FROM ME TO WE - feminist leadership mapping initiative

An initiative of Feminist Hiking Collective and Srilatha Batliwala, in collaboration with Closer Than You Think

The Feminist Hiking Collective is a small non-profit organization co-founded by young feminists. In late 2020, we published an introductory article about collective feminist leadership, building on the work and experience of the feminist organisations, groups and movements that have inspired our work, along with our own insights. We have since held dialogues with different feminists around the world as part of a reflection project to unpack collective feminist leadership, and have documented these discussions as a way of thanking and honouring the collective work that has inspired and informed us. We also hope this will help to record where we have come from and explore new pathways forward.  

The dialogue process included several discussions with Srilatha Batliwala, and we realized that there is very little documentation of the vast array of experiments and experiences with collective feminist leadership. Thus the idea emerged for the From me to we initiative (De mí a nosotres) – our attempt to map the practices of collective feminist leadership worldwide. We are aiming for a collective feminist process of knowledge building, through mapping, documenting and archiving collective feminist leadership experiences from around the world. We are proud to assert that this is a voluntary and collective initiative – there are no donors and no funding behind us, and its implementation depends on your participation.   

We are collaborating with Closer Than You Think, co-led by Ruby Johnson, Devi Leiper O’Malley, and Swatee Deepak. Closer Than You Think is a hybrid ideas studio and consultancy collective working at the intersection of activism, philanthropy and art. Between 2013-2019, Ruby Johnson and Devi Leiper O’Malley served as the first Co-Executive Directors of FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund. Similar to our From Me To We Project, they are documenting co-leadership experiences, including their own, and designing creative and practical tools to support different practices of co leaders in feminist organisations and beyond.  Our two collectives are finding ways to weave together the two projects, seeing the value of generative learning, and connectivity of our work, and the powerful feminist praxis of embodying collective leadership in the way we work. We seek to launch some of our research together later this year through the co-creation of shared spaces and continue to find ways to deepen collaboration as the work evolves.  We meet regularly, share ideas and explore how to connect our work with intentionality.  
 

The From me to we initiative is a collective and iterative process that aims to create and update a creative map interweaving insights from practices of collective feminist leadership, together with stories, through an open call for submissions. This initiative is part of the Unpacking Collective Feminist Leadership project, and is grounded in this introductory article that includes resources and references, for what we consider the elements and core aspects of the practice of collective feminist leadership. The first creative map and stories were published on 1 October 2022. The map art and visual concept is created by Kruthika NS - @theworkplacedoodler

Our hope is to gather the stories of resistance and change in the way leadership is shared and practiced, aligned with feminist values and politics, and highlight how these attempt to dismantle and reconstruct the dominant neoliberal, competitive and self-centred paradigm and narrative of leadership. It aims to explore and go deeper into the structures and practices that underpin and sustain collective feminist leadership and power, and their attempts to create new models of collective feminist governance within groups, organizations and movements. We believe there are multiple and diverse spaces, organizations, movements, collectives, communities, groups and contexts practising collective feminist leadership – and that while these  practices and experiences may be in diverse locations and contexts, they are all interconnected. They are weaved in transnational constellations of transformative feminist power - drawing inspiration from FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund's constellations concept and vision.

This participatory and iterative mapping seeks to focus on the interconnection and commonalities, and support the sharing of  experiences and learnings, so that each innovation inspires others. The initiative is a continuous work-in-progress, which is why we commit to updating the map and stories through a regular call for submissions, and aim to reach a range of spaces and realities.

This is a collective and transformative political process of mapping, documenting and archiving collective feminist leadership experiences. We believe this process is vital to create new feminist narratives of power, collective inspirations and aspirations, to learn from plural experiences and continually deepen radical practices, and that the insights and practices gleaned from these stories can be the seeds that create new knowledge and practice to advance our shared goal of a just and collective feminist society that is grounded in our collective power,  interconnection and belonging to nature.

Spanish page: https://feministhikingcollective.org/de-mi-a-nosotres