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women and gender-diverse people served through our programs & services
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engaged event and campaign participants
GOOD TO BE GOOD is an intersectional, community-wide, grassroots humanitarian and advocacy nonprofit organization with a mission to serve women and marginalized communities and help build a kind and equal world.
MISSION + VISION
GOOD TO BE GOOD is an intersectional, community-wide, grassroots humanitarian and advocacy organization with a mission to serve women and marginalized communities and help build a kind and equal world.
Our vision for an equitable, compassionate, and sustainable world is guided by a feminist, anti-oppressive, anti-racist, trauma-informed framework and the values of compassion and interconnectedness.
Our rights-based and service work is rooted in a commitment to women’s empowerment, equity, justice, and liberation. It ensures a gender-responsive focus that centres on issues impacting women, particularly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) women, girls, and gender-diverse persons from communities subjected to marginalization. Our efforts use an intersectional and holistic approach to respond to their urgent and unique priorities, while bringing awareness to the underlying causes and longstanding systemic inequities that make people vulnerable in the first place.
We combine restorative and empowering supports, programming, and advocacy for women and gender-diverse people in our communities who have felt the effects of inequity—from gender-based violence and structural poverty, to unequal treatment—to realize gender equality for all.
OUR WAYS OF BEING
Alongside our communities, we work to address the challenges and barriers concerning gender equity—uniquely, compassionately, and radically—to improve the situations of the women and gender-diverse people we work with while enabling lasting equitable progress that resonates with communities.
We aim to centre intersectional feminism and justice in our work by collaborating with and taking cue from those most affected by gender inequities. One of our goals is to model and inspire solutions for communities where women and gender-diverse people, in all their diversity, are equal and have respect, safety, empowerment, and access to equal opportunities without discrimination or denial of rights.
Between 2016-2023—with multiple community initiatives and several human rights-focused informed advocacy campaigns—we have advanced Gender Equality by supporting grassroots interventions and strategies in areas such as economic empowerment and development programs and providing over 350,900+ basic essentials for women, girls, and gender-diverse people from equity-deserving communities impacted by gender-based violence, socio-economic disparities, under-representation, and forms of systemic conditions of oppression.
Since inception, we served over 1000 women and gender-diverse people and their dependents through our various programs and support services that promote safe and healthy interconnected communities, economic and social power, and the protection of rights for women and gender-diverse people. This work is a way of centring community members’ voices and experiences, meeting people where they are, and contributing to equitable outcomes in pursuing gender equity and liberation for all.
Our ethos is solidarity over charity; collective care before individual overcoming. For us, these are verbs, and a way of life, not nouns. We believe that the path to equality begins by centring members of our communities impacted by intersecting inequalities: women and gender-diverse people.
We recognize women’s power—including their acts of resistance—as an extraordinary asset. Despite the structural forces that constrict freedom and rights, women and gender-diverse people continue to persevere and demonstrate incredible leadership.
We are committed to working alongside them to dismantle these structures and make our communities equitable and just for everyone.
Why women and gender diverse people? Why gender equity?
We centre women and gender-diverse people because we understand that when we centre the most made vulnerable and marginalized among us, it benefits everyone.
Women and gender-diverse people make up roughly half of the world’s population. Yet, they continue to experience oppression, discrimination, vulnerabilities, and barriers to gender-equal social, economic, cultural, and political realization. Women and gender-diverse people are disproportionately affected at all levels of society by unjust systems and practices ordained by pre-existing patriarchal and racist ideologies. Women are often left out of decision-making and planning that affect them in homes, communities, workplaces, and governments. During emergencies and crises, they are among the most vulnerable to health and safety disparities and at greater risk of losing their means of income—especially if mental health, housing, legal, or health care needs are unmet or state institutions increase the vulnerability experienced by gendered groups. As caregivers, health care service providers, or leaders in their communities, they are often at the forefront of crises and conflict and the least likely to be supported in recovery and justice pursuits.
Ample evidence in the public domain underlines how advancing gender equity is one of the most effective ways to eradicate poverty, promote peaceful communities, reduce violence and exploitation, and bring long-lasting benefits to societies. It also means a reduction in economic vulnerabilities and mitigation of exorbitant human and societal costs.
Gender equity is based on fairness, justice, and having equal access to opportunities and resources according to respective needs. It is the means to identify and remove barriers that compound the disadvantages faced by women and gender-diverse people and tear down gender and racial discrimination caused by the parameters of patriarchy, racial hierarchy, and colonialism. Advancing gender equity is the foundation for healthy and prosperous societies.
We cannot understand and realize true equality without equity. That’s why gender equity is at the heart of our work so that equality unfolds at the forefront of our collective existence.
Our method is two-fold: we focus on acts of humanitarian service and development programming for women and gender-diverse from historically marginalized and underserved communities. And we reinforce active prioritization for gender equity through our advocacy, community-building initiatives, and social programming.
The primary goal of our service delivery is gender equity, with profound consideration of the impact of intersecting identities with genders, such as ethnicity, culture, race, age, sexual orientation, immigration status, income, Indigeneity, spirituality, education, and physical or mental abilities.
We promote interconnectedness, compassion, and gender equality in our work and the communities we inhabit through our initiatives and programming.
OUR PRIORITY AREAS
- Women and gender-diverse people deserve to live free (and well) from violence and structural harm.
- Addressing systemic oppression and barriers that further marginalizes and discriminates against women, moving us toward equal, compassionate, and equitable outcomes in our communities.
- Women and gender-diverse people with intersecting identities and experiences deserve to be invested in and cared for to have access to safe, prosperous lives and equal opportunities.
We enable the fostering of community and using “power-with and for” as a requisite foundation for transformative justice, meaningful connection, sustainable development, and all that we aim to do as an organization. Alongside diverse communities, we are committed to addressing the cycles of gender inequality and social injustices by learning, supporting, empowering, and being guided by wisdom and grassroots movements working to dismantle inequality-producing structures of white supremacy and patriarchy locally and in powerful, loving ways.
We are committed to employing ameliorative and fundamental frameworks within our programming and services. Our approach employs an intersectional and root cause analysis, informed by research and lived experiences, to help identify the interlocking causes—not just the symptoms—that our work aims to challenge and address. We also use a gender lens when analyzing, planning, and making decisions in our work to deliberately examine all the implications of what we do in terms of gender and the different needs and circumstances of the people within who we serve. Trauma-informed, strength-based, pro-choice, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and participatory-based practices are adopted and integrated with every facet of our approach to the work we do.
It is critical to dive deep into the root causes, name them, and tackle them thoroughly to minimize the chances of replicating harm and derailing lasting progress. When we dive deep into the root causes of oppression using a gender analysis, we see how gender power relations manifest to create these inequities.
Our approach includes community-oriented strategies, which centre on women and gender-diverse people and their communities most impacted by the underlying drivers and societal elements that give rise to inequalities and barriers. To truly empower and support women and gender-diverse people, we consult and include them in programs’ development and implementation processes by focusing on their unique and distinct needs, priorities, learnings, aspirations, and challenges through needs assessments and evaluation.
To enhance data-driven, experience-informed outcomes and centre agency and interdependence of affected communities, we engage community members through outreach, cooperative relationships, service design and delivery, capacity-building, and comprehensive response planning. When advancing solutions, we always ask, “whose voices should be heard as we create our future together and share the bounty of our collective efforts?”
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supports & essential care for women, girls, and gender-diverse people
An equitable and kinder world is achievable when we act on our inherent interconnectedness and universal values to uphold shared responsibility, justice, universal compassion, and fundamental human rights for all.
We know this is possible.
TOGETHER—as a force for good.
A note from GOOD TO BE GOOD’s Executive Director
How can we be of service and see a place worth going so that we may do the work of reimagining equitable connected communities? How do we work together to drive radical change in the world we inhabit?
Embodying interconnectedness. Acting in solidarity.
When we cultivate a sense of service rooted in solidarity, and with the hope of building an equal and compassionate world, we inadvertently discover the great paradox that underpins what it means to be human—in our power lies the discovery of inherent togetherness and a way to arrive at our shared humanity. By doing unto others, we not only support others: we care for ourselves and the future of our place while participating in its transformation.
Because we’re all connected; no life exists separately; no freedom goes without another. With this truth, we find we can enhance the world we know is available to us at individual, cultural, and institutional levels.
Shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart, a just world involves the simultaneous co-creation of our individual and collective power through simple yet bold acts: honouring our kinship, defending human rights, and permitting ourselves to be wide awake in the interdependence of life. We must think about everyone involved so that no one gets left behind and do away from systems that hurt us by moving toward spaces that hold us.
May you say no more to injustices put against our women, girls, and gender-expansive neighbours. May you find the possibilities to turn to one another, especially those who confront these injustices in the raw. May you harness the power of care and abolition. May you build the expansive spaces to belong and be equal.
Let it land in your heart again and again that good is within reach—it’s us who makes this happen.
– Char San Pedro
Founder of GOOD TO BE GOOD + Gender Equity Advocate
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