The working group had a meeting outside San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas State, Mexico, in the Alter Natos alternative environmental center of Otros Mundos Chiapas – Friends of Earth México.

This is the second meeting of the Gender Justice – Dismantling Patriarchy working group, after the first one held in Accra, capital of Ghana, in September 2017. FoEI representatives of all regions and structures of the environmental federation participated.

In an interview conducted by the facilitator of FoEI´s Gender Justice – Dismantling Patriarchy working group, Celia Alldridge, Sam Castro and Dipti Bhatnagar shared with Real World Radio some of the highlights from the second meeting.

"One of the highlights was the public event, where there were women from Brazil, Mexico, Bangladesh, Bosnia, talking about how we are now organized. And it shows that all the women had a common purpose: to bring together our struggles to bring Gender Justice", said Sam. Castro was referring to the activity on May 1st about "Environmental Justice and Anti-Patriarchal Struggle: Body, Territory and Work”.

During this second meeting, "we were talking about what is Gender Justice, Patriarchy, Neocolonialism", said Dipti, who is also the Coordinator of the Climate Justice and Energy Program. She highlighted how testimonies allow us to understand these concepts for their daily work.

They also said that it is neccesary to build a feminist strategy to think about how we are going to dismantle patriarchy: "We can’t have system change without dismantling patriarchy, and we can not have enviromental justice without gender justice".

"We felt incredibly powerful, inspired and not alone", said Sam. “We want to bring this work to every corner of FOEI, at every level of Friends of the Earth, into our campaing work", added Dipti.