Young Women of Faith and Transformative Leadership in COVID-19 Response Webinar

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About JLI

An international collaboration on evidence for faith actors’ activities, contributions, and challenges to achieving humanitarian and development goals. Founded in 2012, JLI came together with a single shared conviction: there is an urgent need to build our collective understanding, through evidence, of faith actors in humanitarianism and development.

A joint JLI – WFDD – Berkley Center Initiative on COVID-19

June 30, 2020 Webinar

Faith organizations and communities play critical roles in the humanitarian response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Young feminist women of faith constitute an important part of this response, and yet they remain a largely unnoticed and untapped constituency in this pandemic. Even though they are at the forefront of the crisis as health workers and primary caregivers delivering care and services following faith-inspired principles of solidarity and compassion, their leadership is frequently overlooked. They are setting examples of transformative leadership within their faith communities, challenging the limited role attributed to women from centuries of strict interpretation of sacred texts. This type of leadership pushes for new frontiers of advocacy to bring lasting and transformative change that will help safeguard future generations of young women. Young women of faith have important roles to play in the COVID-19 crisis, especially in reimagining a better future. It is crucial to understand the importance of engaging with this key constituency and to amplify their leadership as gender equality advocates in their communities and organizations. One path is to ensure that they tell their stories and that they are heard.

Jamie Medicine Crane, a Blackfoot woman from the Kainai and Piikani Nations in Alberta started off the event with an artistic interpretation of the COVID-19 crisis. Lopa Banerjee, director of the Civil Society Division at UN Women, introduced the discussion. Berkley Center Senior Fellow Katherine Marshall and staff member Ruth Gopin moderated the remaining conversation with Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women, and three young female leaders of their respective faith communities. They considered the strength and resilience that young women of faith exhibit in times of crisis and how to sustain this leadership beyond the pandemic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=Q9JICs5DiwI&feature=emb_logo

This event was co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs; UN Women; Baha’i International Community; Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue; World Young Women’s Christian Association; Anglican Communion; and the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities.

View the event on the Berkley Center

Read more about the joint JLI-WFDD-Berkley Center COVID-19 and Faith Initiative here