Recap: Feminist Solidarity & Capacity Building Workshop

🌏 Last week, around 40 individuals representing over 15 languages, 10 Southeast Asian and other global nations, as well as a plethora of Indigenous communities and intersectional identities, gathered in Bangkok for our Feminist Solidarity & Capacity Building Workshop. 

🫂 One of the key vehicles through which we built our solidarity and capacity at this workshop was through storytelling! Our collective shared powerful stories about how they were drawn to their movements and what motivates them, highlighting both the pain and the joy. They really captured the spirit of ‘solidarity!’ To us, we fight for liberation not because we want suffering - we fight because it is our love language. It is our way of showing love to ourselves, and to all our human and non-human relatives, believing that there is a world where we are all free.

📣The collective exchanged the storytelling practices of their communities, inspiring other collective members to learn more about each others’ movements, and learn effective ways to amplify our work. For example, our incredible friends Ros and Eliana from Apa Kata Wanita - Orang Asli shared their methods for telling Orang Asli stories through expressive filmmaking, demanding that their stories be heard, even when governments and elites insist on silencing them. ‘Storytelling,’ to communities of the Global Majority, is not just about writing books, publishing academic papers, centering trauma, or sharing what is ‘palatable.’ It is the art of truth telling, communicating, and strengthening the human ties at the core of our communities.

👾 Aside from building our capacity and solidarity over storytelling, our organisers also shared their wealth of technical knowledge. This included step-by-step Narrative and Financial Reporting tutorials from Manushya Foundation’s wonderful reporting team, as well as an informative Digital Security training from our Consortium Member partner from Tibet Action Institute.

🎨 The final session was on Collective Wellbeing. We shared our communities’ wellbeing practices, as well as conversations about what it means to ‘decolonise wellbeing,’ and practise ‘collective care’ as a means of fighting the burnout, stress, and division that pose risks to our movements. Together, we will fight to decolonise wellbeing practices, divest from individualistic, carceral and colonial ‘psychology and psychiatry,’ and reclaim care practices that centre our collectives.

🌴 One way in which we are doing this is by emphasising our need for fun, creativity, and self-expression. That is why we ended our Workshop with a zine-making workshop where we co-created a wellbeing ‘toolkit,’ and an hour of watercolour painting, where our collective used art to express their individual and collective stories. This was a very touching way to end the session, especially after we noticed the same motifs showing up in all our community members’ paintings - the environment, spirit, communities, solidarity, and love. It was a powerful reminder to us of what we, as humans, will always value deep down - and a reminder to us of why we fight at all.

✊ This Workshop was our Consortium’s response to feedback from our subgrantees and broader collective requesting more solidarity and capacity building opportunities. We hear you, and thank you for your invaluable contributions. In order to lead, fight in, and sustain movements, we must steadily grow our collective strategies, knowledge, resilience, and power. These things already exist in our communities - and the more we share our skills, listen to each others’ personal and collective stories, and steadfastly stand in solidarity with each other, we will become unbreakable!

#WeAreManushyan ♾️ Equal Human Beings 

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