HOLISTIC SECURITY
a comprehensive approach to collective protection
Mazorca’s work in security is rooted in a holistic, reflective, collective, and adaptive approach. Grounded in feminist and anti-racist principles, we place collective care at the heart of our facilitation, tailoring our work to each community and its unique context. We create spaces for reflection, allowing us to recognize and address the layered impacts of violence and uncover strategic, collective, and creative ways to protect ourselves.
Our approach to security encompasses digital, fiscal, and psychosocial dimensions, ensuring resilience even in high-risk scenarios. For social movements, activists, organizers, and human rights defenders, it’s essential to assess both individual and collective risks and develop security protocols that are responsive to our needs. While socio-political violence aims to weaken our movements and prompt us to question our purpose, we reject the dominant narrative that equates safety with militarization and isolation. Instead, we believe in fostering generative, community-centered ways to protect and sustain our movements.
Our team has extensive experience providing security support in high-risk zones across the Americas. We have facilitated risk assessments, developed tailored security protocols, and offered on-the-ground accompaniment to over 60 organizations and communities facing imminent threats. Our approach integrates a differential focus, ensuring that the security measures we propose are sensitive to the specific needs and contexts of the people we work with, including LGBTIQ+ organizations, Indigenous groups, and campesino communities.
Collective Care
We challenge the idea that self-care can only happen in isolation. When state-based security mechanisms fail us, we need community. Our approach is based on collective care frameworks to address the impact of socio-political violence on our communities, organizations, and bodies. Our goal is to move our collectives from mere survival to thriving by centering physical, mental, and emotional health and breaking the illusion that individual and collective well-being are in opposition. We focus on building a collective response to violence through transparent dialogue and relationship-building.
Workshops: holistic security
Creation of security protocols
What agreements exist to respond to security incidents? How do we respond individually and collectively when the risks we identified come to fruition? What roles exist in emergency response, and what can we expect from those around us? After this workshop, all of these questions will have clear answers.
Participants will be guided through activities to understand their social-political context, map out allies and aggressors, and successfully identify the individual and collective risks surrounding their work. These protocols can be focused on security in the office, while traveling, or in public events.
Collective Care Workshop
How do we care for ourselves and each other? How do we balance individual and community needs and desires? Organizing for change and being targeted for our work has tangible emotional, physical, and psychological impacts. Over time, sociopolitical violence has the potential to break social fabric. This workshop invited us to reprioritize community care within our movements by participating in a dedicated space to create community agreements around how we care for ourselves and each other within the organization/community.
Danilo Urrea
"In the work carried out with Zia Kandler, we made great progress in capacity building for the security and protection of social organizations and their members. This was possible thanks to Zia's professionalism, experience, leadership, and commitment to the preparation of the agreed activities.
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On the other hand, the confidentiality with which Zia handles her work allows for building spaces of trust that, in turn, enable adequate management of the groups she works with in situations that require trust-building based on professionalism and care, qualities that are present in Zia. The gender approach also makes a strong contribution to the work with organizations and social movements.
Zia's compliance with the commitments acquired before and after the work in the face-to-face spaces allows for a necessary follow-up process in the work related to human rights."