Video: Women Transforming Communities · Global Voices
Juliana Rincón Parra

This post is part of our special coverage Global Development 2011.
Voices of Women Worldwide brings together people from all over the world interested in promoting the voices of voiceless women, young girls and children using all the different media they have available: blog posts, audio, video and visual journalism.
A search on the video selection uploaded by members brought up several fascinating projects that focus on the power of women to transform communities and improve them.
The town of Poso in Sulawesi, Indonesia has been the focus of inter-religious violence for more than a decade.  A woman from Poso decided to start a Peace Academy for women so they can be catalysts for change. The next video clip is a trailer for a documentary telling the story of how Christian and Muslim women are coming together to forge a peaceful future for themselves and their community:
An extraordinary grassroots school is being held on a womans front porch in the post-conflict zone of Poso, Indonesia. Lian Gogali is teaching female survivors of nearly a decade of communal violence how to transform themselves into agents of peace for their families and communities. The Peace Agency is an emotionally powerful and thought-provoking film, documenting the difficulties women face and the triumphs they can achieve in Indonesia. It captures the blunt realities of living on the margins of a country still struggling to embrace the concept of womens rights and inter-communal harmony.
The Peace Agency Feature Documentary Trailer from Spotted Frog Productions.
In San Francisco, USA, Latino mothers are coming together to learn about how LGBTQ children and their families can find safety and love in a community that accepts them, while sharing their hopes and fears. Somos Familia presents their organization's views through this next video [es] with English subtitles:
Somos Familia has also produced other videos called “Drops of Water” where latina mothers of LGBTQ youth share their “coming out” stories:
In Kenya, a group of women dared to dream of a future where they could earn enough money to send their children to school and secure their futures. Pooling together their meager resources they helped one another start small businesses and through their trial and error they started discovering that they could do much more than they had thought. Through crowdsourcing online, donations came and they were able to buy 3 cows and have materials to start their dairy farm, a group goal they had dreamed about. The ongoing story is told in this blog post  and  this video [en] tells their tale:
This is a true story from the African Journal about how choices do create futures. It is a story of 20 single Kenyan mothers creating lives of meaning and purpose from virtually nothing. It is a story of a group of people from around the world choosing to give enough to “jump start” a dream and then to stepping back to watch it grow. It is the story of people helping people to create something special out of nothing. It is a story to remind everyone to that our choices well create who we will be and our future.
More of these inspiring videos and stories can be found on the Voices of Women Worldwide website.
This post is part of our special coverage Global Development 2011.