Mission statement – The Heinrich Böll Foundation’s gender-democratic principles
The gender-democratic principles of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, resolved when the Foundation was reestablished, are as relevant as ever. The Foundation’s goals are as follows:
- for a diversity of principles and life aspirations to be recognized and respected equally;
- for access to social status, employment, income, and power to be independent of gender;
- patriarchal structures and power relations to be overcome in both the private and the public sphere;
- the diversity of gender identities, forms of gender expression, and sexual orientations to be recognized in law and in society.
These tenets should be understood as both a social-policy vision and an organizational principle. Gender democracy is a normative concept that postulates equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal access by men and women to economic resources and political power. Such participation is the precondition for change and for the transformation of unjust and gender-inequitable conditions.
A gender-democratic and feminist politics aims to interrogate and redefine all political domains in terms of their impact on gender relations. Its goal is nothing less than the transformation of all those societal structures that reproduce the inequalities and stereotyped relations between the genders. As a result, giving substance and reality to gender democracy is a shared task that must be tackled by all the members of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
[English translation: Kate Sturge]