Women’s Initiatives

Reconstruction Women’s Fund is lucky to have engaged women to rely on. Their legacy has been passed from one to the others. Amidst the pattern of discontinuity regularly imposed over women’s activities, by minimizing or by bans, above all by erasing, a clear picture could be seen of the position of engaged women in Yugoslavia and later in Serbia towards militarism/party/state. All of them transgress the dominant i.e. allowed discourse of the structures of political power.

Antifascist Front of Women by the nature of its engagement advocated for women in the framework of women’s human rights. Although never designated as a concept of human rights, their position was punished by abolishment of AFW. Twenty five years later the actors of the conference Comrade Woman self-initiated new language closest to the concept of civil society, which protruded in the routine of the party power and the avalanche of threats and disqualifications hit them, but due to the nature of their self-organizing, public abolishment was not possible. Thirteen years later, Women in Black introduced the most dynamic model possible: antimilitarist actions – amidst, immediate and daily – against the war. WiB’s directness and their position Let us not be deceived by our own are irritating to all the regimes in Serbia which count on national homogenization as a handy tool. So the engaged women escaped control and opened perspective for all of us.

Women’s Initiatives – support to women’s groups working in the field of women’s human rights.

Priorities are given: to groups and initiatives with genuine projects/programs that have less acess to other sources of funding, deprived on the grounds of unerdeveloped communities or organzational resources, or discriminated against because of the issues they deal with and to programs and projects with inovative and creative forms of public outreach.