Growing the Voice com- munity While we continued to grapple with transitions within the team and among main stakeholders of Voice, we were also very excited to usher in new members to the Voice commu- nity. We welcomed three new mem- bers to the Voice advisory board: Aapurv Jain, Associate Director, Bilateral Relations, Disability Rights Fund and Disability Rights Advocacy Fund (DRF/DRAF); Devi Leiper O’Malley, Feminist Organiser and Founder, Closer Than You Think; and Maureen Ava Mata, board member of of several organisations of persons with disabilities (AKAP- Pinoy, WOWLeap) and a Council Member of the National Anti- Poverty Commission Persons with Disabilities Sectoral Council. We are grateful to have such powerful activ- ists and development practitioners guiding the work of Voice.
to rise and organise as they always have. It is up to us as funders and fa- cilitators to decide whether we stand by them for the long-haul or not.
reflective, and more intersectional. We also identified as a concrete area for future exploration a learning process with different participatory and trust-based grant makers. This is to learn from their experiences and to identify practical ways forward to work together with and serve the rightsholders concerned— an eco- system approach. We laid the foun- dations for these explorations by refreshing relationships with existing partners such as the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and the FREE fund. We also established new or closer connections with the Global Philanthropy Project, the Sex Work Donor Collaborative, and the Disability Rights Fund. Through these strategic engagements our hope is to establish connections and disseminate information in a way that contributes to the current and future sustainability of grantee partners’ and rightsholders groups’ initiatives, with or without Voice.
Moving on from Voice post-2024
As a way to validate this final departure point in light of the end of Voice in 2024, this year, we also started discussions at various levels to understand how we can move on responsibly after the closure of the programme. We undertook one-on-one conversations with the Voice steering committee, the Voice advisory board, and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These were complemented by a collective visioning exercise at the Voice annual reflection meeting, where we reaffirmed our commitment to be more participatory, more respon- sive and agile, more flexible and
Advocacy by Voice’s grantee partners on the Equilibrons influence grant to the National Transitional Council (NTC) for the for persons with disabilities to be taken into account in nominative and elective positions.
A member of Sehati Indonesia sewing an item for sale. They are an Innovate and Learn grantee focusing on increasing perople with disabilities’ access to livelihood.
of various identities, visible and invisible. Rightsholders groups iden- tified as requiring further outreach by Voice include women living with HIV and indigenous youth impacted by drug policies in Cambodia, rural and female youth in Tanzania and ethnic minorities and the elderly in Niger. The fall out of the COVID-19 pandemic particularly in terms of economic hardships and rise in violence, including gender-based violence, the rollback of democratic freedoms under the guise of pan- demic control measures, have led to the rise of exclusion as a whole!
Where we continue to see hope and opportunity is the increase in grassroots collaboration and networking among civil society, advanced leadership development across all rightsholder groups, particularly women and youth, more attention to mental health issues at various levels, and the improved information flows among rightshold- er groups. Ultimately, the context analysis update continued to vali- date the underlying assumption of the Voice theory of change— while the struggle for a just, equitable and inclusive world is a protracted one, rightsholder groups will continue
power shifts in various spheres, including the vagaries of the COVID- 19 pandemic? And finally, what are the change agendas and aspirations of rightsholders that Voice can con- tribute to the achievement of, up to 2024 and beyond? The stakeholders affirmed in all countries that the intersectional focus of Voice on the five key rightsholder groups has facilitated outreach to a broad range of grassroots civil society initiatives. However, the complex lived realities of the rightsholder needs us to further hone in on the intersections
Voice team with other participants at the ILGA Asia Conference 2022. Photo Credit: ILGA Asia
Voice teams envisioning empow- ered rightsholders in the future
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