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Re-writing Traditional Stories to Gain a Gender-Sensitive Perspective

Fairytales and stories are an essential element of popular culture and communicate social beliefs about gender roles. The Women’s Stories project of the Women and Memory Forum was started to give women an opportunity to challenge traditional texts, re-define their role in society, and develop writing skills by re-writing stories from their own perspective.

Founded in 1997 in Egypt, the Women and Memory Forum’s mission is to promote a society based on justice and equal opportunities for men and women. One of the ways the organization does this is through re-reading and re-defining Arab cultural history. The Women’s Stories project, a set of gender-sensitive writing workshops, focuses on re-defining and expanding the portrayal of women in folk literature.

Using a historic garment factory to promote dialogue on sweatshop issues

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum brings together representatives from conflicting sectors of the garment industry to a recreation of the Levine family’s 1897 tenement apartment and dressmaking shop and discuss what needs to be done – and by whom – to address the problem of sweatshops today.  The museum provides a non-threatening environment in which to build dialogue around contentious

Creating a venue on the Internet for former child soldiers to share their stories and develop new skills

Launched in 2000, The Child Soldier Project of iEarn Sierra Leone created a website for former child soldiers to share their stories. www.childsoldiers.org featured the essays, poems, artwork and voices of former child soldiers and offered an online forum.

Training police officers to teach law to adolescents in order to improve communication and understanding between these two group

The population of Kyrgyzstan often has had a negative attitude toward the police force.  This has been connected with the sometimes high levels of human rights violations by law enforcement personnel and with their lack of interaction with the general population in the protection of public order.  Often, according to Public Foundation, this fear and distrust of police officers is based on second-hand information or is due to a lack of understanding of the police force’s role in the community.  

Involving the community in deciding offenders’ sentences and helping rehabilitate them

Peacemaking circles use traditional circle ritual and structure to create a respectful space in which all interested community members, victim, victim supporters, offender, offender supporters, judge, prosecutor, defense counsel, police and court workers can speak openly in a shared search for understanding of a crime and to identify the steps necessary to assist in healing all affected parties

Creating a public forum where the police and ordinary citizens can work together to resolve grievances

The CLEEN Foundation, formally Centre for Law Enforcement Education in Nigeria, created public forums where citizens and police can discuss concerns and grievances regarding crime and police conduct.

Organizing summer camps to offer children a reprieve from violence

The Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture (TRC) in Ramallah, in the West Bank, organizes a free summer camp to rehabilitate traumatized children. The camp offers recreational, artistic, and rehabilitative activities intended to help children deal with their personal traumas and fears, and support one another.

Creating an ombudsman institution to provide recourse to victims of discrimination

In Sweden, the Discrimination Ombudsman (DO) is a political institutional body that was created to allow citizens to assert their right to be protected against discrimination and to provid

Recording traditional ecological knowledge to protect indigenous rights

The Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) created an online searchable database of traditional ecological knowledge to prevent private companies from patenting that knowledge. The Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database (T.E.K.*P.A.D.) is located at http://ip.aaas.org/tekpad. 

Employing community health volunteers to administer low-cost HIV/AIDS medications, treatment and support

Recognizing that Haiti is rich in human resources, Partners in Health (PIH) defies the international community’s traditional HIV/AIDS treatment model by training community health volunteers, called accompagnateurs, to provide support to persons living with the disease. Ninety-five percent of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases occur in developing nations where little or no access to affordable treatment exists.  Even so, conventional wisdom in international circles often points to the lack of medical and economic infrastructure and the high cost of treatment as reasons why HIV/AIDS initiatives cannot work in poor countries.  Haiti, the western hemisphere’s poorest and most HIV-affected nation, is one example of the intersection between poverty and disease. PIH has reported extraordinary results from incorporating community health workers into HIV/AIDS treatment management.