Gender & sexuality justice
We resource projects that address the unique challenges faced by women and queers on the move, as well as those led by women and queer people, operating on feminist principles.
Borderless Collective
Germany
2023
We resourced a capacity-building project with Borderless Collective aimed at enhancing and advancing expertise within civil society efforts supporting illegalised migrants. This year-long initiative convened participants working on this topic across various EU countries, and topics were identified through a participatory process to address existing gaps in the grassroots scene: project management, logistics, social media and public relations, critical whiteness, queer-feminism, decolonisation, and more. By ensuring diverse representation from different groups at these sessions, the aim is to multiply the capacity-building impact as participants disseminate the knowledge gained within their own organisations.
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Rosa Rolling Safer Space
Greece
2022
Rosa Rolling Safer Space is an initiative created from a 140+ member women and queer non-profit; it uses a converted truck to provide a mutual empowerment and community space for women on the move. Rosa describes itself as a political organization with an intersectional view of society, working with a queer-feminist and anti-racist consensus. Since March 2022, the team provides a mobile Safer Space next to three different camps on the Greek mainland, acting as a different kind of home in resistance to the systematically poor conditions of refugee camps.
Women and queer migrants are able to better access healthcare rights, join social and cultural workshops, and organise alongside other women to build longer-lasting relationships across backgrounds that dismantle the divisive, patriarchal, and colonial roots of repressive migration regimes.
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CommemorAction
Tunisia
2022
A long-standing tradition of resistance, CommemorAction combines the ceremony of ‘commemoration’ with the activism and tactics of ‘action’. Led and self-organized by the mothers and families of missing migrants, this was a week-long movement-building conference that united international and local groups in Zarzis, Tunisia. The project aimed to bridge African and European communities, enhance forensic and legal knowledge for those directly affected, and highlight the link between ecological destruction and European migration policies by collaborating with local fishermen. It culminated in a national demonstration marking the anniversary of a 2012 shipwreck involving 130 individuals who departed from Sfax, Tunisia, to the Lampionne islet near Lampedusa, Italy.
In addition to financial resources, our participatory team attended this conference as an in-person retreat to strategise and deepen relationships between each other, as well as learn from and show solidarity to partners outside of Europe.
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No Name Kitchen
Bosnia, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Spain
2022
Created from the grassroots when migrants and international activists met in Belgrade in 2017 and decided to cook together, No Name Kitchen is an independent civil movement supporting the right to move freely when seeking a better, dignified life. With 24/7 presence on the ground, the initiative combines frontline humanitarian support with detailed and participatory documentation of border violence. It transforms collected data on pushbacks, psychological damage, direct physical violence, and violations of human rights especially against women and minors into political action through advocacy to policy makers, denouncing systematic violations of human rights at the external European borders.
Weekly assemblies and coalition-building with dozens of collectives help No Name Kitchen fulfill their role as a crucial human rights ‘watchdog’ providing a multi-country intervention for migrants along and around the Balkan and Mediterranean routes.
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The Pomegranate Project
Greece
2022
The Pomegranate Project is an initiative designed and implemented by, for, and with women. It provides a holistic protection and empowerment model for women and gender-diverse refugees, with particular priority given to those at risk of and/or survivors of gender-based violence, as every 1 in 5 women who are forcibly displaced have an experience of sexual violence. The project includes safe housing, psychosocial support, case management, and income-generating opportunities to seed and strengthen the individual and collective skills, resources, and resilience of affected women and gender-diverse individuals. The center and model also supports networks and fosters solidarity between displaced women and the local Greek community.
Transborder Summer Camp
France
2022
The Transborder Camp is the largest grassroots-centric and self-organised gathering of an “underground railroad” for and with movements working on forced migration. We resourced its second ever iteration with 700+ participants of migrants and activists across Europe and Africa coming together for several days at Zone à Défendre (Zone of Defense) in Nantes, France, an autonomous area occupied by grassroots activists defending the forest and meadow environment from an airport construction. Strategic exchange took place through horizontal discussions in small groups with multiple simultaneous languages: 40+ parallel workshops were on the program, ranging from relationship and trust-building, critical reflections on movement wins and losses, sharing insight into cross-border struggles, and collectively building an intersectional approach to migrant justice across the realms of queer-feminism, climate, digital justice, and more.
In addition to financial support, we attended the Camp as an in-person annual retreat, strategising about the development of the Fund and deepening our relationships on an eye-to-eye level with the transnational migrant justice ecosystem.
Solidary Wheels
Spain
2021
Solidary Wheels is a non-hierarchical, women-led organisation bridging the gap between a formal legal entitlement to claim asylum and the administrative reality in the only land borders from Africa to Europe: Melilla and Ceuta. Taking a feminist and decolonial approach, the collective focuses especially on advocating for the rights of migrants facing multiple marginalisations. It connects impacted people with movement lawyers, offers social and holistic well-being support, provides close accompaniment throughout administrative procedures, and monitors human rights violations for policy transformation.
Solidarity Wheels sustains the building blocks of resilient movements in this region through its dual pillars of providing informational workshops and activity-based social events to build coalition and activate civil society.