Sassine, Achrafieh
Beirut
Lebanon
- Human rights
Established in 2011, Haven for Artists is composed of six team members, with three full-time (Executive Director, Creative Director, Project Coordinator) and three part-time (Designer, House Manager, Researcher) staff members. Staff and advisory board are all part of the community we serve.
Funding from 2011 to 2020 was out of pocket, and in the past four years we have had funding from various donors, among them Global Fund for Women, Doria Feminist Fund, Foundation for Arts Initiatives, Arab Foundation for Arts and Culture, All Around Culture, Mediterranean Human Rights Fund, and many more (detailed in our annual reports attached). Our budget for our 2024 financial year is around 119,000 USD.
We are a cultural feminist organization based in Beirut, Lebanon. Working at the intersection of art and activism, Haven is a physical and digital platform supporting activists, artistic expression, and production rooted in intersectional feminist thinking and decolonial practices.
Haven aims to empower women, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized communities by offering a free cultural and political learning and training program, a free and accessible feminist library and community-led publications, and through the publication of our queer art archive book. We envision a society where women and LGBTQIA+ folk can express themselves freely and have full participation in the political and public sphere.
In 2022, Haven opened its 3rd cultural center that has thus far hosted 144 free and accessible cultural workshops, panels, and events reaching over 2000 women and marginalized community members focusing on decolonial knowledge production, intersectional feminism, racial justice, and gender equality. Haven also publishes cultural publications and a community-led zine titled Manbouzine. The Haven House hosts a bilingual public library, with over 330 books ranging from fiction and non-fiction, theory, poetry, essays, zines, and comics.
We host and produce:
- Clubs, Workshops, and Panels
- Cultural Publications
- Exhibitions, Festivals & Cultural events
- Creative Campaigns
- Artist studios
- Feminist Public Library
We can offer our community space as a meeting place for the network itself or its member organizations.
We heard about the network from the Challenging Inequalities Program's call for proposals, and are always looking to expand our networks with like-minded organizations in the region and worldwide. We would like to hear more about other partner organizations working on similar topics, as well as have a network of groups we can reach out to to collaborate on larger projects.