CESI representative, Sanja Cesar, attended the strategic meeting titled Resource Mobilization for Women's Rights Organizations and Movements in the SEE/CEE/CIS Region held in Tbilisi, Georgia, from October 21-23, 2010.

The event was organized by The Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), an international, multi-generational, feminist, creative, future-orientated membership organization committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women's human rights. Where is the Money for Women's Rights? is a multi-year action-research initiative founded in 2004 to gain a better understanding of funding trends for women's rights work and how best to expand the resource base for feminist movements and women's rights organizations.

The research was undertaken in preparation for the regional Resource Mobilization Strategy Meeting with an aim to provide an overview of a few characteristics of women's rights organizing and to map trends in resources available for women's organizing in these sub-regions, based on the results of a small survey among women's groups and initial research, including interviews and a literature review.

The first day of meeting offered a space for participants to learn about one another's work and to reflect on the past 20 years of women's rights organizing and mobilizing in the region. We focused on the women's rights agenda at large, not just individual organizations' achievements and had a chance to discuss what role resources played in the past 20 years in defining relationships among women's rights groups and movements.

Day two was aimed at helping participants to envision the future of women's rights in the region and to see what role resources play in the women's rights agenda. We identified specific types of resources and discussed them in depth.

The goal for the last day was to share and build concrete skills in fundraising and resources mobilization for our individual organizations and for movements at large. The skills building was in direct response to the gaps identified in the ability of women's organizations to fundraise and to motivate people to give money for women's rights in the region. The important issue was also how can we build more stable and longstanding relationships with donors, without compromising the movement's agenda for the region.

We have seen that numerous organizations were created during the "transition," and that women's groups face several challenges in accessing funds, mainly related to their location and their internal capacities for fundraising. Women's groups could potentially build more positive relationships with donors; there's a need for funders to understand the complexities of working for long-term social change and for women's organizations to engage in more open dialogues with their supporters. Equally important is critical self-reflection within women's rights organizations and movements at large on the lessons learned from the past 20 years of organizing. It is also relevant for groups to strategize together on how to do the work in the upcoming decades to bring success to the women's rights agenda in the region.