We know that the world has reached a tipping point in its ability to absorb the harmful impacts of unsustainable resource use, economic greed and militarism. This planet-wide crisis is the defining issue of our time and a keen reminder that there are no single issues: global problems are interrelated and so are smart solutions.

MADRE is driven by a commitment to solutions.

Over the past 27 years, MADRE has built a network of community-based women's organizations worldwide. This network encompasses thousands of women and families - in Sudan, Iraq, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala, Kenya, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Palestine and elsewhere - who are on the frontlines of our global crisis. Yet, as part of the MADRE network, they know that change is not only possible - it is already happening.

Through our programs in peace building, women's health & combating violence against women, and economic & environmental justice, MADRE develops innovative social and political strategies that:
deliver resources and support to women and families,
use human rights advocacy to promote social justice,
research and offer alternative solutions to educate and inspire people to action, and
work for an equitable distribution of resources to sustain social change.


History

MADRE was born out of a belief that together we can make a difference. In 1983 a group of women activists, poets, teachers, artists and health professionals traveled to Nicaragua to witness the impact of the US sponsored contra war. What they saw horrified and angered them. They met with women who showed them day care centers, schools and clinics that had been bombed by contras supported by the US government.

These women returned to the US with a mandate from the women of Nicaragua: to bring the stories of Nicaraguan women and children to the attention of the US public and mobilize people to demand a change in US government policy.

MADRE's Founding Director, Kathy Engel, and the women she brought together had a vision of a unique women-led, women-run international human rights organization, dedicated to informing people in the US about the effects of US policies on communities around the world. MADRE resolved to build real alternatives to war and violence by supporting the priorities of our sister organizations and linking them to the needs of women and families in the US through a people-to-people exchange of direct relief and understanding.


26 Years of Women Recreating the World


In the summer of 1983, a group of women from Nicaragua's national women's association and the Ministry of Health for the Autonomous Region of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua extended an invitation to a small group of women in the United States. The Nicaraguan women were living through the worst days of a 10-year terrorist campaign, an undeclared war in which right-wing Contra militias, illegally trained and funded by the US, targeted civilians with mass killings, rape, torture, abduction, the destruction of crops and livestock and the bombing of daycare centers, schools, hospitals, churches, community centers and homes to overthrow Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government. This invitation by the Nicaraguan women would give rise to an international women's human rights organization encompassing a network of women activists, advocates, artists, educators and community leaders in more than a dozen countries.

Earlier that year, a group of Nicaraguans, including members of the women's association and the Ministry of Health, who had survived attacks by the US-backed Contras, filed a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice. The plaintiffs' testimonies were so moving that Kathy Engel, a young poet-activist in the United States, decided to produce a dramatic reading based on the trial transcript. At the time, Nicaragua was not in the headlines. Although the Contras were killing people almost daily and the US was covertly mining Nicaragua's harbors, no one called it a war. "We hoped that the reading would bring public attention to what the United States was doing in Nicaragua", said Kathy. Three of the plaintiffs agreed to come to the US to take part in the reading.

One of them was Dr. Mirna Cunningham, the Minister of Health for Nicaragua's North Atlantic Coast. "After the reading", recalls Mirna, "we invited the organizers to Nicaragua. We hoped that they, in turn, would bring more women to see for themselves what their government was doing to our country. We wanted them to look into the eyes of mothers whose children had been killed by the Contras and to turn that feeling into action. We wanted them to see what we were trying to build in Nicaragua at that time. To understand the lunacy of their government's claim that our Revolution was a threat to the United States. Most of all, we wanted them to go home and organize other women. We believed that if women in the US truly understood the misery that their government was causing, they would demand change. And we were right."

In fact, the women who traveled to Nicaragua that summer came home with a commitment to the women they met there. Joined by others who were moved by the stories and information they shared, they set out to build an organization that would respond to the needs of women and families threatened by US foreign policy and give people in the United States the means to demand alternatives to unjust policies. Inspired by the Women's Committees of Nicaragua whose children had been killed by the Contras or during the fight to overthrow the right-wing Somoza regime, they named the organization MADRE.


Making MADRE: the movements, the moment


Among the women who built MADRE were artists, teachers, poets, actors, health workers and life-long political organizers. They came together across differences of culture, class and community, recognizing one another by their shared commitment to linking the struggles against sexism, racism, war, homophobia and economic exploitation in which they were active. These were the feminists who demanded that the women's movement confront racism in society and within its ranks; the Independentistas who had a feminist critique of nationalism; the socialists who insisted that liberation was more than a function of economics. Building on their common commitment to women's rights and leadership, MADRE's founders pooled the strengths of their diverse political work and life experiences to create a women-led, women-run organization that was both a culmination of and an innovation on the movements for social change in which they were active.

"With Kathy's leadership, we created MADRE to address the crisis of Nicaragua", said Anne Hess, who founded MADRE's Board of Directors. "But also to enable people to see the connections between that crisis and problems right here in the US. Remember, 1983 was a watershed moment in this country". Three years earlier, the Republican Party had emerged from the shadows of the Watergate scandal to reclaim the White House and the courts. The Reagan Administration not only expanded Jimmy Carter's support for the Contras into a full-scale covert war abroad; it also worked domestically to roll back the victories of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as publicly funded day care and health care and to enact an economic program that would bring about a massive redistribution of resources from poor to rich. Around the country, racist and homophobic violence escalated as a right-wing religious ideology moved into the mainstream. Women's economic and reproductive rights came under attack. Poverty worsened and homelessness soared.

"We worked to identify the causes of these problems and the roots of the violence we had witnessed in Nicaragua", said Anne. "We focused on the links, for example, between the dismantlement of day care programs in the US and the bombing of day care centers in Nicaragua." MADRE's founders understood the Contra War in Nicaragua as one of many instances in which US policymakers prioritized militarism and profit-making over people's basic needs, particularly the needs of women.

"Our focus on US foreign policy", said Anne, "stemmed from our experiences in a range of political movements, for example, the movement against Apartheid in South Africa. We learned a lot from the African National Congress in the 1980s, which identified the system of Apartheid as its enemy and not white South Africans. The ANC of that era is remembered as a model of multi-racial organizing, but it also gave us a principle for understanding who your enemy is and where you apply pressure when you want to see change. We understood that our target was US policy; not men, or the rich, or the people who voted for Reagan, but the policies and institutions that perpetuated suffering. An understanding of the role of US policies became crucial to every issue that MADRE addressed."


Women and Families


From the start, MADRE approached its work from the perspective of women, reflecting the world through the eyes of those who are responsible for the housing, healthcare, daycare, nutrition, education and emotional wellbeing of the vast majority of the population and who are targeted for discrimination and violence. MADRE's founders understood that women's social roles as caretakers give them a powerful stake in political issues ranging from food stamps to nuclear proliferation. They also believed that women could transform their individual experiences of violence and discrimination into a stance against all forms of oppression if they saw that different types of oppression are mutually reinforcing.

MADRE's founders knew that while women's traditional social roles and discrimination against women were global in scope, they are experienced differently, depending on race, nationality, class, sexuality and other aspects of identity. They saw that building on the strengths of those differences while focusing on the universality of women's roles and women's oppression could be a key to building lasting political partnerships between women from different communities within the US and between US-based women and those in other countries.

This approach defied a trend toward single-issue politics that marked a lot of progressive organizing in the 1980s. Kathy Engel recalls how MADRE's insistence that "the Nicaragua activists think about El Salvador as well as Palestine and East L.A. was sometimes unpopular". Some of the Central America solidarity groups wondered why a women's organization was sticking its nose into foreign policy. And some sectors of the women's movement didn't like how MADRE talked about "women and their families", refusing to dislodge "women" from the daily context of their lives and communities. When we started to talk about human rights, mainstream human rights organizations barely acknowledged the economic issues we claimed were central for most women in the world -including in the US- like rights to food, housing and health care. MADRE's founders were determined to build an organization that was both clearly focused on concrete issues and able to sustain a political practice as complex as the reality of women's lives.


MADRE's Sister Organizations: Partnerships for Change


MADRE's work with the women of Nicaragua became the model for our partnerships with sister organizations around the world, community-based women's organizations that share our commitment to social justice and progressive politics. The women who come together through these organizations are those for whom the most horrifying newspaper headlines are a daily lived reality. They are survivors of war, political repression, genocide, economic and sexual exploitation and the twin burdens of natural disaster and disastrous policies. Yet they have refused to give in to despair. Instead, they have organized with MADRE to build health clinics, nutrition programs, domestic violence shelters, community radio stations, human rights training centers, literacy campaigns, and programs to promote human rights advocacy and women's political participation. These programs help meet immediate needs in our partners' communities and work to change the balance of power in favor of women and their families.

Through our sister organizations, we have been able to offer life-saving support to hundreds of thousands of women and their families. What our sister organizations have given us in return cannot be quantified. They have taught us that despair is a luxury and that hope is a rational response to hardship if we can join together with others to create change. As Kathy Engel said, "We are strengthened by ... the women who are our models, who have always stepped into the fire when there was no other way to save a child."


MADRE's Members: Turning Outrage into Action


None of MADRE's 26 years of accomplishments would have been possible without our 25,000 members. You are the ones who have supported our ongoing programs and come through again and again when our sisters have faced sudden catastrophes like paramilitary attacks, hurricanes or intimidation campaigns by their governments. You have been there not only with funding for our sister organizations, but with messages of friendship and support. These have been as crucial as bread in ensuring our sisters that they are not alone, that someone knows about the hardships they are confronting and is standing with them.

You have responded to our requests for letter-writing campaigns to stop US weapons sales to Israel and to hold the US accountable to international law. You have collected eyeglasses, AIDS medications and toys to deliver to hospitals and clinics in Cuba. You have joined MADRE delegations to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon to see for yourself the impact of US policy on our sisters in those countries and to educate people back home about what you saw. You have attended meetings, film screenings, house parties, vigils, concerts, demonstrations and community fundraisers in support of MADRE's work. You have passed on our newsletter to friends.

Above all, you have understood the importance of sustaining MADRE as a political home, a place where we can all come together to defy the isolation and apathy that this country so often instills in its people. Together, we have cultivated a vision of the world we wish for and we have built mechanisms to demand that our government's policies reflect that vision.

We have reached out to thousands of other women and men who are not necessarily political activists, but have a basic sense of right and wrong. We have enabled them to channel their principles into coherent political positions and given them the means to act on what they know to be true: that governments have a responsibility for the welfare of their people; that we in the US and millions of others throughout the world will remain imperiled unless the United States respects human rights and international law; and that human need, not corporate greed, must guide public policy.

At the height of the Cold War, we helped to expose the Reagan Administration's covert wars against the people of Central America. During the first Gulf War, we stood up to George Bush, opposing the bombs and trade sanctions that threatened Iraqi women and families. For eight years, we challenged the bogus humanitarianism of Bill Clinton and worked to hold his Administration accountable to its rhetoric. And since the attacks of September 11, 2001, we have showed the world that the jingoism of "united we stand" is a myth. Instead, we have stood united against Bush's war on the world, including his assaults on civil and political rights, women's reproductive health, international law and the priorities of women and families at home and abroad. Today, despite serious challenges to our work, including a beleaguered US economy and deepening crises for many of our sister organizations, we are, thanks to you, stronger than ever.

Twenty-six years ago, MADRE was created, in partnership with those women who were most directly threatened by US foreign policy, to meet immediate needs in their communities and to address the underlying causes of the crises they faced. Grounded in the concrete work of collecting crayons, books, powdered milk, medical equipment and art supplies for Nicaragua, MADRE offered ways for people in the US to think about their own lives in a political context and to join together to demand alternatives to destructive policies, at home and abroad.

Since then, MADRE has provided over 26 million dollars worth of material support to our sister organizations in Burma, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Colombia, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Kenya, the countries of former Yugoslavia, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, MADRE is an internationally recognized women's human rights organization situated at a crossroads of the movements for women's equality, peace and justice and international human rights, reflecting the understanding that women's rights are human rights, that US foreign policy is a "women's issue" and that human rights everywhere are inherently political.

MADRE's Founding Director, Kathy Engel, and the women she brought together had a vision of a unique women-led, women-run international human rights organization, dedicated to informing people in the US about the effects of US policies on communities around the world. MADRE resolved to build real alternatives to war and violence by supporting the priorities of our sister organizations and linking them to the needs of women and families in the US through a people-to-people exchange of direct relief and understanding.


http://www.madre.org