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Associazione Orlando
The Orlando Association is an established feminist organization
in Bologna, with a school, documentation center and library,
an internet café, and partnership programs with women's
groups in other countries.
Contact
Dott.ssa Annamaria Tagliavini
Biblioteca del Centro Documentazione delle Donne
Palazzo dei Notai
Via de' Pignattari 1
40124 Bologna
Tel +39-051-23-97-88
Fax +39-051-26-34-60
Email
Website Server
Donne
Luisa Passerini
Email
Director
Raffaella Lamberti
Mission Statement
Orlando was formed to combine research with political activism
by building a public institution run by women for women, that
can preserve women's cultural productions and research; collect
and share documents and resources about women and cultural
production; establish political and cultural networks of various
kinds among women at the local, national, and global levels;
and rethink the relationship between personal life and political
activity.
Activities
- Italian National Women's Library (Centro di Documentazione
delle Donne)
- Server Donne: a women's Internet server and Internet café
- Hannah Arendt School of Politics: a training school
- Women in Difficult Places: partnership programs
History and Accomplishments
Orlando was founded in 1979 by feminist researchers and activists
in Bologna. Seeking to build a stable organizational base,
they followed an innovative strategy, very controversial at
the time, of seeking government funding from the city of Bologna
and the province of Emilia Romagna, both of which had progressive
governments for many years. This strategy enabled Orlando
to build a substantial infrastructure and initiate valuable
programs without in any way compromising its independence.
Its library and documentation center (the only one of its
kind in Italy) contains over 25,000 books and has subscriptions
to 350 periodicals from many countries. It operates its own
Internet server (Server
Donne), which provides access to the web for many organizations
and individuals, while its Internet café trains women
to be "cyberfeminists." It operates its own training
school, the Hannah Arendt School of Politics, that develops
programs to teach politicians a gender perspective, with funding
from the European Union.
Since 1988, Orlando has been providing
political and technical assistance to feminist organizations
in Israel-Palestine, North Africa, and Eastern Europe through
its program, "Women in Difficult Places." This program
began with partnerships with the Women's Center in Nablus
and Women in Black in Jerusalem; later, in 1994, Orlando helped
set up the women's library at Birzeit University, in the West
Bank. In the early 1990s, Orlando began intensive work with
three feminist organizations in the former Yugoslavia, dealing
largely with issues of violence against women, and more recently
developed a partnership with the two women's organizations
in Albania. Algeria has been one of Orlando's top priorities;
they have brought leading Algerian feminists to Italy to discuss
their struggle for freedom and are working with
Khalida Messaoudi (a feminist Member of Parliament under
death threat from Algerian fundamentalists) to set up a women's
center. Orlando's partnership program with Women's WORLD,
to document the stories of Albanian women in Kosovo, is a
natural outgrowth of this program.
Italian
Program
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