Inaugural National Summit Recap | Part 3

Our last workshop of the Inaugural Summit was: Engaging & Mobilizing Communities to address, prevent, and end gender-based violence. We kicked off the session by watching a short clip from a classic, Bend it Like Beckham. As participants watched the scene, we asked them to think about: What cultural norms can you identify in the following scene? Here are just a few of the several norms in the scene:

• Entrenched gender norms around labor, sexuality and privacy

• Colorism

• Anti-blackness

• Stigma against divorce and marriage as the pinnacle of success

• Internalized misogyny and women being actors of patriarchy

• What will people say?

After this brief warm-up to help us think about the role of cultural norms and communities, we introduced the Community Engagement Continuum for AAPI Communities, published by Mimi Kim & API-GBV in 2005.

We asked participants to reflect on the following questions in small groups: 

1. What are your primary community engagement activities, and where do they lie in the continuum?

2. What types of community engagement activities do you wish to be doing? Why? (i.e. mobilizing or organizing my community)

3. What challenges do you experience or anticipate in shifting or growing your community engagement?

To support us in implementing deeper community engagement, we were joined by Avantika from API-DVRP for a presentation on Creating Spaces for Community Conversations. Avantika led us through the values, approach, process, and best practices for holding community listening sessions which can inform programming, movement building, and further community building.

We concluded the session with a brainstorm on two important questions for moving forward:

1. What questions would you want to ask our community members?

2. Who would you want to make sure is present? And why?

As the summit ended, we were so privileged to have closing remarks from two inspiring leaders, Aparna Bhattacharyya and Haleema Bharoocha! Aparna left us with reflections on the history of the movement—where we’ve been and where we need to go. Haleema asked us to dream big and imagine: where will we be in 40 years? With that, we ended our time together reveling in the new connections, learning, and visions that had been built throughout the day.

Watch a replay of the summit here! And, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our recap series.