Feminist Popular Education
Popular education is a participatory approach to political learning where people critically examine their lives, contexts, and the issues that matter most to them to develop and shape relevant strategies for action.
JASS’ approach to feminist movement building has feminist popular education (FPE) as the foundation for critical consciousness, feminist movement leadership, power analysis, alliance building and strategy development. FPE recognizes the need to address the power dynamics of gender, race, and sexuality that silence and exclude our bodies and our “personal” lives as part of the story of oppression and liberation to give rise to genuinely transformative strategies for everyone. We draw on the thinking of Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, Malena de Montis, Mariela Arce de Leis, Marcos Arruda, Ella Baker, and others.
JASS political facilitators apply the same core principles in every region:
Over the last 12 years, JASS has brought its tools and methodology to dozens of movement building schools, cross movement dialogues, and other movement spaces. As a result, FPE has trained thousands of women to be strong and effective leaders and catalyzed many feminist networks and cross-issue alliances among diverse people and organizations. These include:
In 2019, JASS launched Feminist Movement Building (FMB) 3.0, a bold five-year initiative aimed at building and activating stronger movement infrastructure, strengthening and sharing our political education curricula and growing the political facilitation capacity within JASS and with women activists in each region. By 2024, together with our partners, we will have created a skilled and interconnected network of 3,000 grassroots movement leaders who are organizing thousands, forging and mobilizing alliances, and building the solutions we need to tackle the challenges before us and withstand the inevitable backlash and repression.