Two-hundred mountain women from across the world, including Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Tanzania, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and Zambia, participating to Webinar “We are Nature: Mountain Women Collectively Defending the Earth” share reflections on our connection with the Mountains.
You can revisit the webinar here: https://vimeo.com/542876779?
We aim to have our first expedition as the Mountain Women of the World network in the Mount Aconcagua (6962m) in Mendoza, Argentina. Our goal is to build mountain women's collective feminist leadership and narrate a collective mountaineering story, strengthening economic justice for mountain women, and foregrounding the collective knowledge and experience of mountain women in protecting mountains and all nature.
We believe that mountaineering is a collaborative experience that builds collective power and solidarity. Through this expedition, we want to encourage more women to get involved with the mountains, promoting mountaineering as a tool for collective care, to build humility, resilience, connection, empathy and reciprocity.
This expedition will also allow us to gather mountain women, such as women guides, porters, mountain workers, hikers and women living in mountainous areas, from different backgrounds, including women who are working in heavily patriarchal environments where men generally carry out these activities.
For further information, visit this section: http://mountainwomenoftheworld.org/aconcagua2023.html
Project brief: a participatory, non-extractive research project to map and surface the multiple, diverse challenges faced by mountain women across different contexts and geographies of the world especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to highlight and foreground the multiple and inspiring ways in which mountain women strengthened their resilience, solidarity and collective power.
The project funding is managed by a non-profit organisation based in Italy called Feminist Hiking Collective. The project is implemented by a working group of consultants from the Mountain Women of the World Network (www.mountainwomenoftheworld.org).
This interview is part of the research project ‘Mountain Women of the World: Challenges, Resilience and Collective Power’’. This is a project of the Mountain Women of the World network, which is a network born in 2020 comprising organisations and groups of mountain women from eight countries globally, in collaboration with Mountain Partnership, which is a United Nations partnership and international voluntary alliance and it is part of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
The research project aims to map and surface the multiple, diverse challenges faced by mountain women across different contexts and geographies of the world especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to highlight and foreground the multiple and inspiring ways in which mountain women strengthened their resilience, solidarity and collective power.
A designed multilingual report with the results of the research.
A collection of photo stories.
A short documentary
The results will be public on December 11th, 2022.
After having spent almost two years working together as a network of mountain women, at the same time as the Covid-19 pandemic, organizing a webinar on mountain women defending the Earth with over 200 mountain women from 42 countries worldwide, and now collaborating for the research project, this process has led us to reflect on some key learnings that can form the initial findings of the research process. These learnings consist on a deeper awareness that it really is collective power that is capable of transforming: transforming and strengthening ourselves, our lives, our livelihoods, our autonomy, our inner power, our strength, our resilience - because we are interconnected, interdependent with each other and intrinsically connected with the mountains where we belong. This collective power, being able to rely on each other, complement each other, co-create projects, build ideas and dream together, has been an anchor and a lighthouse for us in pandemic times. We have looked at challenges we were facing together, collectivising our difficulties, we have surfaced and solved misunderstandings, we have regenerated our energies and shared our love for and our belonging to mountains. We chose this title for the research project because this is our very own lived experience as a network of mountain women: we have felt and breathed our collective power and that together we can be resilient in the face of challenges. This is empowerment for us: not lifting any specific one of us up, but all of us, as a collective force. As mountain women. Deeply connected by our belonging to mountains, deeply connected by a struggle to overcome multiple forms of structural discrimination. This is a key finding for us, but this is nothing new nor surprising. But having lived this, we wish to extend this togetherness to more mountain women across the world.
Tell us who you are and why your organization would like to join this network: