Zephanie has been working as an organiser, bridge-builder, and a strategic lead for more than a decade. As a community organiser, she works with women on issues related to land, extractive and intrusive projects, and climate justice. She believes in collective power for transformative change. As a bridge-builder she connects cross-movement and inter-generational spaces to bolster solidarity, movement-organising, intersectional analysis, and generate joint actions and agendas. As strategy lead, she brings her local knowledge, political and feminist analysis, and grounded experience from the South.
Zephanie is the current JASS (Just Associates) Southeast Asia Director. She is responsible for the overall strategic alignment, management, and direction in the region to support and strengthen feminist movement organising, working together with networks and allies in strengthening collaborations, sharpening political awareness, and enhancing safe spaces in the context of heightened hostility and attacks to women and LGBTQ+ people.
Born and raised in the Philippines, she witnessed the extraction and intrusion of the commons that have spread violence at the expense of people’s lives and futures particularly those who are at the frontline of resistance. The historical role of women in the peoples struggles taught her that change comes from organised and sustained actions. Imperative to the building of an equitable economies requires the conditions necessary to overcome the colonial blueprint embedded in the system. This can only be possible by and with organized movements and actions.
During her AFSEE Fellowship, Zephanie rendered an image drawn from the lived realities of rural and indigenous women. The image locates the social categories as interconnected and interdependent web of needs and values that is vital in decolonising and enabling a quality of life. She used the Doughnut Model as inspiration and brought to the framework her own knowledge and experience in dialogue with the actual living stories of rural and indigenous women in the Philippines. The outcomes of the project can be found on her website.
My hope continues to be with every young vibrant leader in the movements and women’s networks that are organising and generating resistance, and who are persistent, creative and courageous, often in the face of risk and isolation both for challenging powerful interests and stepping out of traditional gender roles.Zephanie Repollo