Our personal journey towards Feminist Project Management

Hi there and welcome to our first newsletter (we are still thinking about a more accurate/fun name - we welcome suggestions)!

We are Laura Dix and Janna Visser, the two feminist faces behind Feminist Project Management (www.feministprojectmanagement.com). Based on our two+ years joint journey, we knew that there is a lot of interest in FPM. But to be honest, the number of registrations on our soon to be launched platform have blown our minds. So thank you for registering! 

We thought it would be a nice start to introduce ourselves and take you along in our Feminist Project Management (FPM) journey. 

And stay tuned: next week we will launch our Feminist Project Management Training course (with only limited places available for the first edition in March 2024)! 

A Feminist Project Management Training Course, how did that come about?
J: Laura and I met two years ago. We are both members of the Coalition of Feminists for Social Change (COFEM), an advocacy collective of thought leaders, activists, practitioners and academics working globally to end violence against women and girls. They regularly bring practitioners together to collaborate on learning and advocacy. 

L: I had been managing projects myself (or working on those managed by others) in the UK violence against women and girls sector for many years, and had the feeling that there was something missing when it came to the practice of project management within NGOs. Conversations around service delivery and practice were focussing on being trauma informed, anti-oppressive and feminist, however the same discussions or ideas were not being had when it came to project management. I became keen to explore how these same concepts could be applied to project management, as well as wondering if others felt a desire to work in a different way that was more in line with feminist values. So I reached out to COFEM, who put me in touch with the amazing Janna. We connected over our shared frustrations and experiences as well as our desire for change, and- as they say- the rest is history… 

J: I have been working as a feminist project manager and researcher for the past seven years across different fields (a.o. in international development, politics and academia), and I felt a lot of recognition in the desire for change when it comes to project management. From working across different fields, I noticed that within some fields there is more space for organising things differently than in others. However, I felt it is about time to push project management into a new - feminist - direction across fields. And that resulted in our first collaboration on FPM in December 2021, by co-facilitating a learning circle for COFEM members on FPM. 

What has happened since? 
L: After the first learning circle we felt so excited to have found others that shared our frustrations, and there was a lot of interest in exploring this concept further. The event sparked lots of new ideas and thoughts for us, as well as challenges to our thinking. So over the last two years, as we juggled pandemics, full time jobs, busy lives, country moves and more recently a new baby, we began to explore this further.

J: And this resulted in the Feminist Project Management Learning Brief, again in collaboration with COFEM. The learning brief was launched in March this year. As part of the launch we co-facilitated a webinar on FPM, where we organised an inspiring panel discussion. We asked two speakers to join us - Hera Hussain and Priya Dhanani - to talk about their experiences with FPM.

L: The event was amazing - really well attended and the discussions in both the chat and as part of the event were really rich and helped push our thinking forwards. Since the event we’ve been working out how to translate all of this learning into something we can share with others - and launching a training course felt the most natural way we could do this.

Why a training course now?
J: We noticed that there is a need for a translation of feminist values into project management. That is what we hope to offer with our training course: in addition to a dose of inspiration and a community of practitioners, you walk away with concrete tools to start transforming your project management practices on the basis of feminist principles. 

L: It will be more than just a training course. We will also publish blog posts, facilitate webinars and we have loads of other ideas about how to expand in the future. I think I can speak for Janna too in saying that one of the best parts of the journey for us both has been how much our thinking has changed. We have come from trying to work within current project management frameworks and using typical project management tools, to throwing out the rule book entirely and coming up with our own feminist framework for how to manage projects which we have captured in the training course.

What do you hope for? 
J: We both started this FPM journey because we are done with exclusive and mainstream project management practices that don’t align with our feminist values. What we hope to contribute to with this platform and training course is that people get inspired and equipped to start doing project management differently, from a feminist perspective. I would love to see those managing projects walk away from our resources and training feel more empowered to work in a way that values staff, is mindful of where power lies and helps share it, and a world where managing projects in a feminist way is the norm!

L: I hope to create and connect with a community of like minded people that want to work in a different way- people that are willing to change the status quo and breathe new life into dusty patriarchal and bureaucratic ways of managing projects. We both feel passionate about wanting to really get into the details of how you turn feminist leadership into action when leading projects- how to put theory into practice and how to work in a different way when often we have multiple factors working against us that can be challenging to working in a feminist way.