RESURJ is committed to ensuring transparency and accountability to maintain and build this important membership base and ultimately to accomplish the work we believe in. To this end, as we “build and break, break and build”, an expression coined by our friends at Diverse Voices and Action for Equality (DIVA) Fiji, we practice, learn, unlearn, disrupt, welcome dissent, and renew, through our feminist accountability practices.
- A Justice approach – we aim to transform power inequities and create long-term systemic change, through a justice approach: organizing our constituencies, expanding them, increasing capacities, and supporting leadership and power of excluded groups of women and adolescents including trans persons and non-binary identities, and other marginalized groups.
- Guidelines – our internal RESURJ Guidelines, which details our ways of working, processes, and accountability mechanisms with each other, the collective, and the movement, supports our work and is grounded by our vision for a just world for all. We have developed guidelines for specific areas of work, to ensure a justice approach, such as feminist guidelines on collecting and platforming women’s stories and narratives. We also have an overarching working agreement to continually review and revise our pratical ways of working.
- Practice what we preach: We put into practice key aspects of our advocacy demands and have developed a parental leave policy, health care support for members of the secretariat, travel policy and a travel child support policy for members with small children. These measures are integral to our feminist accountability practice and are actions that allow for members to fully contribute to the alliance and the movement we are part of.
- Consensus building decision-making – as a network that embodies a feminist collective spirit, we work very hard to create open policies and processes that we adhere to. We ascribe to building consensus-based decisions – which are not always easy nor fast but we have grown to define our own ways of practicing consensus-building decision and are clear that it does not mean to convince one another but to hear out all the options, views and reasons. This way of working also exemplifies the pace under which the Alliance move.
- Mutual aid – we aim to practice mutual aid collectively and individually, from co-caring for member’s children in our meetings, to providing space for personal reflection, and discussion on feminist accountability, sharing resources, providing feedback and skills to sharing self-care ideas and practices with each other and our allies . We provide accompaniment to each other, within the collective, and to others outside of the collective, as well as receiving accompaniment from feminist allies.
- Collective care – collective care is central to the way we work together and with others, it is central to the type of accountability we seek from decision makers and feminist movements. Our annual retreats are a space for reflection, renewal, revival, and a space for members to reconnect, revisit and discuss our accountability practices, with an aim to ensure a rest and wellbeing-oriented space.
- Mechanism for Conflict Resolution – we use a praxis approach, of trying, reviewing, revising and retrying our approach to addressing conflict both within and outside of collective, with various approaches and flexible ways to address conflict and potential conflict as they arise.
- Sharing of Power and Leadership – we operate horizontally, with the secretariat and members sharing equal decision-making, ensuring transparency and accountability. We celebrate our differences, skills, analysis and expertise.
- Alternative Spaces – We co-create alternative organizing and strategizing spaces with accomplices, that are centered in feminist accountability, intersectional co-learning, safety and wellbeing.
