Women's Healing and Community Building Through Creativity

"We take up space/ By being in community/ Together/ And saying that we/ Won’t tolerate this/ Anymore," writes community activist Jasmin Rogers, honoring the community of women who support her every day. Her words, published in a piece by The Miami Herald, resonate in commemoration of Women’s History Month in March.

Even though the article is centered in #MeToo stories turned into poetry and the work of female artists to illustrate their testimonies, the piece is also a reminder of how the philanthropic field has a crucial role in advancing women's rights, as an opinion piece by Tynesha McHarris, program officer at the NoVo Foundation, and Ada Williams Prince, program strategy lead at Pivotal Ventures, in The Chronicle of Philanthropy points out.

“I think it is time for everyone to become aware of these issues and to fight for the life and dignity of women, to stop normalizing the exploitation of the female body, to stop overlooking small and big acts of disrespect and to celebrate the individuality, beauty, fertility of women, who are cyclical, perceptive, sensitive, intuitive and sisters,” said Isabel Ruiz Tello, an engraving artist, who according to The Miami Herald, worked with a community brigade to assist the victims of the earthquake that shook Mexico in September 2017 that also worked with affected people to help them heal through art therapy.

Extrapolating this conversation to philanthropy, McHarris and Williams write:

We are often the leaders of uphill battles to bring racial justice and understanding of how gender, race, and so many other issues intersect. Yet it is a missed opportunity when our advocacy efforts are treated as tangential pet projects rather than an essential philanthropic strategy.

Explore here The Miami Herald piece.

Image: Pixabay / OpenClipart-Vectors