Fundraising with the Panzi Foundation

In our project, we worked in solidarity with the Panzi Foundation, an organization that offers medical, psychosocial, legal, and socioeconomic support to women who have experienced sexual violence through mineral conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The DRC is rich in mineral resources like cobalt, copper, and gold, which power electronics such as smartphones. People are put through dangerous mining conditions, and militia raid villages of eastern and southern regions of the DRC to control populations and access mines. These militias, like the M23 (March 23 Movement), displace, murder, and sexually abuse millions of individuals, particularly women. Gender-based violence and rape as a weapon in war demonstrate how women are disproportionately targeted and objectified over men and how war tremendously terrorizes innocent civilians.

The Panzi Foundation has One Stop Centers that provide survivors of sexual violence with all four pillars of holistic care in one location, mobile clinics to reach rural communities, an after-care center for therapeutic community-building at Maison Dorcas, and more to support thousands of women.

By watching videos, reading scholarly articles, and learning from the Panzi Foundation website, we laid a foundation to understand this conflict and the statistics surrounding it. We then went more in-depth with the Panzi Foundation: what they do, what their approach is, and which people run the foundation. We reached out to the Administrative Assistant of the Panzi Foundation, who, unfortunately, could not refer us to someone in particular to interview, but still let us host a fundraiser.

We set up an online fundraising platform that we shared with friends and family, raising $275 that goes directly to the Panzi Foundation. We set up a table outside with a QR code for general donations to the platform, custom prints we made of the Panzi logo ($2), and abstract caricature portraits drawn by Macy Manning ($2).

Through this work, we found out the power of solidarity: through our work, we were able to learn more about an important crisis that more people should learn about, spread our knowledge to other people so they’re more aware of their complicities and larger world issues, and raise money so the foundation can continue to do important work.

Understanding colonial patterns through transnational conflict and gender inequalities, this work frames our understanding of how to support a world that empowers women and fights against colonial supply chains. With this project, we hope to inform ourselves and the people around us of the importance of supporting women and understanding how militarization and colonialism horrifically affect individuals, and most importantly, how to combat this with solidarity.