Analysis and action are the lifeblood of WILPF.
Throughout 2020, many of our Sections, Groups, and partners did amazing work in responding to the multiple crises that exploded during the pandemic: the pandemic within the pandemic that is gender-based violence, the lack of access to food, the collapse of basic healthcare services. The list goes on.
In addition to grassroots action, WILPFers also looked deeply into how COVID-19 exposed the structures that create and sustain gender discrimination — and how gender interacts with racism and white supremacy to compound inequalities and injustice.
In 2020, each of these intersecting challenges cried out for our collective attention with greater urgency than ever before. And we’re not just listening: we’re amplifying voices, advocating for change, and examining our own ways of being.
But there is still so much work to be done. 2021 has already shown us that the temperature is still too high. Calmness and clarity of purpose are needed in how we work, but so is passion. Passion to make the changes that history has shown us must be made if decency, trust, and solidarity can be made real.
As a great poet recently said, “It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.” If 2020 exposed the fault lines, in 2021 the tectonic plates of change are moving. The transformative repair work must now begin.