IM-Defensoras — Autocuidado / Travesías para pensar y actuar
Summary
A Spanish-language feminist self-care and collective-wellbeing resource produced by IM-Defensoras (Iniciativa Mesoamericana de Defensoras de Derechos Humanos), with annexed workshop instructions — a basic self-care taller and a healing-losses taller — drawn from the practice of the Mesoamerican women-defenders network.
Body
IM-Defensoras — the Iniciativa Mesoamericana de Defensoras de Derechos Humanos — is the regional women-defenders network covering Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Their Autocuidado / Travesías resource collects the methodological material the network has developed for the psychosocial wellbeing of women human-rights defenders: a feminist self-care frame that locates care inside the political struggle rather than as an apolitical retreat from it, and a set of workshop scripts that facilitators can run with defender collectives. The taller básico de autocuidado (basic self-care workshop) walks a group through a structured sequence of body-based and reflective activities that surface the participants’ current state, name the resources they have, and design individual and collective care practices. The taller de sanación de pérdidas (healing-losses workshop) is a structured group process for defenders who have experienced the death, disappearance, or political imprisonment of a colleague — a recurring situation in the Mesoamerican context — and combines ritual, expressive, and reflective methods with the discipline of not appropriating indigenous ceremonial forms. Both workshops are written as facilitator scripts that can be run cold by a defender-network facilitator with limited prior training. Treat as link-only — paraphrase, link out to the IM-Defensoras resource portal for the verbatim script [source: im-defensoras-autocuidado].
Use it for
Designing a self-care workshop for women defenders in Spanish; running a healing-losses workshop with a defender collective that has experienced political violence; introducing feminist self-care into an existing training cycle; building a care infrastructure for a movement organisation that confronts high-risk work.
Related
- affinity-groups
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- leadership-development
- one-to-ones
- public-narrative
Open Questions
Verify the canonical URL (im-defensoras.org.mx returned a connection error on the standard scrape); the resource is also distributed by partner organisations in each Mesoamerican country and may have multiple mirror locations.
Sources & verification
- sources/im-defensoras-autocuidado — grounding: secondary — RAW link-unverified per source-list flag; canonical host to be confirmed.