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SOS CORPO, the Feminist Institute for Democracy, contributes to democratization of Brazilian society through the promotion of gender equality and social justice. The organization was founded in 1981 and is headquartered in the city of Recife in Brazil’s Northeast, a region with some of Brazil’s highest rates of poverty, absence of rights, and strong patriarchal domination. Their major strategy is to strengthen grassroots feminism and build feminism as a social and popular movement. For SOS CORPO the struggles against poverty, racism, and homophobia are fundamental dimensions of feminism, of the social change to confront the capitalist and patriarchal system that produces human inequalities and suffering.
IWHC supported SOS Corpo from 1986 to 1997, and then
reinstituted support in 2006.
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“I have been working in SOS Corpo for 15 years. This is because I, as
well as everybody who is working for SOS Corpo, have a deep commitment
to women’s lives. Women as beings in their wholeness, as actors of their
own destiny, particularly their own body.[…] Working in SOS means
witnessing women as they learn to know themselves and learn how to make
their own destiny. “ -- Taciana Gouveia, Educator and Program
Coordinator
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Projects
- Right to participation: Objective: Strengthen women’s right to participation, through advances in organization and political influence.
- Right to work and sustainable living conditions: Objective: Improve women’s access to formal rights and achieve new social, economic, cultural, environmental, and civil rights as a strategy to fight poverty and inequality.
- Right to a life free of violence: Objective: Drive forward social mobilization and public policy implementation processes geared at ending violence against women.
- Body, sexuality, and citizenship: Objective: Help to advance feminist organizations in critical reflection and political influence on women’s right to their bodies.
Impact
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"SOS Corpo has successfully furthered
the mobilization of groups across
Brazil and regionally in Latin
America to advocate for public HIV/AIDS policies that reflect the
social-economic and gender dimensions of the epidemic. As coordinator of the
Pernambuco State AIDS Forum, SOS has
obtained some concrete results such as the release of HIV/AIDS funds by the
State Government to NGOs, including women's groups, in 2008".
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In the past ten years, SOS
Corpo has implemented several projects related to HIV/AIDS with 13 women's
groups working in different areas of the state of Pernambuco. It has partnered
with a leading HIV/AIDS NGO, the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association
(ABIA), to translate the book "Triple Threat: Women and AIDS," and, in 2003, it
co-published the booklet "Gender Equality and HIV/AIDS: a Policy to be
Constructed." Within the last year, with
IWHC support, SOS Corpo organized dialogues with different social movements in
Brazil to discuss SRRH and HIV/AIDS and its links to social inequalities. They
have been participating and advocating at local, national and regional Latin
American meetings on HIV/AIDS to ensure that women's concerns were represented.
If you are a Portuguese speaker, learn more about SOS CORPO on the web:
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