The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's Activist Institutes are two-week-long training spaces and are each attended by 20-25 LGBTI activists. IGLHRC has held five international LGBTI activist institutes since 2005.
The theme of each Institute is chosen by activists who have attended the trainings, focusing on particular groups or challenges and considering the needs of a community.
Below, find the Memoirs of the past three Institutes, detailing their programmes and methods. They also share activists' experiences and the information presented at each Institute, so that the Memoirs can be adapted or used by other activists and groups.
IGLHRC will soon make each of these reports available in Spanish, English and Portuguese.
Memoirs of Past Institutes:
Memoir of Training Institute for Trans and Intersex Activists La Falda, Cordoba, Argentine – 2005 Spanish · English · Portuguese
Memoir of Training Institute for Lesbian and Bisexual Women from Central American and Caribbean
The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery's Art at City Hall (SFAC Gallery) program has teamed up with the International Museum of Women to coordinate and present a large-scale photography exhibition at San Francisco City Hall that will include works by artists across the globe centered on the theme of women and the global economy. As a project of Economica, the Picturing Power & Potential photography exhibition will include a global celebration of women as economic change-agents in as many as fifty photographs selected from this call for submissions. The chosen submissions will be presented in the physical exhibition in San Francisco City Hall and to global audiences on the IMOW Web site.
GUIDELINES
ELIGIBILITY: All living artists worldwide working in a digital photography format. Because the exhibition is sited at San Francisco City Hall, we are especially interested in including works by artists from the Bay Area of California alongside artists from across the globe. All work should have been completed post 2000, and special attention will be paid to those who submit work created in the past five years. No entry fee required.
SUBJECT MATTER: We are looking for works that demonstrate how women are participating in the current global economy as leaders and agents of positive change.
MEDIUM: Photographic works that can be printed via a digital file are eligible. There is no set stylistic requirement; meaning that we will accept all two-dimensional works using any photographic process including photo-essays, portraits, candids and digitally derived or manipulated photos.
PRINTING AND FRAMING: All works will be printed in either a vertical or horizontal 16" x 20" format. The prints will be produced in San Francisco by RayKo Photo Center and framed in simple black metal frames with white mats.
The BFI press launch presented the 24th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, set to take place on 17 - 31 March 2010 with the world premiere of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister at the Odeon West End.
The Closing Night Gala screening on 31 Mar is Children of God, Kareem J Mortimer's gorgeously photographed first feature, which tells the classic tale of love, unfolding against a backdrop of violent homophobia and social unease in the Bahamas.
The first of the Centrepiece screenings is I Killed My Mother. Written, produced, directed by and starring 20-year-old Xavier Dolan, this witty and articulate film cleverly exposes the vulnerabilities and self-doubts of being a teenager.
The festival's second Centrepiece screening is Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, Leanne Pooley's award-winning documentary about Jools and Lynda Topp, folk-singing lesbian twins and national celebrities in New Zealand.
Queer Fruits Film Festival has been established to provide a vital regional screen culture event to enable the GLBTIQ communities and wider community to participate in the celebration and innnovation of international queer filmmaking culture.
Established as an independent queer film festival, Queer Fruits Film Festival seeks to complement the screen culture and outreach events of major urban film organisations, whilst also providing significant career development opportunities for regional filmmakers locally.
Queer Fruits Film Festival pays homage to its community roots in the fabulous and famous Tropical Fruits Inc. one of the longest running grassroots GLBTIQ organisations in Australia, established in 1988. A queer film program had been successfully screened for two years in 2006/2007 Co-ordinated by Duncan Brown, in conjunction with the annual Tropical Fruits’ New Years’ eve extravanga.
In 2009 the time was felt ripe to further extend the event to an exciting new phase.
The transgender hijra community, often known as 'wedding dancers', has suffered decades of discrimination and harassment in Pakistan. But things have started to change, with new rights and laws offering hope to this long-oppressed minority.
JUBA, 28 January 2010 (PlusNews) - In a large market in Juba, the regional capital of Southern Sudan, young women spend long afternoons lounging on beds in sweltering iron sheet rooms, waiting for men.
One girl, no more than 17, wearing a tight tee-shirt with the words "I love beer" emblazoned on it, points us in the direction of a different set of rooms, with the really young girls.
IRIN has come to the market with Cathy Groenendijk, director of a small local NGO, Confident Children Out of Conflict (CCC), which for the past two-and-a-half years has run a drop-in centre for children from desperately poor homes in Juba. Today, she is searching for 14-year-old Alice*, one of her protégés who recently rang her to say she had found accommodation in an area known to house mainly sex workers.
"I can't be angry with her, I know where her family lives - right on the street; I can't judge her for wanting something better for herself, and her body is all she has to bargain with," she said.
NAIROBI, 27 January 2010 (PlusNews) - In a community hall in Korogocho, a slum in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, an instructor takes his students through their paces, but unlike the usual fitness fanatics, today's class is a group of elderly women learning self-defence techniques.
I'm Worth Defending (IWD), which conducts the training, teaches self-defence to school-children, young men and women, and most recently, to elderly women in Korogocho and other Nairobi slums.
Frida Wambui*, 60, is one. Two years ago, three drunken young men broke into her home in the middle of the night and brutally raped her.
"They knew I lived alone... they broke [down] the door and came in and covered my eyes with a blanket, then they raped me... and left me there just lying on the floor," she told IRIN/PlusNews. "I can't believe people young enough to be my grandchildren could do that to me.
This is a memo from Asia Catalyst based on research and outreach conducted over the past six months into international sex work organizations and their current programs and advocacy. The aim is to share this information with Chinese sex worker groups as they develop programs and advocacy campaigns.
AN EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE SCREENING OF 'ISHQIYA' (ONE DAY ONLY IN NEW YORK)
Produced & CoWritten by Vishal Bhardwaj (Director of Maqbool, Omkara) Directed By: Abhishek Chaubey Starring : Vidya Balan, Naseeruddin Shah, Arshad Warsi Language: Hindi/Urdu Subtitles: NA Duration: 2 Hours
Accompanied by a Post Screening Conversation on 'The Changing face of Women's Sexuality in South Asian Cinema' with Sabrina Dhawan (Co-Writer Ishiqiya)
7 P.M @ Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick St, New York, NY Tickets $15 @ Door, $12 with Confirmed RSVPs to admin@engendered.org For More Info or Press Inquiries : 917-971-8722
Engendered Film Salons are a series of screenings & conversations on the changing visual landscape of South Asian intimacies and sexualities in film, media, image & contemporary art. They are accompanied by panels that explore the new visual vocabulary that transform words like home, diaspora, urban and rural into images that reveal and provoke newer ways of seeing and understanding. Conversations span urban & rural studies, sexuality, the body, gender tropes and contradictions, cinema, contemporary art and popular culture, and new perspectives in history.
Engendered is an annual, New York-based transnational arts and human rights festival that brings together the best in contemporary South Asian cinema, visual arts and performance to explore the complex realities of gender and sexuality in modern South Asia, especially at the intersection of ritual and religion. The festival is designed not only to raise awareness, but also act as a fulcrum to enter public dialogue, break silences and impact perceptions around issues of gendered identities, stereotyping, bias and sexual choice and further, how those issues relate to affirmation or violations of human rights, health rights and women's rights.
“Speak Up! Media Skills for the Empowered Sex Worker” is a weekend-long seminar offered by Sex Work Awareness (SWA) in New York City.
Speak Up is taught by Audacia Ray and Eliyanna Kaiser, two former executive editors of $pread magazine who have worked with mainstream and independent media as part of the sex worker rights movement for many years. The 2010 training will kick off with an evening seminar on Friday, April 9th and consist of two full days of workshop on April 10 & 11. They are able to train 10 people.
A video public service announcement, I Am A Sex Worker, which has been viewed 30,000 times online and has screened at events and film festivals in San Francisco, Amsterdam, and other cities;
Workshop participant Megan Andelloux has used her training to assist her in many media appearances debating her right to open her Center for Sexual Health and Pleasure in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Watch her on ABC News;
