Intro to Women's Congress for Future Generations

Women's Congress for Future Generations

We have a beautiful

mother

Her green lap

immense

Her Brown embrace

eternal

Her blue body

everything we know.

(Alice Walker)

A Women’s Congress for Future Generations gathered in Moab, Utah September 27th-30th, 2012, to celebrate and express our gratitude for the Earth’s wondrous bounty, and to fulfill the special responsibility that women hold as the first environment for future generations.

At the Moab Congress, we mapped possibilities and pathways toward achieving whole health and justice in this generation and for all generations to come. Inspired by our environmental foremothers, our hope is to craft a dynamic articulation of the pressing rights Future Generations have to a livable world and the responsibilities of present generations to uphold those rights. Our labors will yield a living affirmation of these rights and responsibilities in word, art, music, and story.

Questions that animated the Congress included:

What are the sacred rights of Future Generations and the responsibilities of present generations?

How might we most powerfully write, craft, sing, pray, dream, speak, and legislate these rights and visions into being?

What might a civil rights movement for future generations look like? What does such a movement need?

What does reclaiming power as women look like? How might women organize on behalf of future generations in ways that transcend traditional strategies of action/resistance, and that honor, embody, and translate the sacred feminine spirit into the realm of direct political and social action?

This Congress was for those called to stand for Future Generations. We seek solidarity with those working for environmental justice, for climate justice, for indigenous sovereignty, for the health of women and children, and with those living on the frontlines of the struggle against industrial pollution and climate change.

Women from across the diverse spectrum of womanhood were welcome—women of all ages and cultural groups, women from all places, backgrounds, and walks of life, women with diverse talents and interests, vocal leaders, and those still finding their voice. We invited men to participate in the Congress, too, as Sacred Witnesses who honor and empower women's voices.

Our commitment is to work that is firmly rooted in radical inclusion, in all of its forms -- not as an afterthought, but as a framework for how we come together and organize. We recognize the double layer of oppression for women of color, indigenous women, lesbians, transgender individuals, and women living on the frontlines of the environmental and social struggle. This is our inquiry and the exploration we intend to deepen with the launch of our Congress. We endeavor to foresee and address barriers that might otherwise diminish the fullest and most diverse gathering of women, and we welcome creative strategies to overcome these barriers and, in the coming months, to carry forward this work in ways that draw strength and wisdom from an ever-widening circle of women.

This Congress is but one conversation in a continuum -- one that we wish to deepen through word, art and action. Women have long cast their concern forward. Conversations about Future Generations preceded this Congress. And there are important conversations going on in parallel. We hope to begin the process of mapping and knitting together this wisdom, and in the future, harnessing crowdsource technology to connect, to continue these conversations, and to amend and ratify a living Declaration of the Rights of Future Generations. Our offerings will be open-ended, striving to map and knit together the wisdom of all of those who feel called to take a stand for Future Generations. They will be released into the world like seeds on the wind, where we hope they might intermingle with ongoing dialogues about our relationship to Future Generations, and be adapted and amended and then, again and again, cast into the world. Our sincerest hope is that we play a role in transforming public dialogue and collective action to ensure that those who come after us inherit a just and livable future.

Peaceful Uprising and the Science & Environmental Health Network are co-sponsoring the Women's Congress for Future Generations.

We are in the beginning stages of planning the next Congress in 2014 in Minneapolis, MN and we welcome your thoughts.

To contribute to the draft of the Declaration of the Rights Held by Future Generations, please visit our blog http://celebratewcffg.wordpress.com/ and make suggestions and comments, input, and suggestions!