Resourcing Our Resilience: Black Feminist Mapping Across the FiLiA Legacy Cities By Rosie Lewis and Pragna Patel (Project Resist)

‘We want a women's movement that is for all women, and we mean Black women who are from communities where they are already dealing with violence and abuse... we are campaigning on our own and we want support, or this isn't feminism.’[1]

[1] All quotes throughout are taken from Project Resist’s interviews with regional grassroots black and minoritised women’s groups.

Project Resist Logo

The FiLiA Legacy Project (Campaigns and Policy) is a three-year project that continues a feminist tradition of independent grassroots campaigning and policy making. Project Resist, a Black and minoritised-led feminist organisation, is supporting FiLiA’s project by ‘mapping’ and documenting (via consultation) the work of Black and minoritised women-led organisations who are based in and around six FiLiA ‘legacy’ cities: Manchester, Bradford, Glasgow, Portsmouth, Cardiff and Brighton. The FiLiA Legacy Project is about policy making from the frontline, centring rights-based activism and the lived experiences of women and girls still excluded from mainstream political punditry and law making. As the UK approaches a general election in which women’s rights appear to be of little concern to any of the political parties, this project is both timely and critically important.

Building Regional Resistance

‘It's as if BME women are second class citizens and have no rights. When I support women, I get threatened, I've lost contracts and jobs because I won't stop but there's a really big problem here. People don't know how violent these men are and what they do to control women in our community.’ 

Project Resist’s work highlights the often-discriminatory state and community context within which regional Black and minoritised organisations, groups and women exist. Regionally led women’s organisations and groups, particularly in the north of England, face higher levels of racism, isolation and ‘non-inclusion’ and a disproportionately low level of investment in and funding for issues that are often excluded from mainstream London-centric policy making.

Project Resist has been mapping FiLiA’s legacy cities by focusing on less visible groups and using existing contacts and networks to reach smaller grassroots community-based groups, as well as more established organisations. First-hand testimonies and organisational data have produced robust case studies to evidence the deleterious impact of regional policy-making and national legislation and politics on Black, minoritised and migrant women located in very different parts of the country. As a result, it is startlingly obvious that when existing mainstream policies and legislation fail to centre the concerns of Black and minoritised women and girls, they can be both antagonistic and harmful.

Fighting for Our Sister’s Rights

Project Resist has so far engaged thirty Black and minoritised women across the six FiLiA legacy cities who are, on a daily basis, taking a brave and bold stance in their communities to advocate for women’s concerns and rights. Black and minoritised women face the double jeopardy of racism and misogyny that also manifests through patriarchal religious and ‘cultural’ control and fundamentalism as well as harmful practices such as honour-based abuse, immigration related abuse and forced marriage. These are practices that are enabled by local political networks that are often characterised by cronyism and corruption.

‘The men in the Mosques and Gurdwaras who have power are the same men in the community who are telling the women not to report domestic abuse, not to bring shame on the community by not marrying men they don't want us to marry, the same men who tell girls they have to leave education... and the local authority and political leaders give them the license to do this.’

Organisations, groups and activists are often alone in their localities fighting for the rights of Black, minoritised and migrant women on all fronts, battling with the state, statutory services and with communities, as well as generic white-led women’s organisations and gender-neutral charities that fail to share resources. They are doing this whilst providing support (from crisis through to recovery) to the most vulnerable women and children fleeing violence in a context where there is a cost-of-living crisis, vehement media-led anti-migrant rhetoric and a shocking political and cultural shift towards nationalist populism. For example, single migrant women and those with children accommodated in Glasgow are experiencing a range of draconian state measures that police, restrict and diminish further their liberty and safety. As a result, local migrant led women’s groups have come together to advocate for the human rights of women who have been trafficked, sexually exploited, abused and tortured, while also providing them with financial subsistence and necessities such as blankets, culturally appropriate foods, and baby formula milk with little or no support or funding and resources.

Women are terrified about the Rwandan policies, they are underground, and it means they are in more danger. We've not seen any of the big women's organisations up here say anything about this, and none of the women can access their services because they have no recourse to public funds. Who is listening to their voices? Who is fighting for them?’

In addition, Covid-19 has had a devastating impact on Black and minoritised women and children’s health and their civil liberties. Multi-agency restrictions that emerged during the pandemic stymied the implementation of the equality duties as many statutory agencies ditched them. This encouraged the further exclusion of Black and minoritised women’s organisations at a strategic and consultative level at a time when the cost-of living crisis was already immobilising their work. In short, Black women in some regions no longer had a seat at the strategic policy table.

‘We are told all the time there is no funding for you, because you work with migrant women or there is no funding because you train women and don't just do domestic abuse. It's clear racism because we are an African-led organisation and we are treated with suspicion. We get asked endlessly about our accounts as if we can't be trusted with money. This kind of racism and discrimination isn't seen and no one will help us with it or fight with us outside of our community but it's how decisions about policy and funding are written in ways to keep us out.’

Following the pandemic, gender neutralisation and the corporatisation of the domestic abuse sector has accelerated, alongside the deliberate excision of migrant women’s rights under the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act. This has resulted in diminished funding for Black and minoritised women’s organisations, especially those who support migrant women’s rights. Black and minoritised women’s work is also increasingly being co-opted by white-led women’s organisations who are seen to be ‘representing’ all women’s concerns at a policy or strategic level but are routinely failing to articulate Black and minoritised women’s concerns and rights.

Policy Making and Campaigning from the Frontline

Structurally and politically, Project Resist wants to ensure that that Black and minoritised-led frontline organisations and groups are strategically placed in political debates, in campaigns for women’s rights and in the national policy-making sphere. We will work in sisterhood and solidarity with FiLiA, with whom we share common values and a political vision for the liberation and empowerment of all women including marginalised women and girls.[2] Connecting and engaging with organisations, particularly underfunded and un-constituted groups is a key part of grassroots Black feminist collectivist organising. In building solidarity and sisterhood, we are building the opportunity to share resources amongst groups and to build a movement outside the mainstream power structures that is resilient and sustainable. If we don’t come together and share resources and power equitably, feminist solidarity will be reduced to lip service, and will work in the interest of ‘some’ women and not all. Project Resist’s involvement in the FiLiA Legacy Project will, we hope, help to bridge the existing gap between regional networks of community activists, campaigners and policy makers. Above all it will help position the involvement of Black and minoritised women at the forefront and centre of FiLiA’s policy making and campaigning work.

(Postscript)

Would you like to get involved in the FiLiA Legacy Project?

If you are a Black and minoritised-led organisation or group based in Manchester, Bradford, Glasgow, Portsmouth, Cardiff or Brighton and would like to get involved in the FiLiA Legacy Project, Project Resist are keen to hear about your organisation and to interview you. Please contact FiLiA’s Project Co-ordinator Julie McGee: projectcoordinator@filia.org.uk

About Project Resist:

Project Resist is a black and minoritised-led women’s organisation whose vision is to empower marginalised Black and minoritised women to realise their rights and freedoms in all aspects of their civil, social, political, economic and cultural lives. Through robust and fearless advocacy, we strive to challenge all systems of power, privilege and censorship that stand in the way of women’s access to equality, dignity, peace, and security.

You can find us on X @ProjectResistUK and our website which will be launched in July is projectresist.org.uk.

About the FiLiA Legacy Project:

FiLiA has held large feminist conferences in cities in the UK ever since 2013. FiLiA stays in contact with women in the cities where conferences have taken place and is involved in projects to make women’s lives better in each one. FiLiA aims to build sisterhood and solidarity, amplify the voices of women and to defend women’s human rights and to do this locally, nationally and globally. We’re keen to hear about women’s concerns, what they think the big issues for women are and of the campaigns they’re already involved in to make things better for women. We are also just as interested in the campaigning that you think should be going on but isn’t.

Through the FiLiA Legacy Project ‒ Campaigns and Policy, (FLP ‒ CP), we want to make sure women’s voices are heard in ways that lead to policy changes where it matters to women. We want women themselves to know how to campaign and to support them when they do so. The project is just beginning, and we’ll make sure that we have ways of asking women what’s important to them throughout. It matters to us that we authentically represent women and that we help women achieve the changes that genuinely matter to them.

[2] By referring to ‘marginalised’ women we refer, as FiLiA does, to a: ‘those who are disadvantaged and multiply marginalised due to sex, race, class, disability, sexuality, age, poverty, sanctuary-seeking status, working-class women, otherwise minoritised women, those who have been in care and/or have experience of the criminal justice system or have experienced violence and abuse.’