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The role of media festivals in strengthening independent media

August 28, 2023

Festivals taking place across the Global South are attracting increasingly global attendees. This brief discussion paper looks at four diverse examples of such festivals – Media Party in Argentina, Festival 3i in Brazil, Splice Beta in Thailand, and the Africa Media Festival in Kenya – and seeks to develop preliminary hypotheses about the nature of these events, what distinguishes them from other events in the independent media ecosystem, what they hope to achieve, and how they are evolving.It also seeks to discern patterns or learnings emerging from these festivals that suggest practical recommendations for those running, setting up or supporting such events in the future, and includes concrete examples of practices that other practitioners can learn or adapt from. We also explore the role of media festivals in the resilience of local regional and global digital native ecosystems.The report has been authored by independent consultant Sameer Padania, who was an active participant in all four festivals featured, as part of a consultancy project for International Media Support, funded by the Ford Foundation. He was a judge for a pitch session and ran one workshop at Media Party, gave three clinics and one workshop at Splice Beta, co-ran one workshop and co-moderated a donors' meeting at the Africa Media Festival, and spoke on a panel at Festival 3i. The report also draws on inputs from IMS programme managers and partners.

Resourcing Black Feminist Organizing in Latin America and the Caribbean

June 15, 2023

This resource is one step in a participatory research journey that began in 2019. Led by Jeannette Tineo Durán, a team of Black feminist researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean explored Black women's activism and organizing across their regions – also termed Abya Yala. Between November 2019 and August 2020, they charted activism across 17 countries and five sub-regions they grouped as follows: the Andes, Brazil, the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the Southern Cone.To put our commitments to self-determination and community leadership in practice, it was important that the research team reflect the communities we sought to learn from. To that end, Tineo Durán assembled a powerful cadre of 16 Black women academics, artists, and activists from the regions to collectively produce it. Using participatory methodology from decolonial and intersectional perspectives that brought together Black feminist perspectives across borders, the researchers did not approach participants as subjects but rather as collaborators in the production of knowledge. Both the researchers and the participants' knowledge and experience were integral to the analysis. Most work was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with research disrupted by public health responses across the 17 countries. Participants were heavily impacted, not only by the virus but also its economic consequences and state policing of quarantine measures. Some planned in-person research activities such as workshops, forums, and meetings were conducted virtually.The original Spanish-language research – Mapeo de Feminismos Negros en Abya Yala (2021) – is a rich and deep resource, including detailed reports on each of the mapped countries/sub-regions. It is a contribution to the Black feminist call for documentation, translation, and sharing of Black feminist knowledge. As FJS and Wellspring disseminate the research to a philanthropic audience, the researchers are sharing it with a wide audience of activists in the regions and publishing their own book for movements.This microsite draws from translated summaries of the Mapeo developed by consultants Carla Murphy and Chriss Sneed. As we concluded the analysis, we saw an opportunity to include perspectives from a wider range of philanthropic actors so we conducted a small survey of seven private foundations in May and June 2022 and five follow-up interviews in December 2022 and January 2023.

Analysis of Trends in Democratic Norms and Attitudes: Regional Summary Report

June 1, 2023

This report presents the main findings, conclusions, and recommendations of NORC's Study of Trends in Democratic Attitudes. It builds on 12 country case studies that describe democratic attitudes between 2012 and 2021 and examine the system-level, contextual factors that have contributed to changes in attitudes over time.In a context of democratic backsliding, a citizenry that remains committed to democratic principles and values—even if dissatisfied with politics and governance—can be critical to staving off democratic decline. In Latin America, however, democratic legitimacy is eroding. The Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) reported that support for and satisfaction with democracy declined sharply in 2016 compared to prior survey rounds and remained low in 2018-2019. While support for democracy remained steady between 2018-2019 and 2021, support for centralizing power in the executive increased n the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Creative Capitalism: Nelson Rockefeller’s Development Vision for Latin America and the World

May 30, 2023

This study of the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) and its associated corporations, including the commercial International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), illuminates an understudied chapter in the history of the public-private aid regime that grew in the midtwentieth century to become the major industry it is today. As development aid became an American strategic priority in the decades after World War II, Nelson Rockefeller embarked on his own experiment for improving agricultural production and standards of living in poor areas of the world. His laboratory would be Latin America, the region he knew well from his wartime work at the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). Rockefeller's vision of "creative capitalism" meshed development work into a complex system of nonprofit and for-profit corporations engaged in trial-and-error projects to figure out how to develop perceived underdeveloped societies. With the announcement of President Truman's Point IV policy to deploy American development aid globally, Rockefeller advised the US government to make creative and robust use of American nonprofit and commercial expertise to implement this new strategic objective. This project illustrates just how overlapping and porous the boundaries of nonprofit and commercial development work were and the extent to which they intertwined with the state and other entities. It also shows the difficulties of agricultural and economic development abroad when conducted by small nonprofit corporations and commercial capital—even with the backing of Rockefeller wealth. These limitations meant that AIA increasingly turned to support from the burgeoning US and international public-private aid industry.

The Ford Foundation, Psychometric Experts, and the Dissemination of Aptitude Testing for College Admission in Latin America during the Cold War

April 28, 2023

This report reconstructs the largely unexplored development of a Latin American network of psychometric experts during the Cold War, which was promoted, funded, and organized by private non-profit US-American organizations, such as the Ford Foundation, the Educational Testing Service, and the College Board. The establishment of this network enabled the dissemination of psychometric knowledge and technologies, and the introduction of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as a college admissions test in several Latin American countries. The dissemination mechanisms of these bodies included the organization of a Workshop in Test Construction for Foreign Scholars, training instances on educational measurement and testing offered in Princeton, New Jersey, to scholars from developing countries; the establishment of testing dissemination centers in South and Central America; and the institution of a Latin American branch of the College Board in Puerto Rico. This dissemination and networking process was triggered and catalyzed by a global discourse coalition that defined a global crisis in higher education admissions due to the rapid expansion of primary and secondary education.

Philanthropy with a gender perspective

April 13, 2023

This Manual was created within the framework of the regional project "Women,gender and philanthropy in Latin America and the Caribbean" developed by ELLAS—Mujeres y Filantropía, together with WINGS (Worldwide Initiative for GrantmakersSupport), Comunalia (Mexico) and Global Fund for Community Foundations (GFCF).It relies on the financial support of the Open Society Foundations.The project's long-term goal "is to integrate the gender dimension in Latin Americanphilanthropy to invest more and better resources in women's rights in theircommunities.

Spotlight on Local and Refugee-Led Efforts to Address Key Protection Needs: Lessons Learned in Three Key Regions

March 13, 2023

In 2022, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) undertook a geographic rapid assessment project to better understand the unmet legal needs and protection gaps faced by displaced people in three regions of the world: Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South and Southeast Asia.This report synthesizes insights and recommendations gathered from interviews with refugee-led initiatives (RLI) and local organizations serving populations facing acute systemic legal rights violations, shares key trends impacting displaced populations in the three regions, and identifies opportunities for more productive and inclusive philanthropic engagement and international cooperation with historically excluded RLIs.

Comportamiento en la adjudicación de recursos 2020-2022. Financiamiento con perspectiva de género

February 1, 2023

The objective of this report is to analyse, through a series of components fed with information collected from January 2020 to December 2022 within the databases of Innpactia, the offer of opportunities with a gender perspective in terms of access to investment support, but not only in economic-monetary resources but also validating the support of in-kind or technical resources in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Construyendo el campo de la filantropía y la justicia de género en América Latina y el Caribe

October 18, 2022

"Incorporar la dimensión de género en la filantropía institucionallatinoamericana para invertir más y mejores recursos en los derechoshumanos de las mujeres y sus comunidades" es el objetivo general delproyecto en el cual se inscribe esta investigación, y este informe.El presente informe es el resultado de una investigación exploratoria cuyoobjetivo fue obtener un panorama lo más exhaustivo posible sobre lasituación actual del financiamiento de las organizaciones feministas y dederechos de las mujeres en América Latina y el Caribe.

Access to resources for civil society in Latin America: Barriers and costs, inequities and inefficiencies

July 1, 2022

Despite civil society's vast scope and relevance, research into the allocation of resources for its activities in Latin America is limited and inconsistent, often based on incomplete data. This research project, jointly undertaken by CIVICUS and Innpactia, is an attempt to go a step further in terms of collecting and analysing data on the civil society-funding ecosystem in the region.

Exploring Safe Abortion Activism Through the Experiences and Stories of Feminist Members of Latin American Accompaniment Networks

July 1, 2022

Feminist networks of abortion accompaniers have been carrying out sustained activism in Latin America for decades. This research project intends to examine this form of abortion rights activism; to listen and learn about the people supporting and shouldering these processes in the region; to understand their stories, paths, and journeys; and to recognize how the personal needs of activists impact the ways in which this type of abortion rights activism takes shape. Further, this study aims to learn about activists' motivations to partake in accompaniment; the impact their activism has had in the different parts of their lives, such as in their interpersonal relationships, their work, and their community spaces; their own experiences with abortion care and the decision-making processes behind themw; and how all these factors combined influence their hopes for and views on abortion care and a more just future.

Affective Cartographies: Migrant, Displaced, And Refugee Girls And Adolescent Girls In Latin America And The Caribbean

June 20, 2022

Being a girl or an adolescent girl is no simple task in a time of multiple socialization demands to access the adult world. But being a migrant, displaced, or refugee girl or adolescent girl is even more complex, not only due to the difficulties stemming from sociocultural and economic standards, but also due to the uprooting that girls and adolescent girls are subjected to when they are forced to leave their country of origin. This report produced jointly by HIAS and UNICEF highlights the main needs and challenges for girls and adolescent girls, including forms of violence they experience during their processes of migration and forced displacement.