(Most of) the Coordination Team Met in Cartagena, Colombia!
Camila, Euge, María Alejandra, Ursula, and Zoé met in Cartagena, Colombia, at the end of March. Sadly, we couldn’t cut through all the red tape around the Colombian visa process in time to get Nancy to the meeting, but she participated virtually every single day, and we are committed to anticipating migration issues and being proactive so this doesn’t happen again.
As regards the areas we worked on, we examined the FLAC’s roadmap, the evolution of our collective vision, the direction in which we’re heading, and the pieces that set us apart from other pooled funding collaboratives. The roadmap also describes the ways our community works cooperatively.
We also polished more specific objectives for each working group:
The Transformative Learning Working Group (TLWG) will ground the different collective reflections we’ve had on intersectionality as a framework for the FLAC and use a diverse set of learning tools to co-create a learning framework that stems out of questions such as: How do we distill the learnings the FLAC has acquired to inform our grantmaking? In terms of funding feminist climate justice action, who/what does the FLAC want to fund? How do we share power, democratize decision-making, and seize opportunities to co-learn?
The Governance, Community, and Care Working Group (GCCWG) will support the sustainable and care-centered expansion of the FLAC by assembling a Design Team of Co-conspirators and recruiting a Community Care Holder. The GCCWG will also co-design the FLAC’s in-person meeting agenda and continue to develop the community’s governance structure.
The Donor Advocacy Working Group (DAWG), for their part, will develop short-term (2023–2024) and long-term fundraising strategies and establish a process whereby we welcome colleagues of existing FLAC members and other strategic allies.
Additionally, the Coordination Team developed a draft document to describe the Design Team of Co-conspirators, discussed how to center community care practices as the FLAC expands, started to define the role of the Community Care Holder, and began to flesh out what we’ll need set in place for a communications strategy;
Since this was the first time Euge met the rest of the Coordination Team, we made it a priority to set aside time to clarify how we operate. We all come with different abilities and backgrounds, so we wanted to figure out the best way to build on each other’s skills. We also took advantage of our last day in Cartagena to go to the beach and get to know each other better while enjoying Cartagena’s sunny days.