CoDev's March 2018 Executive Director's Report
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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CoDevelopment Canada Acting Executive Director, Steve Stewart
Greetings from San Salvador where I am meeting with our partners in APSIES and ANDES.This Report is an overview of engagement activities with Canadian partners and allies, and the general public since the last time I reached out in January.An objective we’ve had for the new year is to discuss with Canadian partners’ international officers and IS committees how CoDev can better help them in engaging their membership in international solidarity. We still have a number to talk to, as things have been hectic the past two months. Having consulted with our largest partners, there is one thing for which we found support and that is a one-day International Solidarity Committees meetings like the ones we used to coordinate. Below is a list of partner and ally engagement activities carried out since the last ED Report.
1. Completed and submitted preliminary proposal for project funding from Global Affairs Canada (GAC) - $298,000 per year for 3 years for a project with Central American partners to combat violence against women. This includes education and maquila partners in Nicaragua and Honduras, education partners in Costa Rica and Panama, and the national women’s sector in Guatemala. The proposal has cleared the first hurdle as of March 8, but must clear 2 more before we are invited to submit full proposal. Then we have 60 days to complete and submit it. The full proposal is very in depth and will require a fair bit of time to complete.
2. Met with BCGEU VPs Andrea Duncan and Kari Michaels to discuss partner projects and funding and ways to support the IS committees outreach to membership.
3. Held several online meetings with Canadian allies to discuss strategies to pressure the Canadian government to take action on post-election fraud violence in Honduras. Co-wrote Op-Ed on Canada’s role in the electoral crisis in Honduras translated into Spanish and sent to Honduran partners.
4. Met with the CUPE BC IS Committee: Discussed partners, funding, ways to assist committee with outreach to membership, and a visit from NOMADESC for April 18-21 CUPE BC Convention.
5. Attended the Americas Policy Group Meeting (APG) in Ottawa. Representatives from 18 organizations met to plan strategies for the coming year. For the Mesoamerica working group, the consensus was that in Honduras (with Jan 27 inauguration of de facto president, no longer a possibility to push for clean elections) the focus would shift to the political prisoners (1100+), with a special focus on human rights activist Edwin Espinal. The APG also planned and presented webinars on Honduras and Colombia (February).
The second day was dedicated to an in-depth exchange with GAC, in which some 40 GAC officials participated, including the Director for Development, the directors of the different regions of the Americas, ambassadors and embassy staff from several Canadian embassies in Latin America, and officials from the trade branch. We discussed the new Feminist International Development Policy and the Human Rights Based Foreign Policy, but also the way Canada’s unmitigated support for Canadian transnationals undermines these policies and the complete betrayal of them represented by the Canadian government’s December 22 recognition of the de facto regime in Honduras, immediately after it had gunned down numerous pro-democracy activists.
6. Wendy conducted a workshop on our Latin American education partners’ work at a conference of the Vancouver Secondary School teachers.
7. Wendy travelled to Colombia with the Front Lines Tour. This was an important opportunity not only to meet and learn from our 3 Colombian partners, but also to get to know our Canadian partners and allies in the national unions. From Colombia, she went on to Peru to meet with SUTEP.
8. Steve travelled to Mexico with members of the BCTF Aboriginal Advisory Committee and the president of the Canadian Federation of Students. There, CoDev and IDEA organized three events with local partners: a) a workshop about the impact of residential schools that was given for members of Section 22 of the Mexican teachers’ union in the streets of Oaxaca city; b) an international workshop on student resistance to neoliberal privatization with student representatives from Canada, Honduras and Mexico at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and; c) an international conference on indigenous education in Orizaba, Veracruz with teachers from various Mexican states, Guatemala and Canada. Indigenous representatives from Canada presented the Blanket Exercise and Project of Heart: a teaching project on the impact of residential schools.
9. Wendy and Steve participated in the BCTF IS Committee planning day.
10. Steve attended the CUPE National “One Big Committee” meeting and did a presentation on the crisis in Honduras.
11. Steve coordinated an online meeting of the editors of IDEA’s Intercambio magazine, with editors from Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and Canada to plan this year’s issues of the magazine.
13. Cindy sent out the Winter Appeal a few weeks ago. Please take a moment to respond.
13. CoDev staff and volunteers transferred supplies for our Cuban partners from the storage facility we had rented to a shipping container at the Rotary Club warehouse at Riverview Hospital. The supplies and now headed for Cuba!
14. We carried out a hiring process for a program assistant, got 41 applications including a dozen very strong ones, interviewed 5 and on March 9, hired Filiberto Celada, who will begin April 5.
15. Mexican police detained Totlahtotl Yoltok coordinator Lucy Morales and several other teachers from Mexico’s Democratic Teachers’ Movement (CNTE) and took them to a military base in Veracruz. We launched a quick campaign for her release and she was freed the next day.
16. Steve was in Tegucigalpa to meet with partners about the current crisis as well as their role in the proposed “Combatting Violence Against Women” project.
NOTE: Throughout February we have been preparing for a series of upcoming Latin American partner visits: Puerto Rican Teachers’ Front (replacing the Cuban teachers rep, who had to cancel because she was a congressional candidate in the March 11 Cuban elections) are here March 16-22 for the BCTF AGM and related events; COPEMH’s Daysi Marquez will be here April 5-11 to speak at the STA’s Social Justice conference and then for a one-day April 8 seminar co-organized by the BCTF and CoDev. Wendy will then take her to Victoria to meet with the greater Victoria Teachers’ Federation and speak at an event of Victoria’s Central America Solidarity Committee.
NOMODESC’s Berenice Celayta will be here April 17-21 for the CUPE BC Convention. Her time in Vancouver is limited, so we will not be organizing a public event with Berenice, but we hope to put together some informal meetings with NOMADESC’s other Vancouver-based partners.
Steve
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