Our Story

[Read the story behind our name.]

Fòs Feminista is an intersectional feminist organization centered around the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women, girls, and gender-diverse people. Together with local partners across the globe, we engage in healthcare, education, and advocacy to advance our agenda. This includes providing sexual and reproductive health services and implementing community-based strategies that make sexual and reproductive healthcare more accessible to the most marginalized women and girls. We also engage young people with comprehensive sexuality education and provide care to survivors of gender-based violence. We stand alongside our partners in the streets, in the courts, and in other advocacy spaces as an unapologetically feminist voice, resisting injustice and advocating for gender equality and reproductive rights locally and globally.

Fòs Feminista carries forward the work and partnerships of the three organizations – IPPFWHR, IWHC, and CHANGE – that formed a feminist alliance in June 2021 with a vision to advance sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice through an intersectional feminist lens and a commitment to the leadership from the Global South.

Fòs means “strength” in Haitian Creole and stands for the positive energy of resilience, dynamism, and drive to challenge all forms of oppression. Feminista means “feminist” in several languages and underscores our focus on women, girls, and gender-diverse people and our commitment to gender and reproductive justice.

As Fòs Feminista, we aspire to co-create a feminist future where all women, girls, and gender-diverse people have the support, information, and services they need to make their own choices about their bodies, their sexuality, and their lives.

Our Commitment to Gender Justice

Fòs Feminista is committed to pursuing gender justice and reproductive justice as essential to the fulfillment of human rights and central to the achievement of our mission to advance the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women, girls, and gender-diverse people.

Fòs Feminista defines gender justice as a commitment to dismantling historical and social prejudices and barriers imposed by patriarchy and its intersecting power structures, in order to enable gender equality so that women, girls, and gender-diverse people can enjoy equal opportunity, recognition, and participation, and have the conditions to fulfill their life project

We define gender as a facet of a person’s identity that describes their socialization into norms, behavior, and roles in relation to their sexual bodies. Gender can be used to classify, control, and ascribe roles, rules, behaviors, and expectations onto bodies of different biological sexes as societies deem appropriate. It can also be claimed through self-determination, when people choose to identify as men, women, non-binary, transgender, gender-diverse, or genderqueer, either in light of, or in spite of, their biological sex assigned at birth.

To learn more, please see our International Gender Justice Policy.