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Our 2022 Call for Proposals and the Diverse Landscape of Local Organization

” The creativity and diversity with which civil society organizes itself to live in more dignified and just environments never ceases to amaze us.”

After being immersed for three months reading the applications we received in our 2022 Call for Proposals, we are convinced that the talent and potential of many organized people abound. People who daily and discreetly offer as much as they can to transform their immediate realities. In the end, they are the ones who are out there, with or without a legal framework or protective public policy, accompanying women who have abortions, supporting and offering permanent containment to the victims during the endless legal proceedings, providing humanitarian assistance to migrants, exposing acts of corruption by local authorities, guiding others on how to assert their rights in the field of health, cultural, linguistic and gender diversity. Taking risks with their advocacy work.

 

During our four-week call, we received more than 400 applications from almost all the states of the country. We are very honored that collectives, civil organizations, neighborhood groups, indigenous communities, networks, coalitions and assemblies, among others, took the time to share with us their vision of change and what they do to achieve it. We want to take advantage of this space to thank them and to let them know that we greatly admire the work they do in such complex and often in desolate contexts and also with few economic resources.

 

Among such a wide range of interesting and urgent proposals at the local level, it is always very difficult to decide which ones to choose to provide them with economic support and accompaniment. A large majority of them meet the requirements set out in the Call for Proposal and demonstrate high relevance and innovative approaches to address problems. With the selection we made at the end of this term, Acento seeks to create a universe that fairly reflects the diversity and organizational power in the face of the most pressing problems on the human rights agenda in Mexico.[1]

 

Thus, with the group of selected proposals, Acento wants to contribute to the organized work in the face of the serious crisis of enforced disappearances, to the momentum of the green tide in several states, to innovative ways of addressing gender violence, to indigenous community movements for the defense of water, territory and common goods,  to urban organizational efforts for a collective and fair management of water, to community and independent communication processes, to the vindication of the rights of trans people, prisoners and disabled people, to initiatives led by youth, among others.

 

When we have conversations with organizations and collectives, we like to affirm that we want to develop relationships of mutual learning, since we really believe in this. With this call we have learned a lot about the current context of the organization of social movements. For example, we have managed to identify the increase of some social and environmental problems, regional initiatives on certain agendas, organizational strategies and common and contrasting methodologies, emerging issues and underserved populations by traditional human rights agendas. Our homework will be to find the way to include these learnings into our working model to better accompany the human rights movement that operates locally.

 

We would like to thank the organizations, collectives and movements that participated in this Call, who trusted us and shared with us part of their valuable and indispensable work in favor of human rights and social justice in their environment.

With the experience of this Call, we have reiterated our commitment to the right to organize in the ways in which the movements deem appropriate for each context. Here is where we stand, here is where will continue to be and this is why we work.

[1] Due to safety and protection reasons we do not make public the list of the new chosen partners. All the information about the process is sent privately to the applicants, whether or not they have been selected.