Dearest eyfa
network,
TL:DR
synopsis:
Since
there is no opportunity
for an eyfa network meeting this year, we are
keen to share the renewed
priorities that
2020 brought to the eyfa
office. We want to be
better at our
solidarity work and particularly with how we show up for racial
and disablity justice struggles. It's our aim to be aware of
intersectionality and to apply this lens in our understanding of
issues, both
internally and in our
projects & collaborations.
Read on
to find out:
How to organise
together with us next year
How
our decolonizing process is going & tips*? for those interested in
reflecting on the dominance of white supremacy culture in your
activist groups
How
to participate in any of the
trainings eyfa is offering next year
We would
also like to know how you
are doing. Things are
hard, but we believe in the ongoing will to collaborate!
...Read More...
2020,
a year of internal reflections on collective and societal
racial dynamics
In case
you've been wondering what we at the eyfa office have been up to
these past months (as so much of our programme has been either
canceled or postponed), we wanted to share with you a bit about
the internal, structural processes that we've been busy with.
There are 2 highlights that might interest you:
1)
we've been working on putting our values better into practice,
particularly in terms of what 'intersectionality' needs to look
like in our movements (this means an increased focus on racial
justice and disability justice!)
2)
we've been working on decolonizing our modes of working,
dismantling white supremacy culture in our office, and
reimagining what it means to be a truly anti-racist organisation
In order to
make these interventions, we've utilised various
anti-racist tool(kit)s (that we are happy to share with those
who are interested!), challenged ourselves to have more
conversations about race, relied on some valuable support from
our board members who are indeed comrades and friends, traversed
some difficult interpersonal landscapes together, putting in
varied amounts of emotional labor, and stuck to our commitment
to each other and to collective liberation/justice. We decided
to structure our internal processes by breaking it down in to
several different aspects of how we organise and work together
(e.g. how we interact with the network, staff recuitment, office
agreements, etc.). We've approached these different aspects now
weekly for quite a few months and we're in a pretty constant
state of evaluating the process.
What's been most
challenging for us in all of this
The whole process
(of
keeping up with all of our conversations taking notes, checking
again for consensus, revising, questioning our own terminology,
then proposing a new thing/idea - all while working mostly
virtually!) in
itself is lengthy and requires patience especially in these
uncertain circumstances. It can be
demotivating
to stay
stuck in a
visionary phase with wanting to make
some structural changes but without
much opportunity to actually take any
action.
Also, it's been difficult to
maintain consistency
during moments of emotional/mental drainage. At different times,
on different days, we've all felt more or less anxious or
demoralised by the state of the world and so we struggle to put
in the energy to tackle the heavy
topics
(like the harm that we may have caused each other unknowingly)
when we finally manage to meet together.
Maybe that's why it
has taken us so long to reach out to you.
What
does this mean for our future work and how we're organising?
In general,
we are pushing for applying intersectionality as a lens for all
our projects, as well as our collaborations with other groups,
initiatives, and ourselves. In our upcoming projects, we want to
give a more central role to the topics of migrant solidarity,
anti-racism, critical whiteness, decolonization, etc. This means
we wish for more of our
white comrades to be engaged in reflecting
on their whiteness, white supremacy culture, and their role in
anti-racist movements, while at the same time we want to reach
out and collaborate with more groups and individuals working
within BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and
migrant communities.
We are in
the process of recruiting new office
staff so that we can
have more BIPOC representation in the office and on the board. A
critical element in this
process is how
important we see the normalizing of difficult conversations
surrounding racial dynamics, particularly in spaces/groups
professing non-hierarchical structures!
Where
is the eyfa network in all this?
We aren't
able to have a network meeting this year, so would instead like
to take this opportunity to envision collaboration with and
among you all.
Participation
Call Out: In case you
would be interested in participating in 1 of 2 trainings that we
hope to conduct in Berlin early 2021:
1)
*Empowerment workshop for BIPOC activists*
2)
*Antiracism and Allies*
write us
for more info and to see if there is still space available.
Orga team
call out + looking for tips: Our
overarching workplan for next year is to explore the
intersection between disability and racial justice, within which
we are hoping to conduct study visits, create a publication,
host an international youth exchange, and develop an online
course. We are looking for people to get involved in the
organisational process of these activities, from basic
conceptualizing and planning logistics, to more specific tasks
like graphic and/or web designers for the online course. We look
forward to hearing from those of you who would be interested in
organising together! Also please share this general info with
your trusted comrades who might not be on this list. Because of
the topic of the workplan, we are expressly commited to
involving more disabled and BIPOC comrades in the orga teams.
Further, if you have any suggestions for groups or organisations
that we should contact to collaborate with on this workplan,
share your tips with us!
Put some
anti-racist tool(kit)s to use in your own contexts: we would like
to invite any of you who would be interested in conducting some
similar interventions in your own groups, to contact us so we
can share some of the materials that we have gathered. We
acknowledge that there is a hurdle sometimes in overcoming the
different contexts from which the materials are sourced, but we
would be interested in future collaborations involving
translation and contextualization of these materials. Maybe this
is a future collaboration we can plan together!
Share with
us what's up: it's been
already quite a while since the
last newsletter, the one connected to the crisifund, and we are
curious about how you are doing. How are you organising during
these difficult times?
Proposals
for collaboration: we would, now more
than ever, like to create space for collaboration amongst
different groups/memebers in the network - in the spirit of
intersectionality. If that means that you'd need any support
from the office to share your materials or announcements wider,
or to simply find potential collaborators to bounce ideas off
of, let us know. You can also, if you haven't already, request
to be added to the Network mailing list, which is one that is
more interactive and intended for this exact purpose.
We acknowledge
that the eyfa network has a somehow amorphous shape and it's not
always what we all want it or need it to be. We would like this
announcement to start a process where we can invite new groups
to join the network, so we can put our values into practice
together. We remain curious about what shape the network has the
potential to take, amidst all its ambiguity and contradictions.
We, in the office, are all
finding 2020 pretty difficult, and we definitely didn't
anticipate that we'd have to go so long without seeing each
other again. But that's all the more reason to take these
opportunities for reflection... so we're sure when we do meet
again, we'll have plenty to talk about!
in commitment,
in collaboration, in solidarity,
the eyfa office