Over the course of 2021, we heard many times that we would return to “normal”. However, the reality has been different. The “new normal” brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic required the ODG to adapt to a hybrid working and relations environment, managing contingencies such as illness and restrictions on our in-person activities on a day-today basis, and to find new ways to open spaces for connection and taking care of ourselves as a team and a group of people.
It also proved challenging in terms of our political engagement, with emergency policy-making prevailing in a context in which, after coming to a grinding halt in 2020, the global capitalist economic machine returned stronger than ever. With it, too, came a return to pre-pandemic CO2 emission levels, the emergence of psychological impacts of the pandemic on our society, and fast-increasing violence and inequalities between social groups, genders, and rich countries and impoverished countries, among others.
It is against this background of the “new normal” that we decided to wholeheartedly return to face-to-face working as an essential tool to relate to one another and to build resistance and alternatives. As part of this, we organized the first large face-to-face meeting in Catalonia “Recuperem el Futur” (Barcelona) in July 2021, with the participation of more than 350 activists from groups fighting for climate, economic and feminist justice.
Against a backdrop of exceptionality, the ODG was not immune to change, with the transfer of 9 people to our technical team, allowing us not only to carry out our many research, training, networking, communication and political advocacy activities, but also to launch our Ecofeminist Transition Plan in conjunction with the members of the ODG assembly. In addition, at the end of 2021, we changed office, moving to the NOVACT office in the neighbourhood of Raval (Barcelona), after 20 years at Carrer Girona 25.
