Our Mission
PaxWorks‘ mission is to empower women and girls living in poverty through small grants to discover self-determination and agency to become leaders in their communities.
Our History
A group of women friends – a Hindu, a Christian, an Agnostic, two Muslims, from Southeast Asia and Central America, mourned the barriers women and girls faced in their countries. We pondered how we might, in some concrete minuscule way, address some aspect of the discrimination and exclusion women and girls face.
We formed a close-knit all-volunteer NGO whose mission is to empower women and girls living in poverty through small grassroots funding. We support local mentors who volunteer to guide a group in imagining how they would like to change some area in their immediate environment. Together, they envision, design, and implement their project. Reporting on both content and process levels, they learn to differentiate these two aspects: HOW we work together shapes WHAT we achieve. The emergent learning reveals the dynamics of the group process as well as their individual patterns of functioning. This process-learning is our goal, intended to encourage equal participation, and invite members to become mentors to a new group. This leadership process enables the integration of new learnings.
We believe in long-term relationships, and thus we established a Legacy Project for continued funding. It is difficult to fund grassroots projects: everyone wants grants to deliver a project to “show-teach-give-do,” from above. We resist that paternalistic, top-down approach, no matter how prettily it is stated. Our process mirrors the creative ways we ourselves want to live: to work in intimate groups, practice shared decision-making, and work together as equals.