Celebrating 45 years of HIC: Building Social Force through Co-Learning and Advocacy

HIC’s Co-learning and Advocacy spaces have emerged from the Coalition’s long-standing history of connecting diverse civil society actors through joint learning and advocacy. These spaces are cross-regional, multi-session encounters that support participating community and civil society organizations to prioritize, strategise, learn and advocate together on human rights related to habitat. Co-learning spaces are based on emancipatory and intercultural learning practices, which link learning to concrete advocacy actions. These spaces are aimed at supporting participants to build social force and speak with a strong interregional and intergenerational voice to impact policies and practices at the local and international scale in order to effect transformative change. 

 The event will provide the space for a joint reflection on past and current learning and advocacy practices and possible popular pedagogies for building social force around habitat rights. The first block of discussion will focus on an exchange with representatives of networks and organizations of different regions on the past and contemporary role of critical pedagogies in building social force within different social movements related to the right to housing, feminist persctives and beyond. The second block will focus on the key discussions and actions emerging from three specific Co-learning and Advocacy Spaces developed by HIC during the first semester of 2022 on (i) Feminist approaches to habitat, (ii) Land Rights and (iii) Multi-level advocacy.  In the end, participants will be invited to engage in an open debate on how critical pedagogies can be adapted, improved and used by other actors to support cross-regional strategic learning, mobilization and advocacy.