Wow – this week has been inspiring in an incredibly personal and political way. I’ve had the opportunity to spend a week with the passionate, generous and committed social change agents at the Idaho Coalition against Sexual and Domestic Violence and attend their annual conference Compassionate Communities – Towards Collective Liberation.
To be honest, before I arrived in Boise, I was thinking – “What is collective liberation?” And in turn, to try to capture (for a blogpost) the learning that has been felt more than thought, is a challenge. In essence, the conference gave voice to those who are marginalised in the move to end gender-based violence – Native Americans, immigrant women, refugees, transgender and gender-diverse people, young people, deaf people and people with disabilities, prisoners and girls and women at risk of sex-trafficking (just to name a few). And it called on all of us to give voice, build relationships, build understanding and to work towards the liberation of all communities.
And so – what does this mean for violence prevention programming?
What it means is that we must become and remain committed to ensure young people from diverse and marginalised communities see themselves, and their whole lived experience in our programs and approaches. We must build meaningful relationships with these young people and we must give them meaningful opportunities to lead. Hearing from some of the Coalition’s Youth Activists and learning about their work was a particular highlight of my week. For if we work to ”liberate’ the people on the fringes, we will all benefit.
And in order to do this, we must work on ourselves. I must work to understand and unlearn the privilege I have have been granted through my white, middle-class, heterosexual, educated, able-bodied life. And I must embrace this as life-long work.
As Kelly, the Executive Director at the Coalition noted in her plenary – “it feels like a lot”. But if we don’t, we maintain the status quo, we maintain the dominant structures which are the root causes of violence in our communities.
Ellen Poyner 