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BOARD OF
DIRECTORS |
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USA
STAFF |
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As the only international
women’s fund in the world designed to respond on short notice, UAF
collaborates with women activists in three primary contexts: peace
building in situations of armed conflict, escalating violence, or
politically volatile environments; potentially precedent-setting legal and
legislative actions; and protection of women human rights
defenders.
UAF joins with local women
to build civil societies that honor their experiences and include women at
every juncture, especially in areas of armed conflict and war, where they
are most at risk.
While UAF focuses on broad societal issues, we
recognize that women’s human rights go beyond the civic and political
arenas and encompass women’s everyday life in the personal realm—in the
home, the neighborhood, the village, and the workplace. UAF advocates for
women’s equality, not only as a matter of human rights, but also as a
fundamental prerequisite for social justice, global security, and
sustainable peace.
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KENYA
STAFF |
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UAF
SUPPORTERS |
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Overview of the Fund
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The
Creation of UAF |
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Rapid Response
Grantmaking
When urgent unanticipated
situations arise that provide an opportunity either to advance an ongoing
strategy for strengthening women’s human rights or to prevent backsliding
in that struggle, women activists look for effective, innovative ways to
respond. In these situations, waiting for financial support from funders
unable to act quickly can be detrimental.
UAF exists to enable
women to mobilize and act within these brief windows of opportunity by
approving emergency funding of up to $5,000 USD within 72 hours of a
request. Whether grant recipients use the funds to fly in an expert
witness for a groundbreaking women’s legal rights case, to evacuate an
activist whose life is threatened as a result of her work, or to mobilize
women to vote in an unexpected election, UAFs rapid response grants
support women activists’ efforts to create sustainable structural
change.
Collaborative Regional Initiatives
UAF expanded its initial role of rapid response grantmaking in
2000 to include planning and implementing collaborative initiatives to
support women in armed conflict regions. These projects, which have become
another fundamental aspect of UAF’s work, aim to: deepen women’s
understanding of particular conflicts; provide women with the tools needed
to initiate strategic actions in their situation; build advocacy skills
through training; and encourage ongoing information-sharing and
networking.
UAF’s first collaboration, partnering with local
women’s groups and the US-based Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and
Children, resulted in a gender audit of reconstruction policies and
programs of the major international bodies involved in post-conflict work
in Kosova. Activists still use this report, Gender Audit of Reconstruction
Programmes in Southeastern Europe, to lobby for women’s participation in
the reconstruction.
More recent initiatives include several
consultations initiated by UAF-Africa: Kenyan Women Speak on the Proposed
Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission; Regional Consultation on UN
Security Council Resolution 1325; and Engendering Regional Instruments and
Mechanisms of Peace Building. Full reports of these consultations are
available upon request.
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In
early 1997 UAF’s co-founders saw an unmet need for helping eliminate human
rights violations against women—the need for rapid response in urgent
situations. They conducted a nine-month feasibility study about the
viability of rapid response grantmaking. The study included interviews
with more than eighty international activists and funders. Motivated by
findings, seven individual women philanthropists launched UAF-Global in
October 1997. The disbursement of UAF’s first grant followed within a
week.
UAF-Africa was founded in August 2001 to support African
women as they respond to violence in their particular communities.
UAF-Africa’s collaborative initiatives in the Great Lakes region and
Sierra Leone promote transitional justice during the stages between
outright violence and real peace.
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Synergy:
Program Components
Working Together
Rapid response grantmaking and collaborative regional
initiatives inform and strengthen each other, resulting in the creative
synergy that builds an effective and strategic support mechanism for
women’s human rights efforts. Grant requests from a particular conflict
region increase UAF’s awareness of the need for more in-depth work in that
area and enhance understanding of women’s activism in armed conflict
situations in general. These grant requests ultimately may lead to a
consultation or training. UAF’s participation in collaborative regional
initiatives strengthens partnerships, networks, and trust between the UAF
team and local women. Likewise, UAF-sponsored initiatives inform program
participants and partners about potential funding and how to make
appropriate grant requests. Engaging in both grantmaking and programmatic
work maximizes UAF’s ability to evaluate effectively and respond quickly
to these requests.
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UAF’s Vision of
the Future
As UAF looks to the future, two
realities stand out clearly: the need to delve more deeply into existing
situations and initiatives, and the wisdom of continuing to expand outward
into additional regions of the world where emerging conflicts threaten to
undermine the peace, security, and human rights of women and
girls.
Going deeper will mean gaining further understanding of the
nuances and complexities of situations, which will allow UAF to refine
programs to maximize their effectiveness and strategic impact. It also
will mean expanding the role of UAF-Africa. Current plans are now underway
to move UAF’s rapid response grantmaking for the Africa region to
UAF-Africa by the end of 2004.
UAF will continue to explore the
appropriateness of developing formal presences in other world regions. In
our ongoing efforts to support women in situations of armed conflict and
its aftermath, we believe our work can be achieved best by establishing
other regional groups, such as UAF-Africa, which will be led by women from
the area. This decentralized growth will facilitate direct working
relationships with local women’s groups, which have been essential to
fulfilling our mission.
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“Women
are not just victims of human rights abuse but also actors who can define
and defend human rights from the perspective of their own lives.
Comprehensive definitions of women’s human rights can then be drawn from
women’s perceptions of what is central to their basic integrity as human
beings. From this starting point, women articulate and work for their
human rights, not by asking existing human rights groups for their
recognition or trying to twist women into existing human rights
categories. Rather, we bring the insights and changes in consciousness
experienced by women over the last 25 years into the human rights
discourse in order to build a perception of what human rights means as
viewed from the lives of women. This aspect of human rights has been
missing from the largely male-defined concepts of what is central to
humanity. Adding this dimension will strengthen the concept of human
rights by expanding it to take greater account of the lives of the other
half of the human race.”
Charlotte Bunch
Center for Women’s
Global Leadership
Rutgers
University |