Blooming Wildflowers: Weaving Stories of Activism
From our earliest years, stories have played a crucial role in our lives. They have the power to forge emotional connections, bridging the gap between local and global issues. Stories not only bind us to our heritage and culture it also links us to our ancestors, to our land, ocean and skies. Stories inform our way of knowing, being, and doing. It connects us to our present and future, as well as the natural world that surrounds us. Stories shape our perspectives, and influence how we navigate the world. With this in mind, the Storytelling Guide by the World YWCA has been meticulously crafted to help individuals harness the power of #storytelling for social activism.
Designed with activists, #leaders, changemakers, women, and #youngwomen in mind, this comprehensive guide provides a feminist perspective on effecting change through storytelling. It is particularly tailored to the leaders of the World Young Women Christian Association (YWCA), spanning diverse regions, cultures, languages, and storytelling traditions. Packed with a comprehensive range of exercises and support, including journaling prompts and brainstorming techniques, the Guide offers an invaluable resource for refining personal and collective perspectives while effecting tangible change. With its seamless adaptability, it empowers individuals to develop and cultivate their storytelling skills in support of their #activism and their activism journey.
The Storytelling Guide is designed to be adaptable and easily accessible to all users.
If you are keen to translate the guide in your local language, kindly contact worldoffice@worldywca.org for guidance.
Welcome to the Feminist Consultation Methodology!
We are excited for this guide to support your work in engaging and co-creating with young women. If this is your first time using the Methodology, we recommend reviewing this guide in full to develop a robust understanding. This guide is a great source of in-depth explanations and contains many tools and templates to get you started. We urge you to adapt them as needed to meet the vision of your consultation. These are not one-size-fits-all since every individual and organisation has different needs! Regardless of the consultation you design, be sure to centre the voices of young women and prioritise diversity, equity, access, and inclusion.
This guide is to present information so that it is accessible and inclusive. When we say “you”, we are referring to whoever you are—a member of a volunteer group, a non-profit organisation, a student research group, a corporation, an individual, or a community leader. You may be a first-time researcher or you may have lots of past experience. When we say “we”, we are referring to World YWCA and the co-creators of this Methodology who now use it regularly.
In the spirit of co-creation and taking the feminist approach, we encourage you to incorporate stories and quotes into your consultation where possible. Not only will this provide credibility and strengthen your research but it is also a way of acknowledging the contributions of your participants. If you come across a powerful learning or story during your consultation
process, we invite you to share it with us to help evolve this Methodology. This Methodology is a continual learning journey for all of us and was created by young women for young women.
Let’s walk this journey together…
YWCA’s Safe Space is informed by remarkable history and experience, as well as shifting technologies and social-economic-political contexts. YWCA’s Safe Space serves as an important concept that is scalable, customizable, and applied to the specific needs of people in their local communities, dealing with different, relevant issues and connecting them with resources, information, and opportunities. With shifting technologies, these safe spaces have begun in the virtual world—connecting women of all ages beyond geographic barriers, and weaving together a shared community.
This Guide, Our Spaces, Power Spaces tells the story of how and why practising safe spaces can be transformative. And at the heart of any transformative action is a profound sense of engagement, buy-in, and ownership. With this in mind, this Guide is a customisable template to make your own! Adding in your unique context to this Guide helps your safe space to be culturally
relevant. Building on the Defining Standards in this Guide allows you to create a welcoming environment.
Download the guide:
Edition 2022.
The World YWCA’s leadership work and approach are feminist and progressive; community-based and intergenerational; focused on the most marginalised and under-represented; and accountable to be responsive to the needs and priorities of women, young women and girls in all their diversities. While leadership work in YWCA is as old as the YWCA itself, the Rise Up! Young Women’s Leadership Program was created in 2010 by young women from the Asia-Pacific region for young women with the intention to contribute to their empowerment, so that they rise up and discover their leadership potential. When we say “transformative leadership,” we mean leadership that brings together knowledge, skills, and feminist values, all of which are aligned towards the larger good of communities.
This Guide builds upon the existing knowledge, creativity, and capacity of YWCA young women to become leaders for positive social, economic and environmental change. It celebrates the processes by which young women explore their strengths, educate themselves, identify as decision makers, and have the confidence, knowledge, information, skills, and support to understand and manage power imbalances, challenge injustices, hold powerful people to account and make positive changes in their lives. It also embraces the core values of Rise Up! to strengthen its participatory peer-to-peer approach to training and mentoring. It acknowledges that young women’s leadership actively aims to disrupt patriarchal structures and helps in building a powerful, supportive network of young women leaders of present and future by decolonising leadership.
Through this Guide, we hope to build a beautiful activist tapestry together, starting with the different threads that come together to make unique fabrics (that’s you!) and weaving in all of the key elements of transformative and feminist leadership. We seek to build out from individual to movement, just as each individual thread matters to the cloth.
This toolkit, in line with the World YWCA strategy, is anchored on a program to support Young Women’s advocacy in SRHR and build their confidence to stand up and speak out at national, regional, and global levels, and to take collective action to change narratives, policies, and to demand high-quality services. The central pillar is for young women to design evidence-based advocacy initiatives through aspirational storytelling, emphasising their rights and to bodily autonomy. The World YWCA aspires to contribute to the growing young women’s movement and body of knowledge on SRHR and mental health around the world. It aims to accelerate a collective action where young women are at the centre as drivers of change
Download the Toolkit in English Here.
Téléchargez le manuel en Français ici.
A comprehensive guide for establishing and engaging in a #leadership training programme. Aimed to learn and build transformative leadership skills among young women, Rise Up! empowers young women to be decision-makers with ownership of their own rights and future. The guide was co-created by and for #youngwomen, and the model was designed to intentionally be adaptable and scaleable to local realities.
The guide includes powerful examples, critical information about leadership, global context, helpful notes for facilitators, information about relevant social issues, and more.
A summary and full training guide for creating a successful YWCA Safe Space programme.
YWCA has provided Safe Spaces to women and girls since its founding in 1855, and the programme is an impactful model for creating lasting, positive change in the lives of women, young women, and girls. The guides includes important background, guiding questions, reflections, and more.
The guide will be updated in 2021.
