Rethink Grantees. Part 1/3
The results are in. Months of work resulted in a group of people from across Europe submitting, discussing, and voting on proposals for progressive activism work. Today the FundAction Facilitation Group reviewed the votes for the first round of Rethink grants. In the end, FundAction will fund 8 applications with grants of up to €5000.
These are the first round Rethink grantees:
Guerrilla Translation Reloaded. Submitted by Ann Marie Utratel (Guerrilla Translation)
Guerrilla Translation is a translation collective specialising in socially relevant topics including the Commons, P2P, activism, cooperativism, gender rights, etc. We help translators use their skills to build a universally accessible knowledge commons. We created an economic model combining pro-bono and paid contract work, valued by the complementary metrics where a percentage of paid work is reinvested in rewarding pro-bono work. We are organising an in-person workshop to plan the next stages of implementation. Our plan is to take our current ad-hoc model and create an open-source accounting and management system grounded in the recognition of carework and which inspires community engagement.
The Rethink fund will kickstart this process by supporting a three day meeting to discuss our challenges and directions for the future. By creating a focused space for our translators and governance pioneers, we will develop and document Guerrilla Translation’s economic and governance model and discuss its sustainability strategy, onboarding process and expansion to new languages. This workshop will be facilitated by Zemos98 and attended by trusted experts associated with the P2P Foundation, P2Pvalue, Enspiral, P2P Models, Holochain, Shareable, SMartBE, and other organizations.
Exploring Collective Liberation. Submitted by Ali Tamlit (Resist Renew)
Our 3 day course on Exploring Collective Liberation is a space where we will examine solidarity, oppression and identities and how all that plays out in activist spaces. This space will be used to explore, discuss and experiment with these challenging topics in a way that is both authentic to the pain that is tied up in them but also is compassionate to each of us as human beings. We recognise that this is life-long work and that this weekend is a contribution to a journey, rather than a quick fix to bring about ‘diversity’ in a questionnaire.
Given the current context of increasing racist street attacks in the UK, especially on Muslim women, following the Brexit vote, we decided to primarily focus on racism. However, collective liberation means none of us are free until we are all free, so we want to respect and include all aspects of our identities in our work.
Climate Camp Poland. Submitted by Kuba Gogolewski (Rozwój TAK — Odkrywki NIE)
Our climate is changing. The extreme weather events are getting more frequent and more devastating with each passing year. Yet some governments and some companies seem not only not to notice but try to get as much fossil fuels as possible out of the ground while they still can. One of the ways to stop this is to come together and working hand in hand understand what unites us rather than what divides us and to send a clear signal that there is no space for new fossil fuel infrastructure in 2018 and after. This is the goal of the first Polish climate camp — creating a platform for knowledge and experience exchange for people from different countries and backgrounds, understanding the needs and concerns of the people living in the regions that could be impacted by new fossil fuel infrastructure as well as facilitating their meeting with representatives of communities most threatened by climate change around the globe.
Coordination will be undertaken by the Polish activists and members of the NGO community and basing on the rich experience of previous climate camps in Europe a series of joint activities will be developed. Sessions developing in-depth particular aspects of the movement, providing space to learn about the challenges of the Polish climate movement as well as to listen to and get inspired by representatives from other countries, joint planning, networking, activism and non-violent direct action trainings and much more will allow all those with energy and the will to quicken the demise of the fossil fuel industry and open spaces for the new-renewables based resource efficient economy to grow for close to a week’s time.
