EUMANS supports the Appeal launched by the Polish Women Strike. The founder of the movemement, Marta Lempart, was among the participants of The Open Congress of Citizens For Sustainable Peace, Freedom and Democracy held by EUMANS in Warsaw on the 11th and 12th of March 2022.
You can watch here the video of the speech of Marta Lempart, who covered both the situation of the humanitarian crisis caused by the War of aggression launched by Russia against Ukraine as well as the need to protect rule of law and democracy and civil rights in Poland.
THE APPEAL OF THE POLISH ALL WOMEN STRIKE TO THE EUROPEAN CIVIL SOCIETY AND CITIZENS
By Marta Lempart
Dear foreign Friends, dear international Partners, dear fellow Humans
As you all know, Russian war against Ukraine resulted, among others, in a refugee crisis of an enormous scale. However, from day one, citizens of Poland and Polish non-governmental organizations took upon the challenge, providing help, shelter and food to people fleeing Ukraine, mostly women and children.
We are the ones who were and are there to assist and support our Ukrainian friends in need, along with local authorities and municipalities.
However, neither us, the ngos, nor the local authorities got any significant help from Polish government ‒ we base on donations, collections, crowdfunding. With te democratic backslide and civic space shrinking in Poland, we don’t see much chance for our government to actually acknowledge and support the citizens, NGO’s and local authorities in the urgent and necessary work we are doing. We are and will be on our own, while we are drained, exhausted and scared of the humanitarian situation getting even worse.
Thus our appeal to you, friends, partners and humans: Please consider supporting humanitarian aid action of Polish Women’s Strike Foundation that we organize in Poland, operating from Warsaw. For now, we established a humanitarian aid point in Warsaw (at Wiejska 14, next to the building where Strike office is located, ground floor), where:
we collect the donated and acquired goods,
we distribute the goods among refugee persons (approx. 300 ‒ 500 persons per day),
we pack and distribute support for refugee persons’ places of stay (groups of 30 ‒ 50 people staying in hostels, hotels etc.),
we pack and send transports to Ukraine 80% of the capacity of our organization is now directed to the humanitarian crisis.
We are doing our best.
But we need a lot of help to manage, survive and be able to go back to our work in fields different than humanitarian ‒ our general fight for women’s rights, running and developing projects against domestic violence and for reproductive rights, for human rights, including LGBT+ rights and for democracy and rule of law in Poland.
We need both goods and financing (for goods that we are not able to collect) and other costs.
To help us financially ‒ here is the list of our bank accounts and PayPal account:
SWIFT/BIC: BREXPLPWMBK
EUR: PL53 1140 2004 0000 3412 1251 4636
USD: PL48 1140 2004 0000 3612 1251 4628
GBP: PL19 1140 2004 0000 3512 1372 1685
PAYPAL: http://paypal.me/strajkkobiet2016
For PayPal donations for Ukrainian Fund please add "UKR" in the comment
To help us by donating goods, here is the contact for organized transports:
+48 512 806 137 (Dominika); mail: domi.kasprowicz.osk@gmail.com (please, if anything, let us know first)
The list of good is available here
More info on Polish Women’s Strike
Polish Women’s Strike is a grassroot coalition of women that planned and organized protests in Poland on 03 October 2016 (‘black protest’), day called Black Monday, in 150 cities in Poland. Since then, PWS organized or co-organized over 2500 protests, marches and demonstrations in different cities in Poland: for women’s rights, for the rule of law, against neofascism rising in Poland, against the catholic church abuse of children and the cover-up of the issue, for LGBT+ rights, against the ban on sexual education. PWS was also a major force in national collection of signatures for the ‘Save the Women 2017’ bill (to legalize abortion in Poland).
Other activities of PWS include local meetings and trainings of different kinds, taking a stance on legislation being proceeded by Polish parliament and government, and dozens of networking situations – engaging and supporting the regular, not privileged women, as the major force of social change and action in Poland. In 2020, protests co-organised and led by PWS against the abortion ban ruled by the illegally acting Constitutional Court gathered hundreds of thousands of people across the country (in almost 600 cities and towns).
At the same time, PWS started working within civic bill committee ‘Legal Abortion Without Compromising’. The committee has collected 150 000 signatures that will be submitted to the Sejm (lower chamber of the Poland’s Parliament). Then "Friends/Neighbours" anti-GBV project is now run with local community leaders in 200 in Poland, working in one established network, providing support to survivors of violenc