Our collective projects

Mountain Women of the World is a collaborative project by non-profit organisation Empowering Women of Nepal, non-profit organisation Feminist Hiking Collective, groups Kilimanjaro Women and las Cholitas Escaladoras de Bolivia, groups Mujeres a la Cumbre, Topchu Art Group and Women Who Hike-Africa.

The project aims to build a transnational network of mountain women*, build mountain women's collective feminist leadership, strengthen economic justice, narrate a collective mountaineering story and foreground the collective knowledge and experience of mountain women in protecting mountains.  

We aim to foreground the fundamental importance of collectively protecting mountains, to promote diversity as elements of deep richness and shared learning, to create and sustain a narrative of mountaineering as a collective experience that builds women's collective power, thus encouraging more women to get involved with mountaineering, and as a tool for collective care, sharing and solidarity, to build humility, resilience, and our reciprocity with and belonging to Mother Earth.  

United, equal, supporting and caring for each other to tell a collective feminist hiking story. 

The mountain unites us. Together we transform!  

*with the term "women" we always mean people self-identifying with this gender.

As at the Feminist Hiking Collective our work is aimed at building collective feminist leadership, we aim to publish a range of collaborative dialogues, articles and resources to unpack it (or at least try!) as a collective reflection project. We would be very happy to receive contributions and further reflections on this, as this is very much a working document and it is not meant to be a fully comprehensive analysis – it aims to be part of our grounding and analysis work that forms our practice.

The project aims to include tools for system transformation, from the inner to the wider society levels, collaborating with feminist groups, organisations and people to collectively reflect, build awareness and analyse the structures that underpin the neoliberal capitalist individualist patriarchal system, and unpacking different elements to build collective feminist leadership, mapping some of its practices worldwide, and grounding the project in a decolonial vision, ensuring dialogues and narratives are not extracting or de-contextualising knowledge, epistemologies and wisdom, but rather co-creating a collective and diverse feminist narrative that honours and acknowledges the collective experiences, work, struggles and resistance of groups and movements across the world.

We have written an introductory article to the project - you can find it here. This initial article is only an initial unpacking of collective feminist leadership, and aims to be followed by dialogues, co-authored pieces and initiatives that focus on specific themes.

We would like to acknowledge and express our profound gratitude to those feminist groups, collectives, networks and organizations whose work have  collectively inspired and grounded our reflections and our practice: JASS, CREA, FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund, Iniciativa Mesoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos (IM-Defensoras), Ni Una Menos, NDN Collective, Non Una di Meno, AWID, FAMM Indonesia and many more.

Building We - for Feminist Democracies is a project of Feminist Hiking Collective with the support of JASS 

Capitalism leaves us little energy to reflect, unlearn, critically analyse and learn. In such context, this process was a rebellion aimed to embrace wisdom, to value and honour the analyses coming from the experiences from movements and groups across time and geographies, and from our own experiences. This project does not aim to propose a “new model" or a "vision for the future", but rather to learn from the wisdom emerged and emerging from the multiple practices reviewed.  The project aims to document experiences, elaborate on practice-based tools and learnings of and for ‘what could be called’ feminist democracies.                         The project includes elaborating on collective feminist leadership and power, collective care, nonextractive learning, decolonisation of knowledge, collective accountability and responsibility. It will elaborate on the meaning and possibility (and necessity) of feminist democratic practices at any ‘scale’ of governance and organising — exploring autonomous feminist governance whilst also exploring the significance of democracy, grounded in our interdependence and belonging to nature. We will also learn from how other beings in nature organise to collectively thrive. 

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

The From me to we initiative is a collective and iterative process that aims to collect and distribute a creative map interweaving and describing the practices of collective feminist  leadership, through an open call for submissions on a yearly basis. This initiative 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. We aim to publish a map with collective feminist leadership stories renewed regularly, starting with the launch of the first creative map on 1 July 2022.