MADRE

Women cannot develop long-term solutions to the crises they face when they are struggling to ensure their family's daily survival. MADRE therefore works to meet urgent needs as a necessary component of creating social change.<br/>MADRE partners with community-based women's organizations that share our vision of a world where all people enjoy the full range of human rights. MADRE works with our sister organizations to meet urgent needs in their communities and enhance women's capacity to create positive social change. <br/>The international human rights framework is a powerful, but under-utilized tool for creating positive social change.<br/><br/>MADRE aims to apply human rights to social change initiatives, advance and improve the human rights framework and to make international law relevant and accountable to the people it is meant to serve.<br/>A cogent understanding of the social, economic, and political conditions that confront us is critical to creating positive change. Therefore, MADRE works to communicate the impacts of policies of governments, international financial institutions, and other centers of power on women and their communities worldwide and to formulate and press for alternatives to destructive policies. MADRE enables people to come together and see their own struggles in a broader context and in relation to other peoples' struggles.

In addition to longer-term development projects, MADRE works in two ways to meet the immediate needs of women and families around the world.<br/>MADRE's Emergency & Disaster Relief Fund enhances MADRE's capacity to respond to crises and enables us to act immediately and effectively when disasters strike, bringing urgently needed resources directly to the women and families most in need.<br/>MADRE's Helping Hands Program delivers medicines, school supplies and other humanitarian aid to our sister organizations around the world. These contributions enable women to meet immediate needs in their communities and strengthen their work for positive social change.<br/>MADRE also offers leadership trainings and human rights education workshops for the women of our sister organizations to gain the skills to advocate effectively in the international arena and, once they have returned home, to hold their governments accountable to the commitments they have made at global conferences.

MADRE's close working relationship with our grassroots partners is grounded in shared goals and objectives, trust, on-going training, mutual learning and consistent and frequent communication. This facilitates monitoring and evaluation (M&E) as programs are developed in a joint process on the basis of a shared analysis. An agreed upon calendar of shared communication (via phone, Skype and when possible, visits) allows for regular communication on program development and the opportunity to regularly share analysis, reflect and course-correct as needed. While measuring results are key to MADRE's M&E framework, we also seek to monitor and understand the whole range of changes our work has an impact on, including shifts in gender dynamics, empowerment and changes in voice and agency of participants. Accordingly, we have developed an M&E framework that uses a combination of tools to gather and process information to answer four fundamental questions:<br/><br/>1. Is the program achieving its results and succeeding in its plan? <br/>2. Are we achieving the changes we wanted to create? <br/>3. What changes do we observe in people, systems and in relationships as a result of this program? <br/>4. How are gender dynamics changing?

MADRE has worked at the intersection of social movements since our beginnings in 1983, when we brought together mothers and peace activists to put an end to the US-sponsored war in Nicaragua. MADRE recognized from the start that prioritizing local leadership is critical for ending human rights violations. Empowering community-based women remained at the core of our mission as we grew into an international organization, endowed with consultative status at the United Nations.<br/><br/>Since our inception, MADRE has nurtured women leaders from more than 90 visionary grassroots groups in over 25 countries. We have delivered $34 million in humanitarian aid to families facing war, displacement, natural disasters, and poverty. Today, MADRE distinguishes itself by standing at the intersection of the movements for global peace, economic and climate justice, women's and LGBTIQ rights, and Indigenous and sexual rights.