Gender Alliance: The Feminist Manifesto
The Gender Alliance is a cross-network initiative bringing together feminists from the BMW Herbert Quandt Foundation Responsible Leaders Network, the Global Diplomacy Lab, and the Bosch Alumni Network.
In the forerun of the Summit (26-28 August 2020), the founding members Colette Mazzucelli and Trinidad Saona with contributions by Thandi Dyani, Julia Profeta Johansson, Chi Nguyen, Eirliani Abdul Rahman, Elsa Marie D’Silva and Carolina Sheinfeld, formulated this Feminist Manifesto:
The Feminist Manifesto:
1. We are promoters of gender equality. In each of our respective roles, personal, family, professional, as members of the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Network, we push for a Feminist Agenda to foster gender equity and work actively in closing gender gaps in line with Sustainable Development Goal 5.
2. We advocate for a gender inclusion perspective. With the aspiration, as articulated in the 2030 Agenda that no one is to be left behind, we affirm that women must have more spaces of representation and participation in contributing to the realization of the 17 SDGs.
3. We champion gender equality regardless of sexual identity. The gender issue is one that masculine, feminine, common, and neutral involving persons of all ages who must be actively engaged to close the gender gaps.
4. We support each other as Responsible Leaders. We encourage each other in the suggestion and scale up of ideas to achieve gender equity.
5. We aim to foster an empathetic approach to feminism. We acknowledge beginning without a common understanding and strive to create a broader foundation to include others without prejudice.
6. We call for an agenda to make the next decade a transformative one to achieve feminist goals. We strive in a transversal way to reach a comprehensive understanding of gender equity that is cross-cutting, diverse, intercultural, and interdisciplinary.
7. We believe that gender balance in all sectors is one of the main keys to transforming the current economic systems, which are broken, by leveraging the complementarity of skills and perspectives among diverse genders.
8. It is our goal to engage with a gender focus throughout 2020 and beyond when hiring, developing new programs, and initiating projects, in funding and other areas of work to accelerate closing the gender gap.
9. We nurture an understanding of gender equity that is cross-cutting, interdisciplinary, and holistic with awareness of religious pluralism, social prejudice against the disabled, and class inequalities.
With these principles, the Gender Alliance articulates the premise for their Agenda and their Call to Action. As the Gender Alliance organizes diverse public events and initiates specific research projects, additional principles of the Feminist Manifesto shall be elaborated.
You can get an even closer idea about the work of the Gender Alliance and the respective contributions of involved GDL members by reading the articles about Elsa Marie D'Silva, Eirliani Abdul Rahman, Elizabeth Maloba and Imran Simmins and their share in the project.
Published on August 11, 2020.
About the authors
Colette Mazzucelli is an American associate professor, academic, author and editor with experiences in the diplomatic sphere as well as expertise in the field of International Relations with a focus on conflict resolution, radicalization, religion and Europe.
Trini Saona is a journalist and Chilean diplomat who continuously explores new methodologies and tools of diplomacy in order to achieve a new understanding of their practical use.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg5
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/gender-gap-report-gender-parity-how-to-speed-up-progress
https://cfc-swc.gc.ca/gba-acs/course-cours-en.html
https://www.heforshe.org/en/barbershop
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/
Trini Saona is a journalist and has been a diplomat with the Chilean Foreign Service since 2010. She is currently posted to the Mission of Chile to the European Union and the Embassy in Belgium and Luxembourg. At the MFA, she previously served at the Embassy of Chile in Mexico, in Santiago, at the Directorate of Strategic Planning and the offices of the Under-Secretary and the Minister, and at ProChile, at the directorate-general for exports promotion.
Between 2015 and 2017, she worked at the Alfredo Zolezzi Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by Chilean innovator Alfredo Zolezzi, whose innovation model aims to connect advanced science and technology with emerging social and environmental challenges.
In diplomacy, her main interest is in exploring new methodologies and tools in depth to achieve a new understanding of their practical use. She studied for an MBA at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile between 2017 and 2019, with the aim of identifying different frameworks of leadership and strategy applicable to diplomacy.
Trini is an alumna of Training for International Diplomats at Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, and a member of the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Network. She speaks Spanish, English and French, and her main hobby is photography.
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Learn more about Trinidad in her latest interview.
Chi Nguyen is the Ontario Liberal Party candidate for Spadina Fort-York. Chi will be running in the upcoming provincial election in 2022, with the goal to represent the area where she grew up in the Ontario Legislative Assembly.
Previously, she served as the Managing Director at Parker P. Consulting, a social enterprise consulting firm owned by White Ribbon. White Ribbon is the world’s largest movement of men and boys working to end violence against women and girls, promote gender equity, healthy relationships and a new vision of masculinity.
Ms. Nguyen has been recognised for her contributions to improving the lives of women and girls throughout Canada by the Governor General (2004) and the YWCA (1999). These efforts included running a national Young Women Vote campaign, the creation of the McGill Women in House program and co-authoring the “Little Black Book for Girls”.
She serves on the advisory of Jane’s Walk, a global movement of citizen-based walks that connect people with their own stories about their communities.
In her free time, she likes to race streetcars on her bicycle, eat delicious food, run and quilt.
Eirliani Abdul Rahman is a co-founder of YAKIN (Youth, Adult Survivors & Kin In Need), an NGO working in the field of child rights and child protection issues, and a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council.
In September 2015, the #FullStop to #childsexualabuse campaign that Eirliani led on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi reached 16 million people over six weeks. She won the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Award the same year.
Eirliani edited Kailash Satyarthi’s book Will for Children, a collection of essays on child labour published in 2016. Her own book Survivors: Breaking the Silence on Child Sexual Abuse, a collection of true accounts by survivors, was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2017. It won joint second prize in the 2020 Golden Door Awards. She also contributed a case study to the medical textbook Essentials of Global Health, co-edited by Babulal Sethia, Honorary Fellow and former President of the Royal Society of Medicine, which was published by Elsevier in London in 2018. The book won first prize in the Public Health category at the 2019 British Medical Association book awards.
Eirliani worked in Singapore’s Foreign Service from 2005 to 2015, serving in Berlin as First Secretary (Political) and then in Delhi as Political Counsellor. From June 2015 to November 2017 she was a member of the Advisory Council of the Global Diplomacy Lab. She is a Fellow of the London-based Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
Eirliani is pursuing a doctorate in public health at Harvard University. She speaks Malay, English, German and Russian.
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Read more about Eirliani in her latest blog article. You can also read her articles about her polar expedition and about human trafficking and learn more about her work, activism and contribution to the Gender Alliance.
Elsa Marie D’Silva is the founder and CEO of Red Dot Foundation (Safecity), a platform that crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in December 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon and Nepal.
Elsa Marie is an alumna of the US State Department’s Fortune Program, a fellow with Rotary Peace, Aspen New Voices and Vital Voices, and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women. Moreover, she has won the Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award launched by Dušan Stojanović (European Angel Investor of the Year 2013) and the SheThePeople’s Digital Woman Award in Social Impact.
Prior to Safecity, she spent 20 years in the aviation industry, where she worked with Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines. In her last role in aviation, she was Vice President Network Planning.
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Read more about Elsa's work at Safecity and see for yourself in this documentary. She also has a very clear vision for the Global Diplomacy Lab.
Throughout her career, Carolina Sheinfeld has sought to advance meaningful change from a local to a global level. Working with the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) she has been able to design and implement initiatives that create safe and welcoming learning environments and through these has reached over 1.5 million students and their families. Prior to coming to LACOE, Carolina Sheinfeld managed a highly regarded programme for immigrants in need of humanitarian protection at the largest legal aid firm in the United States, providing legal assistance, case management and community education to asylees and refugees in the Greater Los Angeles area.
Throughout her career, Carolina Sheinfeld has been actively involved in developing and executing strategies to raise the visibility of the agencies that she represents. She has built and strengthens coalitions and advocated extensively to generate systemic change in the area of immigrant and refugee integration. She is a seasoned trainer and presenter and has thrived as convener and event organiser, both through the Refugee Forum and the Asylum Collaborative of Los Angeles.
Carolina Sheinfeld is a Rotary Peace Fellow and a UN Alliance of Civilizations Fellow. In 2017, she joined the Welcoming Communities Transatlantic Exchange network, a group of integration practitioners in the United States and Germany. She has been part of the BMW Responsible Leaders Network since 2015.
Trini Saona is a journalist and has been a diplomat with the Chilean Foreign Service since 2010. She is currently posted to the Mission of Chile to the European Union and the Embassy in Belgium and Luxembourg. At the MFA, she previously served at the Embassy of Chile in Mexico, in Santiago, at the Directorate of Strategic Planning and the offices of the Under-Secretary and the Minister, and at ProChile, at the directorate-general for exports promotion.
Between 2015 and 2017, she worked at the Alfredo Zolezzi Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by Chilean innovator Alfredo Zolezzi, whose innovation model aims to connect advanced science and technology with emerging social and environmental challenges.
In diplomacy, her main interest is in exploring new methodologies and tools in depth to achieve a new understanding of their practical use. She studied for an MBA at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile between 2017 and 2019, with the aim of identifying different frameworks of leadership and strategy applicable to diplomacy.
Trini is an alumna of Training for International Diplomats at Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, and a member of the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Network. She speaks Spanish, English and French, and her main hobby is photography.
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Learn more about Trinidad in her latest interview.
