Empowering women and girls in Mexican communities

Girls and women in Mexico live in a context of generalized gender-based violence in the spaces where our lives take place, such as the community context, the home, or the intimate partner. This violence also accumulates disadvantages due to conditions of class, ethnicity, disability, migratory status, and others.

Fondo Semillas currently funds 25 groups that prevent,  combat, and address violence against girls and women. This funding has directly benefited more than 12,300 girls and women, and the work of the groups has benefited more than 49,800 of them.

The groups we support, thanks to your donations, carry out different strategies to prevent violence and provide tools to women who are already experiencing violence, so that they can break out of the violent circles in which they find themselves.

Some of the activities carried out by the supported organizations are:

Workshops to learn how to identify and prevent risk factors for violence, to raise women’s awareness of their rights, and to make them aware of the organizations available to them to file complaints.

Training on gender and violence prevention for different actors, such as companies and public servants, so that they implement policies to prevent and eliminate violence against women.

Promoting the economic autonomy of indigenous women is a strategy to prevent violence because, in the experience of the organizations, the fact that a woman has her own income allows her to feel secure and strong enough to escape from violent realities.

Workshops in integral feminist self-defense for young and adult women to prevent and/or escape from situations of potential risk.

Other groups, such as Red por la Igualdad de Género (REDIGE), address the mental health dimension of women who have experienced violence or those who accompany them, providing them with tools for collective care and psychotherapeutic accompaniment.

The Colectiva de Sobrevivientes de Feminicio, Más Sueños, and Las Temis offer free legal advice and representation and accompany the processes of access to justice for women who have experienced violence. They promote spaces where survivors share their experiences, which allows them to learn about the strategies that have worked best in accessing justice.

Undoubtedly, organized women have become agents of change in their family, school, or work environment, raising awareness of violence based on their experiences and promoting the valuing of girls and women.

The organizations we fund are characterized by working with approaches other than punitivism, which has proven to be a failure in the elimination of violence. Continuing to fund, strengthen, and articulate these groups is fundamental, given the effectiveness of their work in preventing and transforming the realities of women and girls.  

Testimonials:

“The Juntas comemos, juntas florecemos meetings are the most beautiful spaces we have been able to build. On various occasions, some of them have opened up about their situations, they have cried with us, and we have embraced each other to bring together our broken parts, but from a place of love and trust. One of them confessed to all of us, proudly saying, that thanks to those spaces of empowerment, she had gained the strength to leave her husband who had been abusing her; at this assertion, we all shouted “You are not alone”, and this simple phrase becomes so real that it takes on all the meaning and feels very authentic”. (Nos queremos vivas Neza)