Women's Metamorphosis towards social tranformation
To provide an innovative strategy on how to use a book on paradigmas that will allow women to look at their situation in a critical and epowering way by knowing and developing their resonance with women in hisroty who have been changemakers.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Sector Focus
Please select one
Year the initative began (yyyy)
2008
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Web site (url)
Positioning of your initiative on the mosaic diagram
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Invisibility of problem
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Increase community resilience
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic
Women throughout history have challenged and transformed traditional forms of thinking and analysis. From science and art to human rights and politics, their contributions have led to important shifts in paradigms, shifts in the very ways we understand and make sense of the world. Yet these women and their actions remain largely unrecognized and misinterpreted. Women: Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect tells their stories and connects them to the challenges of today.
With current paradigms of power and domination leading humans to near extinction through violence, greed, and environmental degradation, these women offer new visions of collaboration and community that are urgently sought by everyone concerned about the future of the planet. This life-affirming shift in paradigms opens the way for people to gain a deeper understanding of how knowledge is developed, challenged and applied across history. It inspires people to act with a greater spirit of critical inquiry, solidarity and hope, encouraged by the fact that small gestures in one place can have profound impacts across society.
Featuring women from around the world and across the ages, this book and the interactive strategy in its web page breaks new ground by making visible the contributions of scientists, artists, activists, and scholars to important transformations in how we think about the world.
It incorporates testimonies, interviews, and imaginary letters that combine fact with imagination to bring each woman and her wisdom to life so as to promote resonance that will help women develop heir sense od entitlement to rights and freedom form gender based slavery. The book and web has served as the inspiration for a musical production to be debuted in Costa Rica in October 2008 and will be the basis for a global education and action program for women activists and organizers to take of during the 11th AWID Conference “The Power of Movements” in South Africa, November, 2008.
Name Your Project
Women's Metamorphosis towards social tranformation
Describe Your Idea
To provide an innovative strategy on how to use a book on paradigmas that will allow women to look at their situation in a critical and epowering way by knowing and developing their resonance with women in hisroty who have been changemakers.
Innovation
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence?
To provide an innovative strategy on how to use a book on paradigmas that will allow women to look at their situation in a critical and epowering way by knowing and developing their resonance with women in hisroty who have been changemakers.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field?
As far as I know, this is a unique strateg in the use of the internet that has no precedent (making the book a characte that will interact). Teh style od the book has no precendent (iamginary letters) and the style with which people will inetercat will help develop their imagination of a different world, not onl rational analysis.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing?
Interactive, open source, bilingual use of a combination of web, blog and email.
How do you plan to grow your innovation?
I have designed a whole strategy to create online and live courses to develop resonance workshops and digital stories as a popular education stragtegy to empower women worldwide to develop their sense of entitlement to autonomy, espet, xercise of teir rights and sharing of their succes stories as the popular education teacher that I have ween for the last 30 years.
Do you have any existing partnerships, and if so, how do you create them?
Yes, Feminist International Rado Endevour (FIRE) at www.fire.or.cr), Wings of the Butterfly at www.alasdemariposa.org), ust Associates at www.justassociates.org, among others.
Impact
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact.
This porject has already hada great impact in the wy it has innovated on the use of at for social change, as expressed in the web page blog features.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact?
Resources to publish the book in English, to travel to organzie workshops and to expand the web blog and pages alongsie the presentation of the theatre show.
How many people have you served or plan to serve?
It has already impacted more than 1,000 people a expressed in the letters and contacts in Wings of the Butterfly web page; furtherome, when taken to AWID's Forum on movement building in South Africa this coming Novembr, to Women's Worlds in Spain in July whhere it will be presentd, to the Social Forum of the Americas in Ocober in Guatemala and the World Social Forum in January 2009 in the Amazonia, it will have impacted more tan 50,000 people.
Directly
I already explained, but you can read the hundreds of letters in the www.alasdemarposa.org
Indirectly
I already explained the people in events that will be impacted.
Please list any other measures of the impact of your innovation?
The women's movement in general, by learning to use art in the process of movement building. We have already don this at FIRE during the Refewrendum about CAFTA, al Just Associates in the Obsevatorios de la Transgresion Feminista in Nicaragua, Oacaca in Mexico, Costa Rica and in the USA Social Forum in Atlanta, 2007.
Is there a policy intervention element to your innovation?
No, except what has to do with strengthening the opne source movement towards the democratization of the architecture of the internet by using open source technology and server in the web and blog dmension s of the strategy.
Exactly who are the beneficiaries of your innovation?
Mainly women worldwide.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)?
Contributions, volunteer work and hopefully financial respuerces from women's funds and other sources.
If known, provide information on your finances and organization
FIRE in Costa Rica an the National Radio Project in San Francisco are fiscal sponsors of the initiative.
So far it hs had the support of the Global Fund for Women ($10,000) used to build Wings of the Butterfly in its initial stage and to preapre the book for publication in Spanish by Editorial Norma this coming month.
What is the potential demand for your innovation?
here is a quest, search abndthirt for innovative ways to build the omen's movement and women's empowermntbecaus advocacy alone has not wokes very well in these consevative times.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability?
Very few, as diversified resources are sought and used:volunteer work, inexpensive technology and programs, diverse finding sources by philanthropists and small funds.
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
The main political and social precedent and source of this initiative is my international media work and that of my colleagues at Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) through out the 16 years since 1991. Many of the interviews and testimonies in me come from that source as you will see in the different chapters. Furthermore, many of the trips the world round provided the setting for many others that did not necessarily become FIRE productions. Or as Netherlands feminist, Irene Dubel once said of me “this book is an effort to take the stories on FIRE to yet another audiences, this time though literature.”
The main personal precedent and source has been my own lifelong effort to reconstruct her life based on the feminist epistemological stance that sates that “the personal is political.” Learning to listen, but also to be heard. Exercising the right to “name” the world. Refusing to name or be “named” by stereotipical definitions. Strengthening movement building like “Las Humanas” in CODEHUCA in the late 1980s, “La Nuestra” of Latin American and Caribbean women towards the recognition that women’s rights are human rights in 1993, the different collectives of FIRE throughout the last 16 years, Women Against the Combo (privatization of telecommunications in Costa Rica) in 2000, Wings of the Butterfly in 2006, Women Against TLC (Free Tease) in 2007, and more recently, Meso American Women’s Feminist Watch since 2006.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material
María Suárez Toro is a Costa Rican and Puerto Rican feminist, journalist, human rights activist and international academic, teaching in Costa Rica, Sweden and the United States. Co- director of FIRE—Feminist International Radio Endeavour – the first women’s global internet radio station, she has covered all the major UN World Conferences since 1992. She has worked as an activst in every Central Amercan country. She has received numerous awards for her activist work, example recognition as one of“21 Media Heroes 2008” by Reclaim the Media, winner of the Donella Meadows Fellowship in Sustainable Development 2007-08 Vermont, and the GAEA Foundation Artistic Residency Award 2007. She is writer of five books and countless articles and serves as an advisor to the Global Fund for Women ad the Central American Women's Fund.
Emphasis of Work
.Empowerment and movement building for social change
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Comments
Hi,
It sounds like you have created and are leading an effective online women's movement. I would like to learn more about your program. Who are your specific target populations? Since this competition focuses on modern day slavery, how does your program specifically address women in modern day slavery? Who are you reaching? Are they in domestic servitude? Do they lack political voice or rights to free themselves from forced labor or human trafficking? How will you monitor your success to prove to donors that you are effective and sustainable?
Most importantly, what is the content of the information that you spread? What is the type of information that you will disseminate? Who is your target audience and how will this help them? Perhaps providing an anecdote of a woman you have helped free from modern day slavery would help illuminate your work. It looks as though you have a lot of energy that would be great to focus into a detailed action plan to address the plight of women in modern day slavery.
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Gender Equality and Human Trafficking Specialist
Dear Jessica, thanks for your interest. Indeed, I forgot to speak about the specific forms of slavery being addressed in this project. It is the broad range of slavery that women face today, but presented in a historial perspective. By way of the resonance workshops regarding these, women will identify their own kind (usually all or some).
Kim Boc Dong (Korean “Comfort Woman”), who were abused by the Japanese Army during World War II, broke fifty years of silence about the abuses they endured. Sexual slavery in war.
Celeste Strong and Brave is the political-subjective construction of a victim of incest in Costa Rica who creates her very own last names to illustrate her healing process through feminism. Her story connects incest as an abuse within the family to the term “The Fathers”—an expression used by the State in law, education, and elsewhere in society—incest as enslavement
Olympe de Gouges represents women of the French Revolution in her account of what happened to them when they challenged the Declaration of the Rights of “Men” to include women’s rights. Exclusion as a form of enlavement.
Mileva Maric. In addition to being a Serbian mathematician and physicist, Mileva was also Albert Einstein’s first wife. Mileva contributed to her husband’s Nobel prize-winning work, often sharing her knowledge with him in love letters. She was never recognized for those contributions. Ensalvement by way of forced domestic labor.
The small island of Goree in Senegal hosts the House of Slaves , which in turn houses the “Door of No Return.” It is from this door that most salves were shipped from Africa to the Americas, the story of which is told here about the enslavement of women that has ben left out of the history of slavery.
Dear Mara,
We would love to learn more about your initiative. The resonance workshops and digital stories seem a great way to raise awareness, so it would be great to hear more about how they mobilize people to end the spread of trafficking. Can you track who reads your online letters? How is outreach orchestrated so that women worldwide learn about your project? What kind of follow-up is provided once a woman reads a letter on your website or learns of your work? How are the live courses conducted and who are the participants? Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.
Also, we really appreciate the comments you have submitted because they provide an additional layer of knowledge and insight to your entry. Since the judges predominately read just the entry form, it would be great if you could update the form with the additional information you have provided in the comments, so as to keep them well aware of all your impactful work.
Thanks!
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The Changemakers Team
Ashoka's Changemakers
Dea Amelia, thanks for your interest. irst let me tell you that the resonance workshops and digital stories are not only or even mainly digital te begin with. They start at workshps that take place all over the world by way of the radio I do at FIRE and the events organized by the women's movement worldwide. Then afterwards they bocome digital for others to inteact. That is how I have found so many invisivle women in history who have made amazing contrubutions yet are hardly known.
Let me give you an example. On Sunday I travel to Spain, in August to Guatemala and in November to South Africa. In each case there is a global event of women and or social movements where have registered resonnace workshops. In them I work with participants presentign them the women I have found and asking them who the resonate with. Then they write their stories ot tell them to me, cnstributing to new findings and connections.
Let me post one story here give to me y a student in such a worskshop when I was teaching at the University of Denver last year:
http://www.alasdemariposa.org/p_eng/03butterfliers/03butterfliers_lupesa...
You can also look at how the project has expanded by looking at www.alasdemariposa.net
Short examples of resonances in this proposal:
In Guatemala:
http://www.alasdemariposa.org/p_eng/09news_collective/09news_colegio_may...
In Nicaragua:
http://www.nuestrasmetamorfosis.net/node/56
With Just Associates and Mesoamerican women:
http://www.justassociates.org/projects_files/EduPopEpiFem.doc
Resonance with rural women in Costa Rica though video conference
http://www.nuestrasmetamorfosis.net/en/node/47
If anyone can be deemed a maker of change, it is Maria Suarez-Toro. She seeks to make change on a daily basis, which is apparent through the ideas she has, the way she expresses them, and the way she interacts with those around her. She seeks to make change beyond that, though, and on a larger scale, which is illustrated through her many endeavors, including FIRE and Wings of the Butterfly. I know this because I have had the fortunate chance to work with her on part the Wings of the Butterfly project, although Wings is hardly just a project—it is, to be sure, something larger, something more involved, something that truly resonates.
For someone to achieve with FIRE and Wings what she has achieved so far, one must have exceptional organization and communication skills. Maria, at the forefront of these movements, not only has these skills, but is also the committed, engaging, creative, and resilient brand of individual it takes for building the relationships that necessarily strengthen and perpetuate the evolution of such movements. Maria, humble and sincere, will be the first to tell you that she is not alone in creating and sustaining FIRE and its objectives—that the support network is full of other creative and intellectual people without whom these projects could not continue. However, I am confident that the thread holding much of these movements’ success stories together is Maria’s ability to inspire—talk about resonance!—as well as her openness to being inspired.
With continued support from an even broader and more inclusive global community, FIRE and Wings could resonate with even greater effect. That would include more trainings, workshops, capacity building, and literature translation, allowing the networks that are already in place to grow. Maria has my sincerest support and best wishes for being awarded the ASHOKA fellowship.
If anyone can be deemed a maker of change, it is Maria Suarez-Toro. She seeks to make change on a daily basis, which is apparent through the ideas she has, the way she expresses them, and the way she interacts with those around her. She seeks to make change beyond that, though, and on a larger scale, which is illustrated through her many endeavors, including FIRE and Wings of the Butterfly. I know this because I have had the fortunate chance to work with her on part the Wings of the Butterfly project, although Wings is hardly just a project—it is, to be sure, something larger, something more involved, something that truly resonates.
For someone to achieve with FIRE and Wings what she has achieved so far, one must have exceptional organization and communication skills. Maria, at the forefront of these movements, not only has these skills, but is also the committed, engaging, creative, and resilient brand of individual it takes for building the relationships that necessarily strengthen and perpetuate the evolution of such movements. Maria, humble and sincere, will be the first to tell you that she is not alone in creating and sustaining FIRE and its objectives—that the support network is full of other creative and intellectual people without whom these projects could not continue. However, I am confident that the thread holding much of these movements’ success stories together is Maria’s ability to inspire—talk about resonance!—as well as her openness to being inspired.
With continued support from an even broader and more inclusive global community, FIRE and Wings could resonate with even greater effect. That would include more trainings, workshops, capacity building, and literature translation, allowing the networks that are already in place to grow. Maria has my sincerest support and best wishes for being awarded the ASHOKA fellowship.
This project is brilliant. And knowing Maria Suarez' work over the years, I have no doubt that she will carry it out in the most profound and useful way. Maria is one of the most committed, multi-talented, and innovative people I know. Her work with FIRE speaks for itself--and for all of us who depend on it in these times of stultifying media consolidation. So much is going on in the world, so much of it vital to our lives and to how we may effect change. Yet we are prevented from knowing most of it or, when we do obtain a glimpse, stories are rarely followed up so that we may know their development or outcome. People's stories are so often vital to that knowing.
Maria Suarez has extraordinary organizational skills and far-reaching global connections. She is always traveling, listening, recording, connecting women to women, people to people, organizations to ideas. Her ethics are beyond reproach, making her work inspirational on so many levels. She is also amazingly flexible and resiliant, often thinking on her feet and understanding how a slight change in direction may improve an interview, conversation, or event.
I first met Maria in 1996 when we were both part of an all-women's delegation monitoring Nicaragua's presidential election of that year. In the group, Maria came upon another woman, Honduran Nora Miselem, and they realized they had been kidnapped together in Honduras in 1982. After days of torture they were eventually freed; being among the very few who survived disappearance in the Latin America of those years. I eventually visited them both and produced a book, WHEN I LOOK INTO THE MIRROR AND SEE YOU: WOMEN, TERROR & RESISTENCE, about their story. I have closely followed Maria's life and work since.
I can think of no one more worthy of this grant, and certainly no one who would put it to better use--for all of us.
Margaret Randall.
One’s wonder what you can say in just some few words about Maria and Maria’s work. Her vitality, courage, vision, leadership and freshness are just some of the adjectives that can characterize her. As Senior Gender Adviser of IUCN, I have had the pleasure of working with Maria. Under her advice and support one feels that you can make important changes happen.
Wings of the Butterfly is just an expression of what Maria can develop. Take a feminist political position, and transformed it in a communication venue, that will be received by a broader audience. The freshness of the message will definitively “fly” through the audiences.
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