Starting over.

[Thelnebriati]

I thought I'd start a thread to discuss rebuilding women's services from the ground up.

The very broad strokes are;
What services are needed?
How can they be funded?
Who will run them and how will they be trained and paid?
How can we learn from past endeavours, what worked and what didn't.
How can we collect and preserve the information, and pass it on.
How can we protect women's resources for future generations? Or do we have to accept they could be taken from us at any time, and treat it as an ongoing project?
Can we come up with new models?

On this thread, lets try to focus on the future, not worry about current losses.
Someone might like to start a thread to record services that have been lost. It might serve as a useful warning to others.

I've worked in collectives, they were an interesting experience. They worked until they didn't, iyswim.
They stopped working when disruptive individuals joined. Unfortunately there wasn't any realistic way to deal with them, and the majority of workers left because the workplace stopped being a pleasant space.

I know this isn't really a sane idea but we really need a large body, run by women which acts as a funding body. It would be supported by crowdfunding / ongoing donations and any cause advancing women's rights could apply for a grant or a loan. It could even copy Stonewall and set up its own Women friendly employer index

As well as being a funding body it would become a well funded and influential lobby group - the go to group for Women's rights - importantly though it would also highlight grassroots women's groups where possible.

It could be made up of representatives from all grassroots women's groups?

@YetAnotherSpartacus

100% agree need to bring back women’s studies

Yes, our knowledge is our power.

Especially women’s history. So much is not in the curriculum. Even basic things like famous Ancient Greek philosophers, they always include Plato and Socrates but not Hypatia.

All laudable but I wonder why women's groups don't take off? Once we can answer that question, we might be able to get something really good going

@highame

All laudable but I wonder why women's groups don't take off? Once we can answer that question, we might be able to get something really good going

I think one of the issues is that people aren't able to commit themself to that level of organisation or feel that they aren't competent to.

Fundraisers have (I think) easier over £1million for legal cases supporting women. Lots of people are willing to donate money, I think time and skills is more of an issue.

I know this isn't really a sane idea but we really need a large body, run by women which acts as a funding body.

It is a sane idea, its just not one thats been widely used by feminist campaigns, which tend to be grass roots campaigns that aren't supposed to be permanent. And there's never been an 'Official Feminist Head Office', because no ones speaks for everyone.

Experience with existing large organisations show we have to be careful about founding principles, so they can inspire confidence. Permanent societies can turn into a gravy train for a few individuals, who dont really want to change the status quo as they become dependent on income. Also they will become a target for activists so they need to be resilient.

But I think all of that can be worked around. There must be successful examples we can use as models.

@highame
I think that the reason women’s groups falter is because first we are 50% of population, so not a majority. Secondly, it is impossible to get 100% of women to agree on anything, so we don’t even get to 50% vote on anything at all.
So the only things that gain traction are things that we hold in common with men and men’s needs. Men supported full time, extended hours childcare from age 0 on up because it meant their female partner could go to work and contribute to the household bills. They didn’t support it so women could sit at home and be SAHP (in most cases).

Essentially, we have to “sell” what we want to men to get enough votes to get what women need. Many women’s groups fail to understand this unfair but truth of our reality and alienate the very people we need support from.

It’s no different from BAME activism...we need allies to get anything done. So do we as women.

That hasn't worked for domestic violence services; in fact its caused them to be defunded. Which is why I started this thread.

I wonder if JKR would be interested in establishing/backing a charitable fund? Esp given the ongoing threat to women only DV services and her own lived experience.

I'd really like not to name names.
If any group did get to the point where serious funding was the only thing stopping them move forward, that would be the time to approach individuals and it should be done privately.

The difficulty with commitment is the reality of women's lives, at base. The reason such a large scale operation hasn't been attempted, and the focus has remained on grass roots fire-fighting measures is because women are expected to clean up everyone else's shit, literally and metaphorically.

I'm articulate and analytical. I'm the kind of person people are happy to let lead them. But I've got kids with mental health problems, relatives with cancer, a minimum wage job, a whole raft of problems I'm not going to disclose here and there are only so many hours in the day. I am quite sure there are many, many other women exactly like me. Which is why the crowdfunders are made up of £10 donations from women who want to protect their rights but simply don't have the capacity to do more.

It is a sane idea, its just not one thats been widely used by feminist campaigns, which tend to be grass roots campaigns that aren't supposed to be permanent. And there's never been an 'Official Feminist Head Office', because no ones speaks for everyone.

Perhaps we need a permanent head office? A way of drawing together disparate grassroots groups (and other entities like refuges). While they may come and go an overall body continues to exist. If the overall body was always made up of reps from grassroots groups hopefully it could maintain its purpose?

I hate to say it but I think we could learn from groups like Stonewall and Engender in how they lobby and establish credibility.

I don't see it as the Head Office of Feminism, more of a trade group made up from reps from an interested party.

sigh... If only the Women's Equality Party knew the definition of 'woman'.

@Thelnebriati

That hasn't worked for domestic violence services; in fact its caused them to be defunded. Which is why I started this thread.

Which too much commitment or too many allies?

I thought domestic violence services were cut in U.K. because of the huge public debt caused by Covid? I don’t think that they were cut due to commitment or allies “not working” but rather their low priority to the U.K. Gov was most likely to due to a lack of allies and/or lack of commitment. Rishi Sunak is a potential ally whose commitment you’d want to secure.

How about lesbian spaces- clubs, social groups etc? Most of them seem to have vanished off the face of the earth, including large and valuable gatherings like Mitchfest.

DV costs the UK some £66 billion a year. Reducing DV would be the cost effective solution.
Allowing 3 women a week to be murdered because refuges are expensive and women only refuges offensive would not be possible if women were seen as human.

Really showing my age here but I would like some good old-fashioned consciousness raising groups. Actually some of the grassroots organisations that sprung up around the GRA sort of felt like that but that atmosphere of creativity, of righteous anger, of combined power, was absolutely intoxicating.

And lesbian clubs were AMAZING!

Cr groups are an easy one to sort- cost nothing and even over zoom they're a nice antidote to isolation.
I started a book group which worked as CR - unsure if it would have been as popular if marketed as CR at the time. It was really enjoyable and I think it was something that would work in lots of different contexts.

Much easier to start a group for CR than eg fund a women's aid, and if women have a better understanding of how inequality impacts on them, they might be more willing to advocate for better funding of women's aids too!

I agree, and to misuse a quote from elsewhere it seems to me that consciousness raising is the 'why and funding is the 'how''.

I would love a women's disco. But... one that is inclusive to those of us of an age to get really bothered by loud thumpy music.
Not totally dark, not totally clubby music.

The one after London Reclaim the night used to be fun.

X posts - yep!

The majority of funding from women's aid groups comes from Local and national government and is backed up by fundraising and grants from places like the Big Lottery. As such it is then tied to the conditions set by the funder. What we also need is an organisation that is tied to the services that can effectively lobby for what is needed and influence policy and best practice in favour of what is needed.
None of the mainstream organisations supposedly for women do this at the moment as they are too involved in other agendas.

I'd like to see properly funded and run Women's Centres with feminist values at their core and absolutely no truck with trans ideology. Binding constitutions that they are for biological women only. I want them in shiny prestigious buildings, not the ramshackle properties that so many women's centres of the past were located in. I want them properly funded, with guaranteed sources of income — not having to apply for tiny pots of money doled out by charities who change their priorities every year or two. Maybe a women's centre endowment fund would be something that a lot of us would be prepared to include in our wills. I want a tangible, prestigious public statement that women are valued and important.

A woman's centre in every city and large town could be the hub for a lot of the projects and actions and services already mentioned and help women learn to celebrate their sex. It would be government-funded as reparation for the shit we've all been put through over the last decade. I want any money left in Stonewall's coffers when it's shut down to to go to women's centres. Fines imposed on Twitter and Facebook and all those who have colluded in an organised attempt to deprive women of their rights and the money put into Women's Centres. I'm in a punitive mood!

My local women's centre is captured. It ran a course by that TW wanting to teach women to orgasm.

I would like women's centres to be less obviously political. I know that life is politics and all that, but women of all political leanings, the privileged and the less so, all share certain needs. I'd like to see women's common ground as the priority rather than there differences.

Nottingham?