DIVA FOR EQUALITY

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Our Politics

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Mission

To promote, develop and organize safe spaces for grassroots feminist non-profit education and community action that is aimed at supporting educating, providing opportunities and empowering all women and girls, with particular focus on marginalized and vulnerable women, survivors of gender based violence, those who are poor and live in rural areas and with diverse, non-hetronormative sexual orientation, gender identity and expression. DIVA will promote and protect human rights, and provide access to justice and advocate for social, economic, environmental and climate justice through grassroots led services, educational training, referrals, policy input and just, effective activism and social movements.

Our Politics​

Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality started in 2011.

We have spent 10 years working and finetuning our politics so that our work is effective, ethical and above all, feminist in its core. People have come and gone from the Management Collective, constituency and the work, and we have shifted and moved focus and locations in which we work, according to need, circumstances and resources.

All our work is guided by the DIVA for Equality vision, Feminist principles, and interpreted through our Code of Conduct and policies. These all specify attention to beloved community, justice, accountability, power, hierarchy and shared decision-making, as well as being clear on roles gifted to the Executive Director and various Management Collective members, the Board of Trustees, Hub focal points, and others. We are increasingly able to discuss open and hidden power in the organisation, hold each other accountable for work done in good and bad faith and to invite healthy and loving challenge, critique and change as a part of work practice and organisational accountability and sustainability.

We build everything through praxis – Acting and reflecting, and explicitly building this emergent knowledge into conceptual, advocacy and social organising and movement building work.

DIVA for Equality works from a south feminist intergenerational, intersectional and interlinkage praxis (action and reflection cycles)

listening, identifying priorities, and providing services, activism and advocacy on the lived realities of LBTQ+ people, women and girls and gender non-binary people throughout their life course, as individuals, collectives and communities. We undertake joint work with wider community, civil society groups and Pacific governments toward advancement of sexual rights, human rights, gender justice and sustainable, climate and ecological just development. This includes the lives of the DIVA collective and staff, LBTI+ and urban-poor, rural and maritime communities according to our priorities and resources.

The DIVA for Equality Management Collective are individually and collectively knowledgeable of, and involved in every aspect of DIVA for Equality work as they decide. Using collective organisational development, administration, operations, finance, programming, advocacy, local organising and movement building we plan, design, approve, implement, monitor and evaluate and learn from the content, structure and programs for DIVA. Every Management Collective member is from a grassroots LBTQ+ background, is thoroughly involved in running the organisation, some more than others when they begin the work and over time as interests, capacities and areas of work align. The expectation is that MC will grow and extend into the work in every area. This is so that we have collective accountability and coverage, and also to share the organisational load. Since 2014 we are consistently applying a programmatic form to our work, now with 5 main Workstreams, while allowing emergent praxis to build.

Management Collective members are taught and accompanied to collaboratively write staff contracts

set up HR processes, write concept notes, full budgets, cheque requests, programme and project work plans, monitoring and evaluation plans, and fully acquit budgets over which they are focal points. They carry out facilitation and moderation of offline and online sessions, advocate online using social media, run meetings, convene coalitions, and fully debrief on their praxis, so that the work becomes more nuanced and effective over time. We are slowly addressing various gaps and obstacles as they emerge in the organisation, and where needed we are bringing in trusted partners to support the core work. However, as from the very beginning, we are determined that the core Management Collective and staff of DIVA for Equality, will emerge within the body of activist work. So our politics guides the contracts and work positions.

DIVA for Equality provides practical urgent action and support to lesbian, bisexual women and transgender people and well as women of all backgrounds in Fiji and now in the Pacific. Over time we work with others to create and facilitate safe spaces and processes to organise and communicate constituency positions, to build and sustain stronger hubs and networks, and increase levels of constructive collaboration within wider civil society and social movements. Our politics determines our strategic planning and workflow, and every aspect of our work at DIVA for Equality.

Major Donors

Our major funders are all feminist and progressive untied/core funders. We have taken a decision not to take bilateral and conditional funding from governments, nor any corporate funding. They include as of 2022,

Corporate Giving

We do not accept grants from Corporate sponsors, as we are working heavily on fossil-fuel-free initiatives,

loss and damage and other climate justice initiatives, and we cannot be seen in any way to be compromising our work, by aligning with any corporate sponsors. We have been approached twice with corporate funds, and have refused them.

Everything about our organisation including the funding sources is political, and needs as much as we can, to be aligned.