Develop Women Leaders
“After attending these trainings, I feel that JASS is a fashion designer. By this I don’t mean that you come to design and measure us, but instead you let us measure ourselves and choose a design based on what is suitable for us and in our communities. From trainings with other organizations, we learn concepts but they are very heavy and hard to follow. With JASS, we are not going too far and you feel it out with us and help us to express ourselves by letting us extract what is inside us and determine what are the suitable things we can do in our community. It is very effective. We want to join JASS’ movement and partner with JASS in our movement.”
– Burmese activist
JASS builds and strengthens women’s leadership
JASS’ builds the individual and collective leadership of women – rural, urban, indigenous, young, LBTQI and HIV+ women – from diverse movements and organizations. We provide safe space, learning experiences, training and a rich body of resource material and well tested popular education curricula. We integrate feminist principles, power analysis and safety strategies for risky contexts in all we do.
We approach movement building as a sustained process, not a single event or one-off training. We accompany women over time, providing support, mentoring and opportunities for activists to engage in continued learning while organizing within their organizations and communities. The workshops and other gatherings provide safe spaces to develop critical thinking and skills, cultivate lasting relationships, debate issues, negotiate conflict, define common agendas, and strategize, and build collective power.
Our leadership and accompaniment model serves short- and long-term purposes:
- Prepares women to navigate, support one another and lead within their organizations and movements so their participation is not ignored, threatened, or rejected.
- Provides women with strategic, adaptable tools to bring back to their communities, creating a multiplier effect to mobilize others.
- Facilitates women’s participation and influence in key advocacy spaces to center their perspectives in dialogues around struggles for environmental, economic, and political justice.
In keeping with JASS’ continuing commitment to generate knowledge from practice, we produce innovative, practical tools, manuals, resources and training curricula to multiply the impact of our learning processes.