The Huairou Commission’s unprecedented organizing effort enabled grassroots women to speak for themselves about their accomplishments in their communities: secure homes, day care centers run by local mothers, rebuilding of communities struck by disaster and partnerships with local governments, to name a few. The group included slum dwellers, small farmers, indigenous women and women recovering from disaster and genocide. Partners such as mayors, representatives of donor agencies, UN officials, researchers, parliament members, and United Cities and Local Governments joined the delegation’s activities and spoke in support of grassroots women’s activities.
 
In the week prior to the World Urban Forum, 184 of these women participated in a Grassroots Women’s International Academy—a methodology developed several years ago by the German Mother’s Centers, and further developed by GROOTS International and the Huairou Commission as a pre-conference activity where grassroots women learn and teach with one another from their on-the-ground experience, and to organize to bring joint recommendations to larger global conferences.

Participants in the Academy drew recommendations (click here to download) from their broad knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work in their communities across the globe, and brought these recommendations to the World Urban Forum. To truly achieve the themes of Partnership for Finance and Safety emphasized in the WUF3, the grassroots experts urged global institutions to make credit more accessible to grassroots women. To develop Social Inclusion in Public Engagement and in Achieving the Millennium Development Goals, they called for international aid agencies to consult them in the redirecting of funds and programs meant to benefit their communities. They also called for the creation of new funds for Peer Exchanges, women-controlled public spaces and ongoing organizing that would allow communities to sustain, upscale and transfer their successful work.
  
In addition to their accomplishments at the Academy, the grassroots organizations in the delegation bring home concrete wins from their networking at WUF3: funds were leveraged for their work on AIDS, follow-up meetings with policy-makers will soon be convened, and dialogues with partner institutions on disaster management are in the planning. Grassroots leaders developed new relationships with national ministers on housing and other areas, as a result of their visibility at the WUF3.