Glossary:
Huairou Vocabulary "in process"

Huairou gathers knowledge and language from grassroots organizations from every continent as well as from movements, non-governmental organizations, business, academia, technology, international development institutions, and creative thinkers. As a result, its vocabulary is always “in process”.

Democracy
The Huairou Commission is built on a deep commitment to indigenous, participatory decision-making.

Grassroots
A grassroots woman is a directly affected woman who works on issues affecting her own community. In the Huairou Commission, the term grassroots generally refers to someone from an economically marginalized community.

Myth 1: Grassroots efforts are small scale. In fact, grassroots organizations often work in large networks of more grassroots organizations, including thousands or hundreds of thousands of people as participants. Grassroots efforts have successfully organized critical masses of people, transferred knowledge and skills, and contributed in the planning, implementation and monitoring of government programs.

Myth 2: Grassroots women are learners rather than teachers. Grassroots women play a crucial role in training other organizations, disseminating information, nurturing local leadership and informing policy.

Myth 3: Grassroots women's initiatives are necessarily low-tech. Experience demonstrates that women are able to acquire information and skills that enable them to become capable craftspeople, supervisors, administrators and designers. Their entrance into these occupations often enhances the quality of output.

Grassroots Women’s International Academy
GWIAs are peer learning and exchange workshops where grassroots women leaders teach, learn and debate one another's approaches to improving their living and working conditions. The format is designed to 'ensure that the innovators of solutions from the ground also be the ones articulating, naming, claiming and transferring their knowledge.' (Monica Jaeckel, "Advancing Governance through Peer Learning and Networking: lessons learned from grassroots women"). Grassroots Academies are participatory and practical, and enable attendees to identify groups to link with in order to strengthen the effectiveness of their local interventions. Grassroots Academies are often held in conjunction with major events (such as the World Urban Forum) to help prepare grassroots women to participate in those events, and to take advantage of opportunities for fundraising and linking to partners and decision-makers.

Leadership Support Process
LSP grew out of the work of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NW), a community-based organization in the US focused on grassroots women as community change agents, and a member of GROOTS International. It provides a process of personal support, analysis for overcoming oppression, participatory, values-based group methods, and planning and organizing methods. The process is used to ensure that grassroots women leaders and their professional partners have raised their consciousness as women and can support and empower each other as they work in local communities. A major focus of LSP is dealing with diversity, including issues of race, class and ethnicity, in a productive way. The key elements of LSP are: Starting with values and vision; setting group standards ('basic agreements') together; supporting each other as leaders; becoming allies and principled partners by honoring diversity; using appreciation and participatory meeting methods.

Local to Local Dialogues
Local to Local Dialogues are locally designed strategies whereby grassroots women's groups initiate and engage in ongoing dialogues with local authorities to negotiate a range of development issues and priorities to influence policies, plans and programs in ways that address women's priorities. Dialogues are convened by grassroots women and used to change the terms of negotiation between communities and their local authorities.

Mapping
Mapping places grassroots women at the center of community assessment, statistics gathering and documentation efforts. The process empowers them to document local practices, strategies and tools, and to undertake critical evaluations of their communities. Mapping is emerging as a tool for grassroots women to analyze and document the challenges they face and the contributions they make to their communities. Lessons from mapping exercises have demonstrated that when the mapping methodology enabled communities themselves, rather than professionals, to take the lead in analyzing the issues, mapping became a transformative opportunity-empowering women to understand the situation they face and the context in which they face it, to identify structures and institutions dealing with the issues in their communities, and to identify the successful tools and practices that have enabled women to raise awareness, forge partnerships and make lasting change in their own communities.

Download "Community-Mapping: A How-to Handbook for Grassroots Women's Organizations" here.

Partnership
Partners play a vital role in the Huairou Commission, which is linking in new ways to partners who will use their influence to strengthen the position of grassroots women and their organizations. They bring resources and influence to a partnership, and are often well positioned to take ideas and policies from local to global and vice versa. Partners lend their credibility to grassroots organizations, facilitating linkages to other resources and opening space for grassroots women within institutions and processes.

Watch
A Watch is a group-based, on-the-ground evaluation project for both visitors and visited. Those who participate – whether grassroots women, students, development professionals – speak directly from the women on site; both visitors and visted ask questions, share insights and may well meet with local authorities and the press, thus raising local women's confidence and the profile of their issues.