Schedule

• 22-24 April: Ariadne’s 2024 Annual Reconnect* (register here)
• 24 April: Joint Day hosted by HRFN, Ariadne, and Women’s Fund in Georgia
• 24-26 April: HRFN’s Funding Futures Festival (Tickets SOLD OUT)

Wednesday, 24 April is a Joint Day for Ariadne & HRFN. Participants will gather for regional analysis and movement connection, in partnership with the Women’s Fund in Georgia.

*Ariadne’s Annual Reconnect includes dynamic plenaries, a selection of visits to local movements of interest to human rights and social change funders and facilitated open spaces to bring up relevant themes in grantmaking.

Ariadne’s 2024 Annual Reconnect and HRFN Festival are separate events. Ariadne members are eligible to attend HRFN’s Festival and will receive a discount code at the time of registration.

Site Visits

During the Ariande and HRFN Joint Day on April 24, Wednesday, we are organizing more than six local site visits. 

You can register* for the site visits on Whova. 

Note: You can only register for site visits if you have already registered for the HRFN Festival. However, space for each site visit is limited, and registrations will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. We encourage you to register early to secure your spot!

Site visit 1: Tbilisi Feminist Walking Tour

The Tbilisi Feminist Walking Tour by Independent Group of Feminists (IGF) will explore Tbilisi’s hidden feminist heritage and recent feminist past. It is an act of reclaiming Georgia’s feminist past and an opportunity to get to know the modern history of women’s organizing and feminist struggles against patriarchy and oppression.  

 The 90-minute walking tour will take you to locations significant to Georgia’s feminist activism since the end of 19th century to the present time. The tour will cover the topics related to the local suffragette movement, access to universal education, civil activism as well as the feminist, queer and vegan activism.

The tour takes the same route (through Rustaveli avenue) as modern-day feminist and queer activists march on every 8th of March since 2012. The first tour was held on International Women’s Day in 2018.  The tour will end with a 30-minute documentary film screening. 

Organizers: The Independent Group of Feminists (IGF) – The Independent Group of Feminists is an informal, non-hierarchical, and non-registered group in Georgia that unites women of different professions, age, socio-economic class, ethnic origin, disability status, and sexual orientation.

Site visit 2: Resisting Authoritarian Regimes and Anti-gender Movements in the CEECCNA regions

For decades, the Central Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central and North Asia (CEECCNA) regions have been experiencing rapidly rising authoritarianism, anti-gender, and anti-democracy movements. While grassroots intersectional movements hold the line and organize at the forefront of multiple ongoing human rights crises, the regions remain unnoticed and underfunded. 

At this site visit in Praktika the Working Class Cafe, organized by the CEECCNA Collaborative Fund, human rights funders and regional social justice activists will build connective tissue between the movement´s analysis of ongoing and emerging crises in the context of authoritarian regimes with democratic backsliding and the funding practices. 

This dialogue will provide a learning space for funders to better navigate the complex political contexts in the CEECCNA regions, and to identify relevant funding strategies and tactics to proactively invest in the prevention of crises on the horizon.

Site visit 3: Audio Walk – Wild Rose

Tbilisi is a city full of contradictions and traces of all those living there. Some can’t walk the streets like others, some have to take precautions before leaving the house. A happy place for one, is a miserable place for others.

In this tour, four transgender people from Tbilisi will take you through one part of the city. The tour is about letting go of one’s own views and following along the tour leads from the transgender community. It’s not about finding hidden places, but rather being open to looking at the city from a different perspective.

Organizers: Mareike Wenzel and Women’s Initiative Support Group
Sound design: Ana Jikia. Participants: Gabi, Iulia, Nata, Tako and Vova.

Site visit 4: Laws, freedoms, and human rights in Georgia

Participants will meet the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), a non-governmental organization at the forefront of protecting human rights, promoting democratic reforms, building democratic institutions, and providing free legal aid in Georgia.

Through GYLA, attendees will learn more about the country’s human rights situation, with a special emphasis on freedom of expression and assembly. Specifically, GYLA will address the controversial, now-scrapped ‘Foreign Agents Law,’ which targeted civil society and media organizations for taking more than 20% of foreign funding.

Organizers: Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA) – Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA) was established in 1994 and is one of the oldest active NGOs in Georgia. GYLA provides free legal aid to citizens of Georgia, foreign citizens, and stateless persons regarding, among others, the issues related to the exercise of freedom of assembly.

Site visit 5: Leading the fight for environmental justice in Georgia

Environmental groups will address the major challenges in the Georgian environmental, climate, and human rights sectors in the context of the country’s ongoing political, economic, social, and even cultural transformation process. One of the main challenges in Georgia is to connect the struggles of different groups (communities, LGBT+, vulnerable groups, indigenous peoples) to ensure the protection of people’s rights and natural and cultural heritage on the one hand and to empower communities and society step by step to challenge the “ordinary” and thus neoliberal agenda and develop a vision and ideas for a democratic future on the other.

In Georgia, as in other countries of the South Caucasus characterized by internal conflicts, the implemented development strategies are based on the post-Soviet understanding of a market economy that viewed everything through a nationalist prism. The major political actors want to lead the country to the imaginary market-based “West” without taking into account the failure of the neoliberal agenda in terms of economic, social and environmental insecurities. The struggles for environmental justice have the greatest potential to address all the challenges and unite people’s concerns. But our work also shows that a closer connection with local communities is needed to reduce the homophobic, nationalist, and other influences of far-right propaganda.

Organizers:

Young Greens of Georgia: The Young Greens of Georgia (YGG) is a  Georgian, youth-led, political, non-governmental organization. The organization’s members concentrate around four principles: democracy, sustainable environment, non-hate, and non-discrimination.

Green Alternatives: Green Alternative is a Georgian non-governmental organization that works to protect the environment, and biological and cultural heritage of Georgia through promoting economically sound and socially acceptable alternatives, establishing the principles of environmental and social justice, and upholding public access to information and decision-making processes.

* Guide on Registering for a Site Visit:

• Download the Whova app (Whova for Android; Whova for iPhone). Search for HRFN’s Funding Futures Festival 2024. Log into the app using the email address you used to register for the conference. If you receive an error message, please make sure you are using the correct email. If you have logged into Whova with another email in the past, you will have to log out and log back in.
• Click the agenda icon on the bottom navigation bar.
• Click on ‘Wed 24 on the top calendar navigation. That will open the schedule for Wednesday.
• Scroll down to the site visits. Click on each site visit to learn more about the sponsoring organization and program.
• On the site visit information page, click the RSVP button to add yourself to the tour. Please note each site visit has a limited number of spaces; once they are filled you can add yourself to the waitlist. Please only sign up for one site visit.

Global Philanthropy Project’s In-Person Coordination Meeting 

During the Joint Day, the Global Philanthropy Project will be hosting a half-day (four-hour) in-person meeting to discuss philanthropic responses to anti-gender ideology, in consultation with the Responding to Anti-Gender Ideology (RIGA) Task Force.

You can register for the in-person meeting here.