A tale of how I discovered the true meaning of the word “sisterhood”.

I'm not a woman with limited economic resources, nor am I a member of a minority or a rural inhabitant. I live in Mexico which is a country of the so-called \"third world\", but I'm a pretty lucky woman belonging to a middle class family living in the city, and therefore with a very broad access to education and technology. It’s important for me to tell you this because I couldn’t tell a story about my personal journey without mentioning how significant it was for me to learn that it’s not necessary to go through a traumatic experience, discrimination or lack of opportunities situation to become a women’s and girls’ human rights defender, but quite the opposite.

I realized that if I wanted the women and girls around me to experience the same opportunities I had and which had allowed me to get to where I am now, then it was my job to do something about it! Especially If I could use my professional education and the networks I had in school, at work, at home to achieve that. Not much later I learned that this was part of what some feminists call sisterhood, which translates into women perceiving themselves as equals, so that we can ally, support, share, and above all, work together to change our different realities!

Once I became aware of this, I immediately signed up to volunteer at the State Institute for Women where I had the opportunity to participate in various programs of social and community development, which later on led me to study a Masters Degree in Public and Social Policy. There I met another fellow feminist who was starting her own NGO, and it was not long before we started making projects together.

The next natural step was to get our message and our actions to a wider public. So I gave myself to the task of registering our foundation in the various social networks, which immediately gave us a broader audience and the ability to create our own information. This rapid growth led me to be more and more involved with new technologies and a few months later I organized a series of small workshops in order to teach my co-workers how to use twitter, Facebook, RSS, among other programs. We also created a website and so we grew our social base by large numbers.

I was doing a good job! But it was time for me to move to the next level, and that was when I found the program Voices of Our Future, where I wouldn’t only learn how to better communicate our message, but would also have a wider network of women around the world which in turn would tell me their own vision and ideas on how to solve the various issues women are facing from very different perspectives. We could give support to each other and share solutions, knowledge and experience, that is, we would put in practice that beautiful word I learned, called sisterhood.