Category: Read, Watch, Listen

Travel across the Caribbean and discover stories of feminist activism

Are you ready to move with us? Travel with us through the Caribbean and discover the powerful voices of feminist and queer organizations in the new Under The Sycamore Tree podcast. We’re thrilled to support the launch of this powerful podcast featuring Women’s Voice and Leadership–Caribbean grantee partners. 

Under the Sycamore Tree is a limited series Caribbean, feminist, archival podcast that documents women and LGBTQI+ led organizations across eight Caribbean countries. The conversations are insightful, intimate, and multigenerational, with each episode focusing on topics ranging from eldership to legislative changes to queer families.

Caribbean feminisms are powerful, intersectional, and rising. This podcast shares their stories with the world.

About WVL–Caribbean

When institutions we didn’t build hold us back, or don’t work for us: We move.

Women’s Voice and Leadership–Caribbean is a partnership among the Equality Fund and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice to resource the leadership and transformative agendas of women’s rights and LGBTQI+ organizations in the Caribbean region.

WVL–Caribbean is supported by the Women’s Voice and Leadership (WVL) Program, which launched in 2017. The Government of Canada recently announced the renewal and expansion of this program–a powerful call for continued resourcing of women’s rights organizations and feminist movements across the globe. Our WVL–Caribbean grantee partners are living examples of feminist change in action. Every day, they show the world why funding local feminist solutions, ambitions, and movements is critical. This podcast is an opportunity to share their incredible work with an even wider audience. Most of all, it’s an invitation to the world to listen, learn, and get inspired by the feminist organizers and activists leading change across the Caribbean.

Why a Caribbean feminist podcast?

Under the Sycamore Tree is hosted by Carla Moore of Moore Talk JA.

Under The Sycamore Tree takes place here in our audio yard. You’ll need your imagination and your heart, so picture yourself gathered with us under a large motherly sycamore tree. You’re with me listening, allowing me to guide us across eight countries as we hold space with organizers from nearly two dozen organizations.

– Carla Moore

As the podcast producers and host noted in a recent interview with Astraea, feminism is frequently depicted as white and North American, but Caribbean feminism has a long and vibrant history. Caribbean feminism looks very different from common understandings of feminist activity. For example, as citizens of primarily Small Island Developing States, “our lives are very intertwined with the environment. We’re eco-feminists by default because our countries could disappear entirely due to climate change.” 

The podcast provides a space for Caribbean feminist voices and the broadening of our understanding of multiple feminisms. 

About the Podcast

Each episode is dedicated to a theme related to the work of Caribbean feminist and LGBTQI+ organizing, including Eldership, justice and judicial precedents, youth, families and queer communities, feminist leadership, sex worker organizing, feminist-led agriculture, and Caribbean Indigeneity and rematriation.

Many of our WVL–Caribbean grantee partners were involved in the podcast, including:

Women’s Way Foundation of Suriname.
Guyana Rainbow Foundation.
CARI-Flags
Guyana Trans United.
PETAL 
Sweet Water Foundation Research and Treatment Institute 
Girls of a Feather 
Eve for Life 
Intersect Antigua
WE Change Jamaica 
Our Circle 
POWA -Productive Organization for Women in Action
CIWIL – the Caribbean Institute of Women in Leadership 
SUCOS, or the Suriname Coalition of Sex Workers.
Helen’s Daughters 
Integrated Health Outreach 
Toledo Maya Women’s Council
Makushi Research Unit 
Wapichan Women’s Movement 
Dominica Planned Parenthood Association
Tamukke Feminist Rising
Raise Your Voice St Lucia
Stichting Projekta
Women’s Research and Outreach Centre

Listen today!

Under the Sycamore Tree launches today, May 2! You can listen to a new episode every Tuesday on your favourite streaming platform or on the podcast homepage.

We are covered. True conversation between the Caribbean Women’s Voice and Leadership grantees and me, Carla Moore of Moore Talk JA

Travel with us through the Caribbean

Under the Sycamore Tree is about connection and continuity. The podcast is a time capsule of this moment in feminist, “Queeribbean” organizing. It archives a small amount of what has been done so far and reflects the hard work and commitment of Caribbean feminists. It also offers organizers a space to meet and share with each other, and provides a space to project our wildest hopes for the future. 

We’re inviting you to join the movement for feminist and queer social justice in the Caribbean with the Under The Sycamore Tree podcast. Listen to the podcast today. 

Under the Sycamore Tree is a podcast featuring WVL–Caribbean grantee partners and is supported by the Equality Fund and Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. It is produced by Rebel Women Lit and Queerlystated, and made possible by funding from Global Affairs Canada.