Creating Cultures of Care & Resilience

Why are cultures of care important for strong women’s rights organisations? 

• A major source of unhappiness and stress in organisations is harmful organisational culture. None of us want to cultivate unhappiness in our teams, and furthermore unhappy and stressed team members can lead to high turnover and poor organisational performance
• Organisations that nurture self and collective care may be stronger and more adaptive to change
• Engaging in self and collective care helps us to align our external advocacy and programming values with our internal practice and behaviours
• Engaging in self and collective care is a political strategy. Oppressive systems benefit from the stress and exhaustion of social justice activists, so prioritising our wellbeing and joy can be a powerful strategy to resist oppressive forces 

Our Feminist Organisational Capacity Strengthening approach to Creating Cultures of Care and Resilience is based on the following principles: 

• Strengthening women’s organisations is important because they are crucial in maintaining and widening the space for voice, visibility, and rights of diverse women and girls
• Stronger women’s rights organisations are better able to establish, participate in and strengthen vital, vocal and visible feminist movements
• Organisations can address many of the challenges they face through an approach to organisational capacity strengthening based on feminist principles like intersectionality, challenging and redistributing power, deep democracy, the personal is political, non-violence & respect for the earth
• Recognising and challenging unequal power relations in internal organisational culture and practices will make us better prepared to recognise and transform power relations in society
• The wisdom is in the room. The solutions and creative ideas to address your organisational strengthening needs already exist in your organisation

Workshop Details

• Time required: 14 Hours (4 x 3.5 Hour Sessions over 2, 3 or 4 days

What does the workshop cover?  

The workshop will guide you and your team through a process to reflect on your organisational approach to self and collective care through engagement with a number of frameworks and activities, including: 

• Power dynamics like power-over, power-with, power-within and power-under
• Feminist principles like intersectionality, challenging and redistribution power, deep democracy, the personal is political, non-violence & respect for the earth
• Key concepts like self-care, collective care, resilience, stress, burnout, trauma and vicarious trauma
• Personal reflections on what makes us feel resilient and joyful 
• Imagining our organisations with a culture of care 

Groups will be supported, in a safe and fun environment, to reflect on how these principles might be translated into practice, so the organisation can become the ‘next best version of itself’.   

Learning outcomes 

By the end of the workshop you and your colleagues will have: 

• Engaged with feminist principles and power analysis frameworks and how they apply to your organisational culture
• Identified and shared self and collective care strategies
• Undertaken a guided collective reflection on current organisational practices that either support or discourage self and collective care
• Identified strategic priorities for strengthening your team’s culture of care
• Developed a concrete, actionable plan for strengthening cultures of at your organisation
• Developed a plan to track progress over time 

Who is this workshop for?  

This workshop is ideally suited to organisations, groups, teams or collectives who have a desire to more closely align their organisational systems, strategies and culture with women’s rights and feminist principles. 

About the facilitator  

Bronwyn Tilbury is the Feminist Movement Strengthening Advisor at IWDA. She identifies as a queer, cis-gendered, white woman from the minority world/global north. Bronwyn has worked with women’s rights organisations across the Oceanic Pacific and Southeast Asia for more than a decade to support their organisational and movement strengthening capacity. She has facilitated diverse groups across the region using feminist facilitation principles to create safe spaces for transformative conversations and outcomes.