On this historic Human Rights Day, December 10, 2018, 70 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Women’s Human Rights Education Institute is pleased to share our new video which highlights the work we do in the promotion of women’s human rights in conjunction with transnational women’s human rights defenders, our partners and our amazing team of faculty, as well as information about our 2019 plans!
Video produced by WHRI alumna and feminist filmmaker Lakshya Dhungana of Kaju Creative
We hope that this inspires you, and helps you to understand the multiple layers of impact that come from the work we do: personal, collective, and systemic transformation. The WHRI’s holistic framework has long been the unique hallmark of our program, and that which keeps our participants coming back to continue engaging and partnering with us over the longer term.
WHRI in Transformation: Exciting plans for 2019!
2019 will mark the 15th anniversary of the Women’s Human Rights Education Institute, co-founded by Costa Rican feminist jurist Alda Facio. The WHRI has been in happy partnership since its inception in 2004 with the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education (CWSE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University in Toronto (OISE/UT). Between 2004 – 2011, our administration and our programs were housed at the CWSE in Toronto, and it continued to be our home base from 2012 while simultaneously we began to offer international programs through various partnerships that took us to Colombia, Nepal, Costa Rica, the UK, Honduras, Guatemala, and Trinidad & Tobago. The partnership with the CWSE has been fruitful and mutually supportive throughout this time, and we are grateful for the support and the chance for us to grow within an already established institutional framework.
Now, in 2019, the WHRI will move into its next phase of transformation. The world has changed, and the work we do continues to grow and respond in tandem with those changes. We are very pleased to announce that the WHRI is in the process of moving our administrative home to Costa Rica, where we will deepen our already long term relationship with the Fundación Justicia y Género. This move reflects our commitment to ongoing transnational work, to de-centering the North in our work, and to an increased emphasis on more in-depth work within the Latin American region, including many more Spanish language programs. We look forward to the continued organic growth of our work with partners, program alumni and engagement with women’s movements. In a time of heightened backlash against women’s human rights, the importance of this work only grows, the linking of the local to the global a crucial strategy of resistance.
We will continue to offer programs at our former home in Toronto – in 2019, we are pleased to offer the CEDAW for Change Institute in partnership with the International Human Rights Program of the University of Toronto law school from June 17 – 22, 2019. Applications are now open for this program. Click here.
Growing on our pilot program in Ecuador in 2018, we are also pleased to announce the renewal of our partnership with IAEN, the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales in Quito, where we offered our first Spanish language two-week program in September 2018. We look forward to offering this program again from August 19 – 30, 2019. Applications for this program, and full information in Spanish, will be posted in January 2019.
We are also continuing to grow previous partnerships into additional programs. WHRI Alumna and faculty member Terry Ince of the CEDAW Committee of Trinidad and Tobago (CCoTT) has been working with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, as well as other units of the University of the West Indies to plan our first full length program in Trinidad & Tobago, and WHRI alumna Anna Arutshyan of the Women’s Solidarity Fund has plans underway to host our program again at Oxford University in late 2019 or early 2020. Information and application for these programs will roll out as details are finalized, and we are excited to share that these programs are pilots of what we hope will be longer term relationships to offer sustained programming with partners at these locations.
We are so appreciative of our community of alumna, advisors, funders and partners and look forward to the many opportunities provided by this phase of growth and transformation for the WHRI.
