Feminism in political organisations

The Red-Green Alliance is cooperating with the Colombian partner organisation La Manada Feminista to promote political participation of women, LGBTQI+ persons, and racialized people in a series of left-wing parties and ethnic organisations in southwestern Colombia. La Manada is a feminist collective that gathers sexually diverse women, all of whom have personal experiences with sexual and political violence since childhood and within the political left.

Through an extended training programme, La Manada educates delegates, responsible for gender and diversity issues, from a series of left-wing parties and ethnic organisations with electoral aspirations. The school is antipatriarchal and intersectional, the last being a feminist stream that takes into account how different positions and identities suffer different forms of oppression. Throughout the programme, the participants develop tools to handle cases of racism, gender-based violence, and violence stemming from prejudice within their organisational structures, and their knowledge is replicated and implemented in all the participating organisations. A key product of the project is a series of manuals developed with and adapted to each of the parties and organisations.

Throughout the project, the Red-Green Alliance and La Manada will exchange experiences and share knowledge. The Red-Green Alliance is in an ongoing process to promote diverse participation and tune the feminist focus of the party, and the feminisms from the south can enrich this process. Simultaneously, La Manada can be inspired by the Red-Green Alliance’s internal feminist debates and concrete politics of inclusion—knowledge that will be replicated with all the participating left-wing parties and organisations in Colombia.