Feminist WINS Webinar - Episode 2: Key Takeaways

Maddie Bryant, M.A. Candidate and IGLI RA

“As long as we tell one more story, we postpone the end of the world. As long as we keep telling the stories of those who came before us, and of what we're doing right now, we show that there are stories of resistance worth telling, and ways out of where we are.”

- Danielle Assis

On June 9, IGLI hosted a second installment of its "Feminist Wins in a World on Fire" series. Moderated by IGLI Director Marie Berry, the hour featured three organizers from IGLI’s Network: Danielle Assis from Brazil, Aluel Atem from South Sudan, and Banan Abu Zain Eddin from Jordan. 

Marie opened with two ideas that framed the conversation. The first was "weak hope": not a belief that things will get better, but a decision to keep acting, creating, and organizing anyway. The second was Verónica Gago's “potencia feminista,” the collective power that emerges when people care for one another, challenge injustice, and build new forms of life and politics. The speakers then shared how that looks in practice, from Amazon-wide cultural mobilization to feminist storytelling and healing work in South Sudan. Here's what stood out.

Key Takeaways

• Hope is an active practice

  • Hope here isn't certainty or optimism. It's the ongoing work of acting, organizing, and creating when the future is uncertain, and it grows through care, resistance, and imagining alternatives together.

• Feminist organizing builds alternatives, not just resistance

  • Movements need to create new forms of community, politics, leadership, and care, rather than only responding to crises. Danielle Assis argued that capitalist "solutions" mostly manage collapse, and that a deeper cultural transition is the real way out.

• Culture and storytelling are political action

  • Amazonia de Pe mobilizes through music, dance, film, and poetry, including hundreds of decentralized events during its annual Amazon Week. At COP30 in Belem, civil society organized more than 60 autonomous spaces and a march of over 70,000 people. Culture connects people and moves them to act.

• Climate justice is inseparable from Indigenous knowledge, culture, and territory

  • Protecting the Amazon means protecting the cultures and traditional knowledge that have sustained it. As Danielle put it, defending the climate also means defending the cultures that keep the forest standing.

• Documenting marginalized people's experience is itself resistance

  • Aluel Atem described how earlier generations of South Sudanese women waited for "the fire to go out" to tell their stories, and were erased in the meantime. Platforms like Gender Talk 211 build a living feminist archive in real time and move women's stories onto mainstream platforms.

• Movements don't emerge automatically; they require deliberate investment in relationships

  • Building a collective means creating spaces where people can meet and recognize their shared experience. Aluel's feminist talking circles and "Banat fi Siyasa" (girls in politics) program have grown to more than 300 young women and girls.

• Care and healing are part of movement-building, not a distraction from it

  • Movements often measure success by outward growth. But for communities carrying layered, generational trauma, growth also means "building inward" through restorative practices and collective care, so activists can sustain the work.

• Funding structures can undermine the movements they aim to support

  • Aluel called for resources invested in people, relationships, and agency, rather than short-term projects, deliverables, and outputs. Success in five years, she said, means relationships that outlast any grant cycle, including leadership succession between generations.

• Lasting change is relational

  • Across all three regions, the thread was the same: sustained change comes from trust, connection, and community built over time.

“We saw what happened to the generation of our mothers, and the women before them, who felt they had to wait until "the fire was off" to document and write and tell their stories - and that wait just contributed to their erasure in real time.”

- Aluel Atem

Speaker Bios

Danielle Assis, Amazônia de Pé - Danielle is a Brazilian journalist, activist, and researcher. Passionate about stories of resistance and Latin American popular culture, her work centers on issues of climate, culture, and gender. For over ten years, Danielle has participated in grassroots movements and collaborated with NGOs, political parties, and progressive lawmakers to craft messages that inspire action. Currently, she manages the Communications team of Amazônia de Pé, a nationwide movement advocating for the protection of public lands in the Amazon, designating them as conservation units and Indigenous and Quilombola territories.

Aluel Atem, Ma’ Mara Sakit Village - Aluel Atem is a South Sudanese feminist peacebuilder and organizer working across feminist community-building, peacebuilding, and narrative work. She is the co-dreamer of Ma’ Mara Sakit Village, a feminist collective rooted in storytelling, cultural preservation, economic justice, and intergenerational organizing for women and girls in South Sudan. With over a decade of experience across grassroots, regional, and international spaces, her work explores how power, resources, and political systems shape everyday life in conflict-affected contexts, and how feminist organizing and collective leadership can help build more just and sustainable futures.

Banan Suad Abu Zain Eddin, Takatoat - Banan is a feminist activist, Co-founder, and Executive Director of Takatoat. She has a deep passion for feminist political organizing, knowledge production and exchange, and strengthening collaborative networks. Through her work, she strives to create critical, radical, and intersectional feminist spaces by collaborating with feminist groups and collectives in Jordan, the SWANA region, and the Global South.

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Author Bio

Maddie Bryant is a graduate student at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver. She holds a BA in International Studies, with a secondary major in Psychology, also from the University of Denver. She is currently pursuing an MA in Global Economic Affairs. She hopes to pursue a career advising on complex international legal and policy challenges, particularly those involving conflict, treaty frameworks, and institutional accountability.