Sidorela Vatnikaj

Sidorela (she/her) is an activist based in Tirana, Albania, working in gender and urban justice. In the last six years her activism has spanned over different areas within the wider anti-privatisation movement, namely around fighting for the betterment of the healthcare and education systems and the race for free and accessible public spaces, all work that she’s been doing in and next to student organisations, trade unions, and eviction & gentrification activist groups.

Right now she’s developing the first anti-femicide platform in Albania, collecting data & making public the dire findings around gender-based violence in the country. What keeps her going everyday to fight for systems change is the trust she has in her team and in this work, after the conviction that no one can be free until everyone is free. She is also working towards democratising public spaces in her city through neighbourhood councils – a non formal structure that allows citizens to collectively sense-make & self-organise around the injustices they sense and experience.

Her go-to approach for dodging pointless political debates is to drop a casual ‘I would prefer not to’, which is her way of saying ‘Let’s not get stuck in discourse but be in practice of what new, radical and fresh ideas have to show us for social justice’.