Feminists Deliver
Women Transforming Cities (WTC) is committed to creating women friendly cities. Our vision is to live in cities where all women and girls have real social, economic and political power. Cities that work for women work for everyone. We organize to transform cities by empowering self-identified women and girls in all their diversity through community engagement, inclusive policies and equitable representation. We take action from local to global, from neighbourhoods to UN Habitat.
Engaging, listening, doing
Over the years, WTC — partnering with other women’s organizations, city staff and community allies — has hosted dozens of neighbourhood “dialogue cafes” and city forums engaging women and allies in the often difficult conversations and decision-making required to address the most pressing issues of our times, from climate crisis & housing to violence and income.
From these discussions we have developed eleven key recommendations to support women friendly cities. We ask cities to prioritize gender equality and commit to using a gendered intersectional lens informed by disaggregated data on all city policies, programs, budgets, funding, staffing and governance. We are working with Vancouver’s Mayor and Council to ensure follow-through on commitments made during the last election, by reading and responding to Council agendas, connecting with elected officials, and attending and speaking at Council meetings.
Speaking up
WTC recognizes that the majority of women are silenced or face barriers to being heard. For cities to be equitable places to live and work, we need to hear the priorities and needs of those most marginalized. We run workshops training women how to speak out on their issues at City Council meetings. At election time we take the learnings from the neighbourhood cafes and wisdom of women’s organizations to create the Hot Pink Paper Municipal Campaign to ensure candidates commit to the issues and gendered intersectional frameworks that reflect our lives. www.womentransformingcities.org
Workshops and speakers for municipalities, NGOs, businesses and more
WTC provides in-depth training workshops on gendered intersectionality and the use of disaggregated data. The focus is on practice: intersectionality is not a theory to be talked about and then shelved, it’s an evaluative lens, a programming framework, a way of living and working together in the world and must be based in social justice.
Women Friendly Cities
At the 2018 World Urban Forum we launched “The Women Friendly Cities Challenge,” an online collaborative library of “wise practices” from around the world that support self identified women’s inclusion in city building. Learn from others, and share your initiatives.
Join us to create cities for all.
womentransformingcities@gmail.com
womentransformingcities.org
@womentcities