WUNRN
Huairou Commission - http://huairou.org/resilience
Movement Building Approach to Women’s & Community
Resilience
Vision
The Community Resilience Campaign envisions a holistic,
pro-active approach to reducing vulnerabilities to poverty, disasters and
climate change, in which organized groups of grassroots women frame resilience
in their own terms as improving housing, basic services, food security,
livelihoods and protecting the natural environment.
Goal
The Huairou Commission Community Resilience Campaign aims
to empower grassroots women's networks to gain the support of partners - local
authorities, national governments, donors, academics-to bring their priorities
and practices to the forefront of policy programming in order to reduce
vulnerabilities to disasters, climate change and poverty.
Objectives
History of the Community Resilience Campaign:
Since the early 1990s, the Huairou Commission and GROOTS
International member groups have experienced major disasters including two
major earthquakes in India (1993 and 2001), Hurricane Mitch in Honduras
(1999), Marmara
Earthquake in Turkey (1999), multiple hurricanes
affecting Jamaica (Hurricanes Ivan 2004, Dennis 2005, Dean 2007 and Gustav
2008), Bam Earthquake in Iran (2004), and The Indian Ocean Tsunami ( 2004).
Women found that they were facing similar problems in post disaster relief and
recovery processes-there was a need for women to be leaders in planning and
monitoring processes and programs.
Through their responses to disaster, member groups
organized grassroots women to undertake leadership roles in relief, recovery
and reconstruction efforts to position grassroots women as active agents of
recovery and resilience. By staying organized and active in post recovery
processes the women's groups managed to improve the quality and impact of post
disaster investments and also reconfigure power relationships in their
communities to respond to community priorities, such as housing, basic services
and livelihood needs. Members realized that building the capacity for
resilience was central to the survival and protection of community development
gains, as women's historic disadvantages - their restricted access to
resources, information, mobility and decision making power - make them highly
vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and natural disaster.
The Huairou Commission's global campaign on Community
Resilience is led by GROOTS International and works with a critical mass of
grassroots collectives on development initiatives to reduce poverty and
vulnerabilities and create a culture of resilience. This approach integrates
poverty reduction, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction as
inter-related elements of a comprehensive disaster resilient development
planning and policy framework. It is based on our understanding and
experience that the most effective solutions arise from organized groups of
grassroots women, as key stakeholders, framing resilience in their own terms:
as improving community health, sanitation, food security, livelihoods, and
reducing environmental degradation in their communities.
By building a critical mass of grassroots women's groups
-through peer learning and multiple networks- HC members are better equipped to
engage in global and regional advocacy with government officials and policy
making agencies to formalize women's participation in these processes and
advocate for the adoption of coherent approaches that are holistic and bottom
up.