• LGBTQ

I have over 10 years of experience in campaigning and organising around social justice. I currently work at The Advocacy Academy (TAA), a youth organising movement that supports young people to engage in collective action, improving their communities, tackling social issues that directly affect them. I teach political education, support their campaigns (from ideation, strategising and direct actions) and provide leadership development across six cohorts of 16 – 25 year olds. During my time there I’ve supported a range of campaigns covering immigration issues, gender-based and sexual violence, decolonising the education system, climate justice and tackling youth violence.

Separately to TAA I am co-building a grass-routes campaign with 8 young adults, aged 20-24, who all have experience of structural oppression. We’re called The Breakout Room (TBR). We are interrogating how the current system in the UK is so unjust, and investigating why we tend to conform and what are the hidden forces that keep us from breaking out? Ultimately we are organising to create conditions that enable more people to Break Out of the repressive society in which we live. We believe these following conditions as being necessary for “Breaking Out” of ideological, internalised, interpersonal and institutional oppression: Critical Education, Hope, Decolonising Our Minds, Radical Relationships, Brave Spaces, Healing and Ideas for Action. By creating these for our campaign group and then for other people, we hope to build a network and mobilise people with critical thinking whilst equipping them with their own tools to ignite action in their own lives. This would enable more people to challenge the cultures and power structures that keep us dependent on Capitalism, and organise together towards a future where we have control of our minds, bodies, time, relationships and the means of our subsistence.

I am also part of the Hologram, a radically innovative peer-to-peer feminist health network that attempts to create stable and healthy people who can survive the end of capitalism to build something new. I am really interested in how can we create anti/post-capitalist feminist systems of care and support that transcend our physical locations and isolation, creating community across boundaries?

My main journey with stress and healing is connected to having had cancer in my 20s. This whole experience caused trauma that I’m still processing. I’ve engaged in talking therapy, mindfulness and am now doing somatic-based healing practices. Through my organising and youth work I also support people through different stresses, trauma and experiences of violence. I draw from healing justice practices but am generally really embarking on more healing centred approach whilst fighting/resisting/organising. I am also learning more about my ancestral linage and connecting with eco spirituality.

One of the main factors that has drawn me to this course is the spiritual element as an underpinning/foundation to nonviolent direct action. My goal is to learn and connect with the spiritual offerings of this course. I am really interested in the notion and reality of ‘stepping into risky actions’ with centering healing, I want to learn more about how healing and action intersect. I want to work through different placeholders for change around climate chaos with my group and the wider group of the course. I am constantly exploring my growth edges but to do it with the support of a group and teachers/guides I am interested to see where we can challenge and develop, myself and my group, to take radical actions, for personal, collective and wider transformation.

One of my goals is to take this learning back to the community of young organisers (100+ people). I work with, at The Advocacy Academy and The Breakout Room(see above). These young people are organising around the climate crisis and other intersecting issues, and will be the generation that is most impacted/ are already hugely affected.

We will also share our learnings with our community at the Hologram. Lots of people displayed interest around this course and we will will offer our learnings to them.

I am comfortable using zoom but unable to attend a session in May due to a wedding.

Yes

Our group is formed through the Hologram. I have been a part of this community for a year now, and active in our collective practice and meetings. I have built trust and connection through this group with people across different time zones, and have moved into places of vulnerability and challenge with strangers who have become friends and comrades. Due to us all being part of the hologram, where we centre radical honesty I have trust in this group and the process we will go on together that is currently unknown.

I have access needs and wonder if you provide written material from the sessions to support people’s learnings?