Public service and community activism Sample Clauses

Public service and community activism. Many feminist activists choose careers allowing them to practice their feminism and continue their activism once they leave education and training. For a number of respondents, feminist activism formed part and parcel of their working life and leisure time. This was particularly so for those working in the public and voluntary sectors, including public sector trade unions, education, health, social work and women’s and social justice NGOs. The possibility for feminists today of making career choices which facilitate their activism is a legacy of WLM activism in the 1960s and 1970s when no such choice existed for feminists and when trade unions and NGOs and the public sector were not open to feminist ideas. Among those interviewed and in employment or who had been employed before a return to education, the overwhelming majority have, or had, jobs in the women’s and social justice NGO sector, local government, community housing, youth probation and higher education. Many have consistently raised women’s issues in the workplace and highlighted the gendered impacts of certain social policies on women. One respondent explained: Everything I did was feminist and everything that I chose to do like the work that I did when I finished the Masters was like I basically spent 5 years working in like a homeless organisation //… // and in that role I basically pushed the women’s agenda because women were very much forgotten about because everybody just sees the homeless man on the street and they forget about the hidden homeless which is predominantly women. So for me that was how I was doing my activism within my work environment. (Xxxxx) Voluntary work and fund raising for charities was the most common form of civic activism undertaken by respondents. The school girls in the sample undertook fundraising and voluntary work through school feminist society campaigns (e.g. in favour of the Women’s Empowerment Project or the organisation Daughters of Eve which fights the practice of female genital mutilation) or through community volunteer schemes supported by their school; helping at a local soup kitchen was cited as an example. Similarly, a number of the university students were also involved in fund raising and undertook voluntary work such as helping out at the Xxxxxxx Society or at a rape crisis centre or other local organisations supporting domestic violence survivors.