Hey feminists!
It’s been a while! FemRev, the Organizing Committee of the 2011 Gathering, has taken the last seven months to rest, reboot and begin making the transition to becoming the Pan-Canadian Secretariat of the RebELLEs movement. We wanted to give you all an update on our goings-on of late.
Though we’ve been quiet recently, RebELLEs from coast to coast have been engaged in plenty of important activism. From monthly feminist brunches, to Take Back the Night marches, from presenting at the Women’s World Congress, to writing and publishing articles, as well as infusing the occupy movement with strong feminist analysis, young feminists are engaging and making change in their communities on a constant basis.
We were honored and excited to be able to send two RebELLEs, Lissie Rappaport and Anna-Celestrya Carr, to the World March of Women in the Philippines for the 8th WMW International Meeting this past November. We look forward to the new ideas, experiences and energy for organizing that they will share with us all. Stay tuned for an email about their experiences with this international grassroots feminist movement. http://www.worldmarchofwomen.org/index_html/en
FemRev has been busy writing reports about the 2011 Gathering, which will soon be available on the RebELLEs website for your viewing www.rebelles.org. Over the last couple of months, we have been meeting to discuss our transition to being the Pan-Canadian Secretariat (SP) and creating an action plan to help us in this process. The SP has been based in Montreal since FemRev became the new Organizing Committee (OC) in 2009. To give you a rough idea of what this entails… The SP helps the OC by sharing knowledge and experiences, tools and resources as well as offering support in many other capacities. The SP also moderates the list serve (so y’all don’t get junk emails from it!), supports collectives and helps organize teleconferences with collectives and regional mobilizers every couple of months.
In addition to this, we’re working on some ideas on how to move forward as a movement. We are looking at who will become the next Organizing Committee, and a new RebELLEs Writing Team is currently being established that will work on writing articles for the RebELLEs column in Canadian Dimension as well as pursuing other partnerships with progressive and feminist media (email us if this is of interest to you!). Last but not least, we are looking into how we, as a movement and as the SP, might move forward with the RAD document that was begun at the Gathering in May and what this process could look like. Again, stay tuned for some updates in the new year as we will want to hear from you on this!
In December, we here in Winnipeg will be busy keeping warm with our loved ones, so you might not hear from us again ‘til the new year. We look forward to continuing to build the movement in 2012!
In solidarity,
FemRev Collective
The Pancanadian Secretariat of the RebELLEs Movement
