Young women’s organizing often transpired in isolation, with few links to broader political agendas, or to previous generations of women activists and their experiences and expertise. Those NGOs that supported “young women’s leadership” generally conducted one-time trainings focused on the individual rather than building the kinds of leadership and collective citizen power needed to influence social and political change. Young women were keen on being active social change agents, but they lacked the deep political consciousness, connections, and organizing skills required to address common needs and to advance their rights.

Based on Nani and Dina’s analyses, JASS saw an opportunity to equip young women with the confidence and skills necessary to be more effective organizers. We decided to focus our work in SEA on building young women’s political leadership capacity, bridging the gap with older generations of women activists, and providing spaces for exchange and learning.

JASS MBIs are participatory processes that re-energize women’s collective leadership and shared capacity to define, lead and advance sustainable change. They provide safe spaces where women can critically examine their lives and contexts. Through popular education, they enable women activists to identify injustices affecting their lives, deepen their political analyses, and to build trust and solidarity across differences of identity, age, issue-focus, location, etc. and their underlying causes. As personal and political relationships emerge, women begin to define a shared change agenda and to develop coordinated strategies and alliances.

Strengthening young women activists’ leadership and organizing capacity required a dual strategy that both developed individual capacity and confidence, and built collective strength and organization. We would identify and engage with young women already active in community organizing, whether in women’s rights or within other social justice organizations. We believed that by investing in individual young activist leaders, they could play a larger role within their organizations and bring a feminist perspective to the organizing and strategizing they were already doing. In Nani’s words, “If you are an activist, a movement person, it doesn’t matter where you are. JASS wants to invest in leadership of women who can really build a movement to make a change, rather than form NGOs. JASS wants to create a space where you – young and energetic, with a vision – can build your character, leadership, and capacity to contribute to change.”

We had three goals for this SEA Movement Building Institute: 1) offer intensive training to provide young women with the tools to unpack, understand, and navigate power in their lives and to address and improve their work on the ground; 2) build a sense of sisterhood, belonging, and solidarity among the young women; 3) prepare a select number of women to participate in a regional MBI which would include young women and seasoned activists from other countries.

JASS believed that bridging this and other divides would prove strategically vital for women’s movements going forward. We decided to convene an intergenerational dialogue in tandem with a follow-up training workshop for young feminists from the initial MBI. Our goal was to break the idea that only seasoned feminists had knowledge to share, and that only their “knowledge” had legitimacy, and to forge more diverse and crosscutting feminist leadership. 

In the same year, we also facilitated an Intergenerational Dialogue to address the gap between high-profile national-level feminist leaders and the younger generation of activists and organizers. The intergenerational dialogue gathered 42 young and senior feminists working on higher policy as well as at the grassroots levels on a range of issues. This dialogue was important not only because the young women had requested it, but also because young women needed to be equipped with the confidence and skills to put forth their voice, knowledge and value within their organizations, where experienced feminists tended to dominate. 

As a starting point, the facilitators engaged the group in building a timeline on the wall to review the history and dynamics of each historical era, and the challenges and successes of women activists in each period. Then, moving to the present, participants detailed and clustered the biggest issues women were working on—from domestic violence to migration. Young and senior feminists reflected on the incredible breadth of work undertaken and energy invested by women activists, and their continued efforts to forward a range of rights agendas. Pivotal questions were introduced regarding fragmentations within and the sustainability of the women’s movement. In the end, everyone in the room acknowledged the need to bridge divides. They concluded that, “the rainbow strategy of diversity turns out to be a strength.”

Participants also learned about alternative forms of power (power within, power with, power to, and power for), which encouraged them to shift their perception of themselves as powerless, to see themselves as visionaries and leaders of change. This discussion also uncovered common challenges they were facing and wanted to act on: sexuality and sexual rights, migration, violence against women, and women’s rights within broader human rights agendas.

JASS is my Home

Creating a space of trust for diverse young women, in particular, LBTQI women, was vital. Through a more relaxed evening session, participants were able to open up, share personal stories, and discuss sex and sexuality. How does a woman have sex with another woman? Is sexual orientation a choice or something we were born with? These were some of the traditionally “awkward” questions women felt comfortable exploring. The openness fostered within this safe space allowed other women to learn about the issues faced by LBTQI women, and affirmed that “being LBTQI was normal,” as Maria Mustika, an LBTQI activist who participated in the process, explained.

• Connecting Across Cultures: Holding regional processes was a challenge given the distinct nature of SEA countries and contexts, from their diverse political histories to the resulting differences in each countries’ women’s movements. For example, the women’s movement in the Philippines was more developed than in Cambodia, where the legacy of oppression during the Khmer Rouge was still fresh. Contemporary Philippine women’s activism and movements date back to the struggle against the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the 1980s, and as far back as the early 1900s. In Cambodia, while women’s NGOs began to be built in the 1990s, the discussions on women’s activism and feminism are only recently starting to take shape. Each country also had its own language, so going deep was difficult without expensive simultaneous translation.
• Overcoming the Dominance of Seasoned Feminist Activists: While young feminists appreciated what they had learned from the intergenerational dialogue, overall they felt that the voices of senior feminists had dominated discussions and seemed reticent to engage with the younger generations. As one participant expressed, “Wow, these ‘celebrities’ just come and go. They don’t want to listen to us.” 

Despite this setback, the dialogue was still considered successful on three fronts:

• Bringing together women from different generations who work at policy, grassroots and other levels on a range of issues;
• Generating a shared understanding of the history and dynamics of each historical era, and of the challenges and successes of women activists in each period; and
• Detailing and clustering issues and challenges, such as domestic violence and migration—some ongoing, others new—and thus moving towards a feminist agenda for Indonesia.

• Diving deep through country processes. We decided that we would continue to build solidarity at regional levels while going deep at national levels. In order to strengthen leadership and organizing capacity to better influence local and national policies and debates, we chose to expand our activist training and organizing processes beyond Indonesia to the national level in Cambodia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. From that point, trainings with women from Indonesia and Timor-Leste were held separately in order to delve deeper into their specific contexts and issues.
• Changes to future intergenerational dialogues. The JASS SEA team took the disappointment from the first dialogue in Indonesia as an entry point, inviting the younger women to define the kind of movement leadership and values they wanted going forward. The succeeding intergenerational dialogues were facilitated by the younger feminists themselves, enabling us to challenge the established style (presentations by “celebrity” feminists), and instead invite a true inclusive exchange. We also decided to invite more seasoned grassroots organizers (not urban-based) who were more embedded in the grassroots levels we were trying to reach and impact.
• Invest in young women. It was important to ensure that the process and methodology of the intergenerational dialogues was designed to ensure more meaningful participation of young women. And it was equally imperative that parallel investments be made in supporting young women to discover and use their own voice and leadership, and to strengthen their capacity to challenge established styles of leadership, and attitudes about young women within their movements, organizations, homes or communities.

As a result, more organizations began to recognize that they actually had young women in their ranks. Women’s movements that had been, for a long time, dominated by women over 40 were now aware of and working with younger women. This recognition was also a step forward for JASS SEA; we now knew where to find—and network with—young women in the different countries in which we worked. We no longer relied solely on the older generation because we had a base to count on. Some of the young women moved up to become leaders of networks or directors of their organizations, while their former directors became part of JASS, serving as multigenerational resources.

Young women working in urban-based NGOs were already granted some opportunities, while young, rural and indigenous, poor, lesbian, transgender, and/or HIV+ women were overlooked by NGOs. It was precisely these women who were most affected by injustice. These young women were organizing in fresh and creative ways, but with few of the resources, skills, and connections needed to make an impact.

JASS SEA selected an additional group of 24 young activist leaders from 19 Indonesian provinces, including women who were active as farmers and fisher women, indigenous women, workers and unionists, researchers, literacy trainers, or worked in HIV/AIDS support and legal aid, or fought against trafficking. The safe spaces and workshops focused on engaging the ‘invisible power’ (values and beliefs) that shapes norms around women’s status, roles, and a sense of individual agency, while surfacing possibilities for working together. Three of the trainers were drawn from the initial Indonesia group, deepening their own skills as they worked alongside experienced facilitators and mentors to introduce power analysis, to engage in community organizing and communications, and to learn from scholars about feminism. The idea behind this process was to develop and mentor a cadre of young activist leaders who could sustain and multiply the organizing. A second intergenerational dialogue was also held.Because many placed ‘writing skills’ high on lists of requested support, we created an online writing community and training course in Bahasa-Indonesia, with one of the participants—a seasoned writer—leading the process.

They also made strategic use of communication around Mothers’ and Valentine’s Days to promote women’s political perspectives and participation, since these commemorations are often used to undermine feminist values by glorifying the role of motherhood and strengthening the narrative of submissive young women.

Leveraging Momentum at Country Level

National programs launched in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Cambodia

As the work of JASS was gaining momentum in Indonesia and Timor-Leste, three national-level leadership workshops were held in November 2009, employing JASS tools and drawing on the local “alumni” from previous JASS processes. For each workshop, JASS SEA wove together the elements most relevant to the needs of the particular group and context. JASS teams were consulted widely to ensure diversity of class, focus, location and ethnicity, and to successfully negotiate long-standing tensions in certain countries.

Malaysia: In Kuala Lumpur, JASS partner and popular communications center— KOMAS—hosted 42 participants from many different sectors and communities throughout the country, including prominent indigenous movements, under the theme “Empowering Grassroots Women Leadership.”

Philippines: JASS brought together women across a spectrum of ages, movements and political affiliations, some with deep and historic tensions. The theme for this convening in Manila was “Liberating Filipino Women through the Years” and the local host—the Center for Women’s Resources—served as the key anchor for the initiative.

Cambodia: Twenty-eight participants between 25 and 30 years old from 17 Cambodian NGOs attended JASS’ Phnom Penh workshop, hosted by local training partner SILAKA—an organization that strengthens women’s political participation.

Combining regional networking opportunities with training experience

In our efforts to maintain cross-solidarity, we kept the long-term strategic goal of regional action and impact in mind. As such, we identified moments that combine regional networking opportunities with training experience for the regional ‘alumnae’ – the young women we had been accompanying since 2008.

Timor-Leste: The work in Timor-Leste stalled due to multiple conflicts among activists on personal and organizational levels around class differences, generational gaps, lack of accountability, and accusations of using money for personal use. In part, this breakdown arose due to the lack of trained women capable of filling leadership positions. Consequently, young women were often put into director roles without the necessary support and mentorship to help them thrive.

Philippines: In this country, deep political divides were causing conflict among activists. In the mid-1990s, the women’s movement split into several factions aligned with new political parties and in particular, differences existed in the analysis of how best to solve the issues plaguing women’s lives. One faction focused solely on women’s rights and women-only spaces, while the other faction (mainly grassroots-based) believed that women’s issues were not separate from the broader issues, and that the solution should engage everyone, including men. 

Malaysia: Moving forward in Malaysia after the initial workshop was difficult because we were not able to develop a firm base of women who could sustain the work. Malaysian participants utilized some of the tools and skills they gained from national and regional JASS trainings to strengthen their work and leadership, but, they viewed women’s rights and building feminist power as side issues, next to the urgency of their work in broader social justice efforts, such as organizing for the rights of indigenous peoples. 

Philippines: As participating activists began to use the neutral umbrella of, “JASS Network Philippines”, we played the role of bridge-builder to help build relationships with women across different political views because the women’s movement had been already very strong. Utilizing strategic relationships with key activists, such as Jojo Guan of the Center for Women’s Resources, JASS was able to gather activists who would otherwise never meet—a success, in and of itself. The organizations that make up JASS Network Philippines represent an impressive depth and breadth in terms of the networks, communities, and issues embodied. 

Timor-Leste: While the young women were very passionate and motivated, the dominance of seasoned activists continued to be a barrier. Due to increasing conflict and lack of trust, we decided not to work deeply and instead Nani and Dina opted to work behind the scenes to provide mentorship and support for women in their own organizations, and to help diffuse and address tensions. In the meantime, we still provided opportunities for regional cross-solidarity networking and building with activists from other countries.

Indonesia & Cambodia: In Indonesia and Cambodia, we were seeing the kind of trust and solidarity emerging that is essential for effective organizing. Consequently, we sustained investments in building critical consciousness and shared analysis around power while also designing the processes to surface strategic opportunities where women could mobilize influence together. 

Malaysia: In Malaysia, we decided to support and accompany the activists’ own processes by providing our methodologies and expertise as requested and needed.

Cambodian Young Women’s Empowerment Network (CYWEN)

In 2010, following the national and regional leadership training processes, two of the young Cambodian women activists involved formed CYWEN to address the under-representation of women’s voices and issues in media and public debate. CYWEN is a network of over thirty diverse young women, including rural and urban women, factory workers, and women in formal jobs.

Forum Aktivis Perempuan Muda (FAMM Indonesia or Young Indonesian Women Activists’ Forum)

FAMM formed in 2012 as a network of 162 young Indonesian grassroots women who had participated in JASS Southeast Asia training processes since 2007. In the country’s increasingly repressive cultural climate, JASS’ capacity-building activities for young women leaders sparked and shaped a surge of young women’s activism and organizing. Today, the network consists of more than 350 organized and mobilized women and is a true testament to the value of investing years and resources into base- and trust-building.

Movimentu Feto Foinsae (MOFFE-TL or Young Women’s Movement Timor-Leste)

Despite the issues in Timor-Leste, young women formed a group in 2012 dedicated to fighting all forms of discrimination in all areas of women’s lives to achieve gender equality and justice. While we did not work deeply with this network, we still continued to offer support through accompaniment. This network is still alive today and continues to engage in our regional campaign—One Day, One Voice.

A Diverse Network

JASS Network Philippines 

In the Philippines, women activists welcomed JASS as an honest broker—a regional Southeast Asian body that could operate as both insider and outsider, outside national tensions. JASS, as the international organization, also served as a key resource of local to global collective power. Filipino women activists defined and embraced JASS Network Philippines as an alternative platform that enabled them to deal with, and then put aside, past organizational and political differences in order to move forward. The network emphasized a multigenerational approach with attention focused on young women.

In Cambodia, there was a painful history of systematic violence against women and cultural pressures on young women to remain silent. Since the political changes that began in 2001, equality efforts had gained momentum and official endorsement, although the gap between rhetoric and reality remained wide. For example, freedom of expression, a critical ingredient for democracy and rights to flourish, was still limited. Criticism of the government often led to a backlash, including arrest and even death.

FAMM Indonesia brought together LBTQI, Muslim, rural, and indigenous women. Through participatory learning processes and activist trainings, FAMM helped women shift their mindsets and gain the confidence, knowledge, and skills to challenge prejudices and conservative narratives on subjects like sex and sexuality by educating and engaging their local communities. FAMM combined face-to-face learning and training activities with social media to support messages and activism across a range of boundaries—location, issue focus, partisan politics and religion. The embrace of LBTQI issues in this growing circle of predominantly Muslim women showed promise for challenging the hold of religious fundamentalism. 

In Cambodia, where more than 70% of the population is aged 18 to 34, young women activists clearly are key to social movements. We have played a critical role in supporting CYWEN to create and protect spaces specifically for young women in a country where young people—especially women—had less status. CYWEN’s goal was to strengthen the activist skills and leadership capacity of young women to make young women’s issues more visible and central to the agendas of women’s and other social movements.

CYWEN has doubled its membership, recruiting young women activists from local NGOs and women’s organizations. While navigating a challenging context, members continue to use the network as a political home. CYWEN members have been invited into government–NGO dialogues as resource persons on violence against women, human rights, and gender equality, and have represented the country in regional civil-society gatherings. Today, the young women of CYWEN continue to use cross-sectoral dialogues to forge solidarity among diverse groups of Cambodian women. As Kunthea Chan, a key founding member of CYWEN exclaimed, “The Cambodian young women’s movement? It is starting now, with CYWEN.”

Subsequently, we launched One Day, One Voice (ODOV)—a now annual regional solidarity campaign that serves as a platform for coordinated, multi-country organizing. The campaign organizes synchronized activities under the leadership of JASS SEA allies in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Timor-Leste and Thailand to effectively spotlight marginalized women’s issues and agendas across the region. During the campaign, JASS SEA and our allies share social media memes, blogs and videos on a political theme and organize discussions and street actions across six countries.

In 2014, ODOV started spotlighting the situation of women human rights defenders (WHRDs) and state violence through the theme “Justice for All Women Human Rights Defenders!”, spotlighting the increasing cases of arrests, criminalization, fabricated charges, harassment, and even killing of WHRDs in the region. In 2017, ODOV centered on rising authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and militarism in Southeast Asia. In 2018, using the theme “We are all Defenders”, we featured the resistance and safety strategies that Southeast Asian women activists are devising amid the growing risk and threats.

Not only does ODOV mobilize thousands - over 16,000 by 2018 - it reaches other groups of activists with whom we do not work directly. Holding ODOV during the 16 Days of Activism—a widely recognized annual campaign—strategically garners more visibility as well as solidarity from people around the world fighting for justice.

• In the Philippines, we joined the call for the release of GABRIELA community organizer Miradel Torres and peasant organizer Andrea Rosal. And in 2018, when the Philippine Department of Justice (DoJ) attempted to criminalize opposition activists and human rights defenders by labeling 649 citizens as terrorists (including UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz), JASS SEA released a statement of concern and a feature article, both picked up by local and international media.
• In Indonesia, FAMM joined dozens of women’s organizations across Southeast Asia to mobilize global support for the release of Eva Bande, a member of FAMM imprisoned on and off since 2011 for peacefully organizing against the national palm oil corporations extracting resources and displacing her community. FAMM also provided emotional and economic support for her family.
• In Cambodia, we called for the release and appeared at court hearings for Kong Channtha, a land defender imprisoned for protesting forced eviction from a community surrounding Boeung Kak Lake in central Phnom Penh.

• A stronger, safer, and louder young women’s alliance. FAMM has turned itself from a network which offered safe spaces and training to young women activists, into a 350 member alliance (Muslim, LGBTQI, rural, and indigenous women) for political solidarity, collective voice and safety. It has emerged from the JASS’ movement-building processes as: (1) an ongoing safe space for mutual support and political education, and (2) a protection and solidarity network. FAMM members are using creative strategies to counter fundamentalist messages on sex, sexuality, and women’s roles.
• Deepened collaboration and capacity: Recently, JASS SEA entered a five-year partnership with Hivos and five local women’s organizations, including FAMM, to deepen the collaboration and political leadership of feminist organizations in Indonesia.
• Linking with the grassroots. The young women of CYWEN in Cambodia, have forged solidarity and links with women land rights activists such as Kong Channtha. 
• Women political prisoners freed. All four of the Southeast Asian women political prisoners that JASS SEA, FAMM Indonesia, CYWEN, and allies from the Philippines campaigned for, have been freed. On the eve of International Human Rights Day (Dec.10) in 2014, newly-elected Indonesian President Joko Widodo pardoned Eva Bande. In early 2015, Kong Channtha and six other Cambodian land rights activists were released. In the Philippines, JASS allies led the campaign to release peasant organizer Andrea Rosal, who was freed in September 2015 after being cleared of criminal raps. GABRIELA member Miradel Torres was likewise freed in July 2019, with the false charges against her dropped.

In response, women have mobilized boldly to make their voices heard, demand justice, and offer alternatives to the status quo, in the face of repression in reprisal of their work. This is what we call the fifth trend: women’s resistance. 

But resistance requires strategies for staying safe. And essential to safety is stronger solidarity and trust among women activists.

The new four-year Women’s Voice and Leadership project in Indonesia aims to strengthen the capacity and collaboration among 5 diverse women's organizations and networks - from university campuses, rural villages, religious groups, lesbian, bisexual and transgender groups, and young activists - to strengthen the feminist movement in Indonesia to challenge repressive conservatism and political exclusion. 

In Cambodia, JASS is using under-the-radar strategies and political education to support women garment workers’ activism within the labor sector. 

In Myanmar, JASS is bringing together women in formal and informal sectors—garment workers, women farmers, and indigenous land defenders—to develop a shared political analysis as the basis for collaboration.

Regionally JASS SEA hosted a Defending Rights in Hostile Contexts gathering —part of a global series of related gatherings on rethinking human rights protection from a movement perspective. The gatherings bring grassroots activists into direct conversations with donors and NGOs— to deepen our collective understanding of current shifting power dynamics that have increased violence, attacks against defenders, and restrictions on civil society. And to explore how to better align regional, and global efforts with what local social movements and communities are doing to integrate protection into their ways of working.

• being grounded and working with young women outside of mainstream NGOs;
• playing the role of a “bridger”, bringing together women from very different backgrounds, movements and agendas;
• providing activist support through safe spaces that encourage mutual-care, learning and trust
• offering our power framework and analysis tools and spaces, a critical contribution at a time when changing global contexts mandate improved and reconfigured strategies; and
• equipping women with the skills and tools they need to be effective organizers and alliance builders.

With these, JASS hopes to contribute to the work of women organizing around issues of resources, land, health, gender rights, and economic justice. JASS seeks to help challenge conservative narratives and practices, and increase women’s voice, visibility, and influence in strategic spaces from local to global. JASS aims to develop, with our allies and partners, shared “what women want” demands and recognize women’s individual and collective potential to move agendas forward and push for alternative solutions. Lastly, JASS hopes to have built and strengthened cross-movement and cross-border networks to support women’s organizing work in restrictive contexts.