In my tenure here at WEDO, I sometimes take for granted how much we, as a small women's rights advocacy organization, achieve on the global stage. This year, WEDO was among the first to raise awareness about the impact of climate change on women and the important role they play in generating solutions. We continue to push the envelope in documenting corporate violations of women's rights and in promoting gender parity in decision making. And we have succeeded in persuading many government representatives at the United Nations - both North and South - to move away from the rhetoric of promises to a deeper understanding of the systemic changes needed to improve women's daily lives. Our new Development Director, Mary Fridley, who you'll hear from below, reminds me just how unique our work and significant our accomplishments are in today's world.  We hope her appeal will move you to make an even larger contribution to WEDO this year than before.                     
                                            June Zeitlin, Executive Director

When WEDO hired me nine months ago, I was honored to become the first Director of Development for an organization that I have long admired.  I wasn't, however, very familiar with WEDO's work, which means I've had a great deal to learn about the organization and its history. As I become more familiar with WEDO and its many advocacy accomplishments, what I've been especially moved by is its dedication to building a grassroots movement that gives voice to the poorest of women, even as it works to create a just and sustainable planet for everyone.    

What I have come to see more clearly in my months at WEDO is that this commitment to grassroots activism should not only shape our programmatic initiatives but its fundraising strategies as well.  As WEDO prepares to launch several new initiatives over the next few months, we do so in a dramatically less stable world than the one in which the organization began 16 years ago.  The foundations and governments that support us are to be applauded, and we are working tirelessly - and with success - to increase their numbers (not to mention the size of their gifts!).  As we do so, however, it is with the recognition that institutional support can - and does - disappear very quickly as funding priorities change and/or political winds shift. 

Thus, it is imperative that WEDO be able to count on the "grassroots" - in this case, the many friends and colleagues we have now and the many more we will meet in the future - for ongoing financial support that is unattached to strings.  For me, the empowerment of women, especially poor women, is too important to our planet's future for us to ask anything less. 

If you have never contributed to WEDO, I hope you will do so today; if you have, please accept our heartfelt thanks - and give again even more generously. 

To give a tax-deductible contribution online, click here.

Checks can be made payable to WEDO and mailed to:

Holiday Appeal 2007
WEDO
355 Lexington Avenue, 3rd Floor
New York, New York  10017

Your support really will make all the difference in (and to) the world.

On behalf of all of us at WEDO, I'd also like to wish you the happiest of holidays and a most peaceful New Year. 

                                                        Mary Fridley
                                                        Director of Development

Women as agents of change have made enormous contributions to social movements worldwide. But global trends, such as income inequality, increased militarization and over-consumption, are stifling progressive change and undermining many of the prior gains women have made. New strategies and alliances are emerging to advance a comprehensive human rights agenda. We asked WEDO Board Chair and feminist scholar and practitioner Srilatha Batliwala to share some of her views on social change and the international women's movement.

Q: Working towards the empowerment of women has been your life's work, across sectors, issues, geographies, and organizations. What are the areas in which the international women's movement is having the most impact, and what do you feel most discouraged about right now?

A: I think in fact that the international women's movement's capacity to have global impact has been steadily declining since the Beijing World Conference, though it has scored some significant successes in three key areas: in pushing the UN - especially the reform process - to create a much stronger and better resourced gender entity within it, an important campaign led by WEDO and Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL); in the recent success of the Association for Women's Rights in Development's (AWID) "Money and Movements" action-research to bring donors to account for their consistent de-funding of women's movement-building work; and in bringing gender perspectives to some of the debates and activism around poverty and economic justice, led by the Gender and Trade Network, DAWN, and others.  But I feel somewhat discouraged that there are very few spaces left in which women can build a coherent common agenda at the global level, and that the level of specialization, diversification, NGO-ization and "project" orientation that has occurred within women's activism worldwide has reduced our collective voice, power and impact.

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Batliwala is currently Civil Society Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University where her work focuses on transnational civil society, particularly on transnational grassroots movements, and on bridging the divide between practitioners and scholars. She is also Scholar Associate at the Association for Women's Rights in Development where she is providing intellectual leadership to AWID's Building Feminist Movements and Organizations Initiative.  She also serves on the boards of Gender at Work, Just Associates, IT for Change and PLAN International. She is co-editor of "Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction" (Kumarian Press, 2006) and author of Status of Rural Women in Karnataka and Women's Empowerment in South Asia-Concepts and Practices. Batliwala joined the WEDO Board in May 2000 and lives and works from her home base in Bangalore, India.

Only 0.1% of official development assistance is spent on gender equality, according to a 2005 Eurostep/Social Watch report. Alarming statistics like this illustrate just how little money and resources are actually allocated for women's empowerment. 

As member states converged at the UN General Assembly High-Level Dialogue on Financing for Development (FfD) on 23-24 October at UN Headquarters in New York, women's groups stressed that the current financial architecture continues to undermine gender equality, women's rights, and sustainable development.

WEDO participated in the two-day long FfD dialogues, part of international efforts to generate financial resources necessary to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - a set of eight goals that emerged from the 2000 UN Millennium Summit to improve living conditions and remedy key global imbalances by 2015 - in the next seven years.
But women's groups maintain that unless more funding is allocated to gender equality, which largely depends on addressing the structural inequalities in the global economic system, the MDGs won't be met.  Neither will the world's larger development agenda that goes beyond the targets set in the MDGS.

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It's easy to support WEDO. 
Using JustGive, you can easily (and safely!) donate to WEDO online.  Just click on the button at right to support WEDO today.  Because when women lead, the world benefits. 

WEDO is currently hosting three extraordinary Graduate Fellows from Brandeis University's Heller School, each pursuing Master's degrees in Sustainable International Development. A native of Kenya, Lucy Wanjiru (l) has been working on natural resource management as a social mobilizer and rural water and sanitation consultant in Sub-Saharan Africa for over ten years. At WEDO, she is helping to build our climate change adaptation and advocacy program in developing countries. Focusing on U.S. advocacy on climate change, Leah Stern (middle) has long been passionate about recycling and planting trees and applied her agroforestry skills in Senegal for several years before returning to the U.S. for graduate school. Moutushi Islam (r) is originally from Bangladesh where she worked for five years in community development and macro-economic planning. She is working in WEDO's Economic and Social Justice Program exposing corporate malfeasance against women's rights and safety worldwide and assisting in critical U.N. processes like Financing for Development. Our three Fellows are invaluable, and we extend enormous thanks to them for their great work!