The Long Journey: Sending Love to Grace Lee Boggs

99 year-old legendary American activist Grace Lee Boggs has been in hospice care in her Detroit home for the past two weeks. Recent posts on her social media outlets have intimated that Boggs may be “coming to the end of a long journey,” as she has put it. She is not conducting interviews, taking phone calls or receiving visitors. After a lifetime of inspirational and powerful community activism, having been at the forefront every major social justice movement in recent American history, including civil rights, feminism and environmental justice, she has earned a well-deserved rest.

However, her work does not stop – the posts also note that her contributions will be celebrated and advanced at an October conference called, “Reimagining Work and Culture” to be held Oct 18-20 in Detroit.

We at Sisters of Resistance would like and express our deep love and gratitude to Grace for her incredible life work, and send love to her and to her family, with our wishes for peace and strength at this time.

Read the whole article at Detroit Free Press.

UPDATE, 28 Nov 2014: Grace’s trustees have made an urgent request for donations to help support Grace during her time in hospice care. If you can, please make a donation here.

Demonstrate for Gaza

Gather in London on Saturday if you can and demonstrate for Gaza!

Saturday 9 August 2014
Assemble 12 noon
BBC Broadcasting House
Portland Place
London
W1A 1AA

End the occupation!
No to settler colonialism,
No to apartheid!
Long live Palestine,
Long live Gaza!

SoR in Interface: feminism, women’s movements and women in movement

Sisters of Resistance are delighted to appear in the latest edition of Interface. Our discussion with Dr Sara Motta, about resistance to patriarchy, the SoR blog and practicing feminism in the everyday, is available for download as an audio file here.

Volume three, issue two (November 2011):

Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement

Full PDF is available here

Issue editors: Sara Motta, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Catherine Eschle, Laurence Cox

Volume three, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme “Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement”. Interface is open-access (free), global and multilingual. Our overall aim is to “learn from each other’s struggles”: to develop a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions and national or regional contexts.

This issue of Interface includes 27 pieces in English and Spanish, by authors writing from / about Australia, Canada, Denmark, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US.

Women We Admire: Wangari Maathai (1940-2011)

Africa's Green Queen

WHO SHE IS: Wangari Maathai (1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011), Kenyan feminist, environmental and political activist.

WHAT SHE HAS ACCOMPLISHED: In the 1970s, she founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental organization that empowers women by planting trees to restore their environments. She was one of the first to pioneer this practice among  grassroots campaigns for environmental conservation.  According to The Guardian, “Her disdain for the economics promoted by Britain, the World Bank, and the west was huge: ‘The people at the top of the pyramid do not understand the limits to growth and they do not appreciate that they jeopardize the capacity of future generations to meet their own needs,’ she said.

Her solution, to work with the poorest and most vulnerable women to repair their own degraded environments and empower themselves, proved inspirational. Planting trees became a worldwide symbol of hope and community regeneration. The Green Belt Movement she started evolved into one of the first truly worldwide, grassroots, self-help organisations.” (John Vidal, Guardian, 27 Sept. 2011)

Women of the Green Belt Movement planting trees

Over the next 20 years, tens of billions of trees were planted by women as a direct result of her work. For this, she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2004) for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.”  She is known as one of Kenya’s greatest heroes of the last 50 years.

WHY WE LOVE HER: Mathaai’s politics was on point and her principles were put into practice. She combined environmentalism and feminism; she built an ecofeminist movement that went worldwide, united female poverty and environmental concerns to fight against patriarchy and for climate justice.  She was fearless, responding to extreme political repression with public acts of resistance, such as home barricades, hunger strikes and clashes with the police. Through it all, she wore traditional dress, repping for her culture. She remained defiant in her personal life as well, refusing to allow her husband to control her. Her passion, her example,  and the grassroots model she used will continue to inspire women as we fight for revolutionary change.

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The Women of #OccupyWallSt

Viva las mujeres de la revolution.

Venceremos!