Another TRAWOS research project ended on December 31, 2020.
F for strength - Women. Life. (Upper) Lusatia has existed as a platform for five years now. In cooperation with the Equal Opportunities Officer (GSB) of the district of Görlitz, several project phases were successfully initiated and implemented at the TRAWOS Institute of the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences. The aim was and is to bring together as many different women as possible from politics, business and regional development, education and administration, care and services and the socio-cultural sector. With various events and the online platform www.fwiekraft.de, F wie Kraft has not only helped to raise awareness of the diverse lives of women in recent years, but also to show where and how they contribute to the successful development of the region. The "hard work" of women for "soft location factors" is at the heart of F wie Kraft. Analogous to coal mining, F wie Kraft unearths the raw material of quality of life that lies hidden between the layers of jobs, housing, transport links and economic power.
For a successful structural change, it is essential to systematically consider women as decision-makers and decision-makers for future developments and to shape the cultural change in the industrial region. It is often women who try out new forms of rural cultures in Lusatia and drive their development forward: for example in the areas of agriculture, cultural and creative industries, village development and political engagement. They do this mostly invisibly, but effectively. In their fields of activity, they address all the core issues that are necessary for a vibrant democracy: Regional and sustainable management, regaining social trust and community, alliances and knowledge exchange in and beyond the region, as well as political engagement and interest organization.
These topics lie fallow in the rural regions of eastern Saxony and eastern Brandenburg and are in urgent need of recultivation. The F wie Kraft platform aims to make the diverse cross-industry and cross-sector activities of Lusatian women visible, to reflect on, evaluate and expand their significance for gender-equitable structural change and to anchor them in communal (collaborative) work. By bringing together women of different generations, addressing cross-sector initiatives and identifying thematic interfaces, it is always possible to bring women together as creators, make them visible and unleash their development potential. This requires something very simple: encouraging women to contribute their perspectives.
As the contributions on the platform impressively show, their perspectives are quite heterogeneous and cannot be reduced to a "business-oriented course" alone: Their close-range innovations are dedicated to the concrete worlds of action and address economic and cooperation structures; new forms of work, the change in forms of housing, living, nutrition and consumption as well as areas such as care, health, family forms, social communities, landscape spaces and knowledge landscapes.
They are not concerned with all-round full service provision, as rural regions typically do not have the full infrastructure available. Particularly in the areas of mobility, culture and education, concrete solutions have "always" had to be produced locally. The focus of the debate on structural change on the renewal of economic structures means that the needs of civil society, the innovative power and the knowledge that lies in these self-produced solutions are being overlooked.
Since October 2019, F wie Kraft has accompanied women from Lower and Upper Lusatia in their activities on behalf of Zukunftswerkstatt Lausitz and made their commitment visible. The project focused on "women as an economic factor" in the regional structural change in Lusatia. As part of our assignment, we worked in six work packages on
Despite the unpredictable external conditions, we are satisfied with the project and its results: We have not only succeeded in initiating and/or expanding and consolidating networking and empowerment processes. The perspectives of Lusatian women on structural change and the participation of women were also successfully collected, bundled and widely communicated on the project's platforms.
The findings were made available to the public and reached the Minister for Gender Equality, who explicitly referred to the status report. They formed one of the foundations for the "Lusatia 2050 Development Strategy" of the Zukunftswerkstatt Lausitz as well as for further research, consultation and discussion processes - for example in the context of the newly initiated third-party funded projects, the meetings of the GSB in the Lusatian region or the political and civil society debates that are currently being held and will be held in the future on the role of women in structural change.
Despite the changes and rescheduling of internal and external events and meetings, the project team was able to participate in up to five events and meetings per month. In addition, we focused our capacities on digital networking and the expansion of our digital networking channels. Many new perspectives and potential orders for the future of F wie Kraft became apparent.
The overall satisfied view is supported by the results of the evaluation, which show that the project is not only perceived as successful and profitable, but that numerous cooperation partners would also like to see it continued. In the next step, the question of institutional consolidation and safeguarding of the Lausitz-wide, non-partisan and cooperation-generating transformative work on gender-equitable structural change must be addressed.
Further information on the TRAWOS project"F wie Kraft - Frauen als Wirtschaftsfaktor für die Lausitz" (06/2019-12/2019) can be found here.
