Prospera’s XIII Biennial and Gender and Climate Justice
Over the last twenty years, Women’s and Feminist Funds have increased our power, influence, and impact to significantly raise more and better resources to create enabling environments for gender equality and human rights. As feminist funders, our main collective purpose is to support women, girls, trans, intersex, and non-binary people’s groups, organizations, collectives, and feminist movements to thrive.
We are committed to ending all economic, social, political, and environmental injustice. We imagine a world where equity, well-being, and peace prevail for everyone, not just for a few privileged. We yearn for different ways of decision-making, shifting and holding power, and re-distributing resources in equitable and socially just ways. Most importantly, as climate change threatens life on the planet, we are determined to work together to create, implement, and expand feminist climate solutions today to fulfill our collective dream of reaching a feminist world tomorrow.
While feminist funds have only supported climate justice work for the last decade, we understand that the root causes of climate crises are not isolated but intertwined with various forms of intersecting inequalities. Moreover, the climate crisis is a direct consequence of patriarchy, which enables a system where certain groups benefit from the overexploitation of natural resources at the expense of the planet and the majority of its peoples.
Much of the Women’s and Feminist Fund’s current climate support is delivered through rapid response grants to environmental and land defenders, indigenous peoples, and their communities, particularly in Latin America. We recognize an urgent need to double down in all regions to support climate action. The multiple environmental challenges we are facing in terms of food security, ocean and land protection from deep sea and land mining, clean energy and a just transition (particularly in the Global South), water management, and the displacement of communities and populations —are all dependent on massive investments in public infrastructure, regulation of the current uses of natural resources within planetary boundaries, and the protection of the remaining natural resources and the indigenous peoples that protect them. In addition, there is an urgent need to re-examine the macroeconomic and global governance architectures that allow deepening inequalities between the North and the South in the name of new or green economies.
In a time when Global South countries are increasingly indebted, where civil society movements and organizations are being criminalized for organizing, environmental activists are being persecuted, killed, and disappeared, and artificial intelligence is transforming day-to-day life as we know it, we need to urgently and collectively address the structural and intersecting inequalities that underlie climate issues through a feminist approach. From October 1st to October 3rd, In Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, The Prospera International Network of Women’s and Feminist Funds will hold its XIII Biennial.
In our gathering, we will explore concrete actions to resource innovative thinking and efforts in such adverse contexts. We invite funders, governments, allies, and activists to join us in these dialogues to strategize together to adequately fund, support, and partner with other feminists and indigenous women to achieve a gender and environmentally-just world.