SEEING RED
Links and things from the CODE RED feminist collective. Visit our website for critical Caribbean feminist commentary.
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Caribbean Images
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Delegates from Barbados and Jamaica in deep conversation.
Follow #CatchAFyah for updates on this historic meeting which brings together representatives from youth, women’s, LGBT and feminist organisations from Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Haiti, Grenada, Guyana, St.Lucia, St. Kitts & Nevis, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica and St. Vincent & the Grenadines.
CODE RED is a feminist collective of Caribbean women and men. Join us on facebook or follow us on twitter.
CODE RED member reflects on Caribbean feminist mobilisation at the 2012 AWID Forum and shares her expectations for Catch A Fire: the region’s first young feminist grounding.
Read full blog entry here.
Catch A Fire!
Ignite the imagination.
Ideas & Action for social change.
It’s not a meeting. It’s a movement.
A new generation of Caribbean feminists will meet in Barbados for two intense days to strategise on how to collaborate regionally, strengthen feminist voices and initiatives in the region as well as mobilise around key issues like sexual and reproductive health and rights.
This is just the beginning for this group which includes members of traditional women’s organisations, regional feminist organisations, LBGT and youth organisations as well as women’s health organisations.
We are social entrepreneurs, peer educators, community activists, volunteers, gender and development professionals, a doctor working on rural women’s health, the coordinator of the young feminist fund, students, teachers, advocates, artists.
We come from Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Trinidad & Tobago and the Caribbean diaspora.
We recognise the need to reach out further within our own communities and across the other territories of the English, Spanish, French and Dutch-speaking Caribbean.
Watch this space for updates and to learn how you can get involved.
CODE RED is a feminist collective of Caribbean women and men. Re-blog to help us get the word out!
Catch A Fire the Caribbean: Regional Feminist Grounding
CODE RED will bring 10 young feminists from across the Caribbean to Barbados for a regional grounding in May (1-day meeting). We are looking for passionate and engaged leaders who are working at the community level. Do you know someone who should be there? Tell us! redforgender [at] gmail [dot] com.
The meeting is envisioned as a starting point towards regional feminist mobilisation of a new generation of Caribbean activists whose outlook is regional, who are well networked into their communities and who are connected to each other. Some young women from the region have started their own initiatives and could benefit from access to funding, mentorship and opportunities to grow and develop these initiatives into institutions. One of the objectives of this meeting is to determine how we can support each other and becoming stronger voices for social change in the region.
Persons who are working specifically in the area of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights are especially welcome.
The participation of 10 young women from the English-speaking Caribbean and Haiti will be fully funded. Country representation will be taken into account as part of the selection process.
Barbados-based activists and other participants from the region who have their own funding are also invited to participate.
Want to be there?
Send us your contact information (including SKYPE ID) and a brief bio outlining your activist work.
It’s that simple!
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
CELEBRATING TRAILBLAZING CARIBBEAN MEN: Haitian migrant moves from airline baggage handler, to pilot and now owner of airline and philanthropist.
Beyond the success story he makes an emotional and passionate appeal for Caribbean nations to recognise the humanity of Haitians and end the discrimination against them.
CODE RED is a feminist collective of Caribbean women and men. Join us!
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Two years ago, Haiti unanimously passed a law sharply raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. That doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it was two and a half times the then-minimum of 24 cents an hour.
This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).
”Obama administration put pressure on Haiti not to increase its minimum wage.
CODE RED is a feminist collective of Caribbean women and men. Join us on facebook.
“ The reason I’m HIV negative is because I don’t mess with Haitian girls. ”
“ The fact that we are seeing fewer severe cases [of cholera] is positive. It suggests that people are taking precautions and that there is a greater understanding in the community of the need to maintain strict hygiene and to seek medical assistance at the first sign of symptoms. ”
Federica Nogarotto, MSF field coordinator in St. Marc, Haiti
(via doctorswithoutborders)
Two Caribbean women (one from Haiti, one from the Dominican Republic) are among the Pan American Development Foundation’s 2010 Heroes of the Hemisphere.
Nicole Orelus (pictured above) runs cosmetology school, Ecole de Cosmétologie Communautaire, which provides some of the most vulnerable young girls with training in cosmetology. In addition to the skills of this good trade, Nicole has classes on preventing domestic violence and the importance of family planning, which has helped her graduates to take better control of their reproductive decisions.
source:Heroes of the Hemisphere
Where are the Caribbean tumblrs?
i know you’re out there. Put your hands up so i can see them!
Where are the Caribbean tumblrs?
Let me apologise up front if anyone finds this post offensive. That is not my intention.
The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine will be hosting 70 Haitian university students displaced by the quake. I am overjoyed that UWI has taken this initiative. I am some what worried that I only see two women’s faces in the group photo. It’s hard to raise this question especially since in the English-speaking Caribbean women usually outnumber men at UWI. Nonetheless, I’m wondering, should UWI not have been more sensitive to questions of equity and gender justice? All those students are deserving, so are the thousands more who are unable to complete their tertiary education. This is not about some crude man vs. woman numbers game. It’s just about how gender relations, as relations of power based on the construction of social difference, have very real material consequences—in this case (if what i’m inferring from the photo is correct), Haitian women’s unequal access to higher education. And while UWI did not create the unjust gender system in Haiti (or anywhere in the Caribbean for that matter), i’m not sure we should let them off the hook so easily for not being more sensitive to it.
In the end, all I have is this photo (and the others in the spread, including a shot of the two women together), linked to from the UWI STA facebook page. While a picture is worth a 1000 words, this one, I hope, is not telling the full story. Join us on facebook for the discussion and feel free to disagree with me. All voices welcome!
Haitian women share their lives.
