IWDA partner agency Women’s Action for Change (WAC) has their September newsletter WACky Peace now available online.

Inside readers can find articles on WAC’S 2009 play ‘Bats and Birds’ which “uses the bats and birds of Fiji to discuss racism, child rights, community care and cooperation, environmental sustainability of Fiji forests, nonviolence and peacebuilding.”  Readers can also learn about WAC’s informal settlements program, and read an interview with Losana Buli, member of WAC’s informal settlements women’s network.

Claire Rowland, IWDA Program Manager also contributed to this newsletter with an article on trade and gender in the Pacific. As well as profiling staff and management collective members, the WACky newsletter also calls upon readers to share their useful environmental ideas, poetry, examples of successful individual and community action, or simply a green message or concern-especially from small-island states - in lead up to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Women’s Action for Change (WAC) was founded in 1993 by a group of local feminist women who identified a need for more community-based, participatory work on gender equality issues for diverse women in Fiji.

The dream of this group was to create a sustainable community-based organisation using a wide variety of theatre and arts-based learning methods, working toward full gender equality and social justice for all.

WAC believes that work to envision and create a gender equal future necessarily includes conflict transformation, active nonviolence and peacebuilding, and always an engagement with the personal as political.

16 years on, WAC works in 12 provinces around Fiji (with limited regional and international work), using participative arts to connect with people in remote, rural and urban communities, and especially working among individuals and groups, including women and girls, experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, marginalisation, violence and poverty.

WACky Peace Newsletter PDF

IWDA has supported Women’s Action for Change in Fiji for over 4 years; initially supporting their Violence Against Women program that worked at trying to change the culture of violence prevalent in current conflict resolution approaches, working in schools and with young women and men to promote non-violence and mediation skills.

Currently IWDA is funding the 2nd year of WAC’s informal settlements program which continues to actively support and facilitate empowerment and decision-making spaces of women living in informal settlements in Fiji, in order to improve their lives and enable them to engage effectively with diverse stakeholders and decision makers.

WAC uses skill-sharing/training, financial mentoring and empowerment activities, and aims in the long term to achieve gender equality through feminist social transformation.