organizations that reproduce misogynistic patriarchal and neoliberal approaches to work and interaction
- Horizontal interaction – we want to build such ways of working and living together, where we will not have a clear hierarchy
- Unequal distribution of funds. Changes here include moving from exploitation to partnership relationships. Now the focus is on the funds on results, on quantitative indicators and squeezing the resources of activists, their exhaustion, focusing on “success” and we need relationships with more trust and recognition of our expertise.
National level:
- Policies in the country – from victimization of victims of gender based violence to culture of consent; from a neoliberal approach to recovery towards a more inclusive economy of care and the system of welfare which takes into account the care work performed by women
International level:
- Acknowledging Ukrainian feminists in the international feminist community, which is also centered on Western visions and theories of feminism, and even decolonial approaches are blind to Russian colonization and its specificity in Ukraine.
- Antimilitarist analysis of some Western feminists does not allow for recognition of our right to resist imperial Russian aggression. National interest of Ukrainian feminists are connected to the freedom and democracy and not to nationalism
We are also very interested in expanding solidarity feminist networks with Ukrainian feminist activists abroad and with activists from other war and decolonizing contexts. So, please reach out to us if you have ideas for collaboration, or if you are advancing similar agenda in your region and face similar challenges. Let us work on them together.
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