The Women's Resource Center

We finally moved the Women’s Center to the new location on Zaroubyan. The opening went well although I expected more people showing up, but I think most of the people I invited were busy with work.
For those who don’t know the Women’s Center, here is a brief info:
When I was living in Montreal, I was very much involved in women’s issues and volunteered most of my time at a local women’s center on St. Denis and at the University. Once we decided to move to Armenia, in 2003, I got in touch with Shushan, a friend that I met years ago while I was doing volunteer work in Karine Dag with Land and culture organization and I suggested to her my idea of starting a women’s center at the Yerevan State University. After discussing the idea and the project through multiple e-mails, we finally got in touch with Gohar, a young professor from the sociology department of YSU who was also very much involved in gender issues and was interested to start something for young women in Yerevan. Then I moved and the 3 of us got together in Yerevan, talked for months and found out how similar the young Armenian women’s situation almost everywhere including Armenia was. Our gatherings and discussions were becoming more and more regular, we use to meet a lot at the University and talk about everything in our life. Other female students started joining us and gradually the 3rd floor of the main building of the Library at YSU became our meeting point and there we launched after a year the Women’s Resource Center.
The first year, we concentrated mostly on conducting a series of seminars on women’s human rights and discussing how the situation was in Armenia, and then we implemented the career corner for women, because most of the young women graduating from the University were having trouble in finding a good job because of the lack of some basic skills (computer, languages…). The last year at the University we also started a discussion group called “my body, my right” which is a weekly meeting of young women discussing their own sexuality and the right to their body. And that was it!!! That was the year they kicked us out of the University because we were starting to disturb the very conservative atmosphere of the University with our ideas of change and liberation.
At that day, I was out of town attending a conference in Istanbul, and Gohar called me with a very concerned voice to keep me inform that the door to our room (we had a small room on the 3rd floor) was closed and on a big white poster it said “Closed for undetermined period”.
Now it has been 2 years we are working outside of the University and are open to all women living in Yerevan. Most of the volunteers followed us and helped us starting our activities in a small apartment that we rented on Toumanyan Street and now this year, since the Center is growing and more volunteers and members are joining we had to move again to a bigger location.
The center is run by 5 paid staff and 16 members/volunteers who are part of our collective and management. Our activities include; women’s rights trainings, round-tables on gender issues, career seminars, “my sexuality” closed group discussions, prenatal courses, mother and child mornings, peer-to-peer help, film and book club, sexual assault crisis drop-in center. We also have an interesting library on feminist literature and theory, gender, LGBT resources and books, violence…and other gender awareness activities in the regions.
Last year we implemented the new Women’s center in Shushi NKR working mostly on women and peace building in the Caucasus. So now we travel once a month to the region.
That is all for now, I will give more updates eventually!