Feminist Youth Leadership Programme
(FYLP)
About
The Generation Equality Forum (GEF), convened by UN Women in 2021, kickstarted a five-year process of intergenerational, multi-stakeholder convergence around the goal of achieving irreversible gender equality. Through this project, Gender at Work India took on the task of advancing the GEF mandate by creating a contextual programme around building feminist youth leadership in India.
This process intervention was specifically located in the overarching context of a nation mired in deep ideological chasms, a shrinking space for civil society, and several draconian laws and policies clamping down on movement-building and rights-based work. With a constantly shifting landscape of political realities, youth activism also morphed and adapted to be more effective, while simultaneously ‘calling in’ their own movements for lack of diversity and meaningful representation.
FYLP follows a ground-up approach to understanding, operationalising, and building resources for feminist youth leadership in India, while simultaneously unpacking the context in which these are embedded. The research (lit review, needs assessment, white paper) attempts to inform and be informed by the praxis (co-creating a curriculum, building a cohort), towards building a process composite that is at once iterative and intentional.
Objectives
The objective was to bring together people, knowledge, and pedagogy in a way that would lead to secondary and tertiary impacts and promote just, equitable, and intersectional feminist agendas across civil society.
Through the course of this process intervention between January and November 2022 we engaged in several discussions in small and large groups, online, and in person trying to get to the heart of the question: What does it take for youth leadership to recast and reimagine the feminist movement as it stands, and what does it take for civil society to make room for more feminist youth leadership?
We spoke to over 100 people with every individual contributing to a painstaking examination and re-examination of youthhood, feminism, movement-building, and leadership.
More information about the outcomes and knowledge products of the programme can be found here.
