Community Linkage: when migrant women are agents of change

Community Linkage: when migrant women are agents of change

Surt Foundation has presented the experience of the Community Linkage which, from 2022 to 2024, has involved a group of migrant women in the creation of a support and training space in the face of male violence, in order to give them agency own and propose improvements to Badalona’s specialized services.

The project has highlighted the life experiences and strategies of a group of migrant women from the neighborhood of Sant Roc (Badalona) to accompany other women in the community in situations of sexist violence, and to have an impact on how develops attention in public services. The project exposes experiences of encounters between migrant women and professionals as a strategy to strain power relations.

Weekly and for two years, around a dozen women have met to share life experiences, train in the identification of male violence and become agents of change in the community by passing on the new knowledge acquired. It has been an empowering process for each of them, in sorority and in creating a support network, in addition to acting as leverage for contact between women users of specialized services and the working staff of the municipality’s services. The objective: to build a bridge between the needs of the neighbors and the services offered.

In the sessions, shared experiences of discrimination were detected, but also of strengths in the face of vulnerabilities. Migrant women are read by the environment according to axes that intersect in their identity (gender, language, origin, physicality, marital status, class, etc.) and, at the same time, they move according to the context they are inhabiting.

They have worked on their agency, knowledge about rights and administrative processes, their role in the community and sexist violence (institutional, economic, physical, psychological, sexual, etc.).

The protagonists of the group have participated in a video that summarizes their experience and that was shown at the presentation session “Tensioning power relations in community intervention” held this Tuesday, April 30, at Rosa Sensat, Barcelona .

More about Community Linkage project

Establishing an “effective connection” between gender-based violence care services and communities of migrant women is the aim of Community Linkage, a European project coordinated by Surt with the aim of promoting the identification of situations of violence and the improvement of both prevention and support for women. The challenge has been to facilitate mutual learning between specialist care services for gender-based violence and migrant women’s networks.

Community Linkage is an initiative financed by the European Fund and in which 4 entities and research centers from Italy, Greece, Slovenia and Catalonia participate. It started in the spring of 2022 and will close with the presentation of the results at an international final event on June 13.

Project: 101049734 — CommunityLinkage — CERV-2021-DAPHNE Co-financed by the CERV Programme of the EU