intersections
yamani hernandez
bear with me, any exclusively design oriented friends. here's another tangential post about how i process things in my world-view and filter through my identity as a designer, educator, reformer in relation to other issues that i am passionate about.
last night in my role as vice chair of the board of directors for IL Caucus for Adolescent Health i made a presentation to a group of prosepective funders of the Chicago Foundation for Women's/Tide's Catalyst Grant fund which is focused on reproductive justice. they are trying to raise 100k in the next six months. the incoming CFW board chair asked, how to get people to donate to this issue??? to which i responded...its about discussion, dialogue, exposure, and truth telling. it never fails to inspire people. in a sense, blogging is that (though no replacement for in person social networking as my friend peter exley so eloquently pointed out later last night at pecha-kucha vol.9--whoo hoo---but i digress.) we are obsessed with stories...and hopefully those stories spur action.
so, in my presentation, i started with a story. my story was about how after doing youth development with young women for about 7 years i got really burnt out emotionally and decided to go to architecture school (ha! architecture school as a vacation...yes, i can hear you laughing HYSTERICALLY). after architecture school i profoundly missed working with and on behalf of young people and ran a summer environmental arts program to quench that thirst. in the course of that program one day during lunch break, a 15 y/o mother was huddled over with a bunch of other girls...i came over to check in and see what was up. well, turns out they were orchestrating an attack...in lay terms, they were planning for her to get "jumped". more specifically, they were making sure that each girl got $10 to kick her in the stomach enough times to make sure that she lost the second baby she was carrying. besides the fact that this was a jarring situation, that i no doubt intervened in...i really had an epiphany about intersections. people and progress are complex and nothing is in a vacuum. NOTHING. there's no such thing as a singular issue...and i am reminded of this daily.
i have always considered my youth development work to be community development...and in that i have always used collaborative art-making and a participatory design process (mostly public art) as a tool to addressing and un-packing real-life social issues, i consider my arts and design education work to be community development as well. now in education i feel the same thing. we must understand the intersections of education and the complex lives of students...people...in order to reach them with both rigor AND relevance. reproductive justice is saying that also. people bring their WHOLE selves everywhere they go. you can't talk to a child about physics if they are hungry. you can't teach a child about environmental stewardship and sustainability when they don't have access to sexual health services and are plotting their own violent demise. its gonna come up in the process...and its just ALL connected...and the more we realize this the richer our social change efforts will become. Here is a chart from the organization asian communities for reproductive justice that attempts to note the intersections of social justice issues (environmental justice, immigrant rights, worker rights, education, anti-violence etc.)
i'm not posting this to preach about RJ. i'm posting it as a model of analytically understanding intersections (yes that is the word of the day), b/c to me, we should see all issues in this way. understanding the other factors and movements influence the issues we care about...we need to forge collaborations and coalitions and work across disciplines at all time in order to make change. (stepping off soap box now).
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however if in fact anyone IS interested in more more info about RJ, adolescent sexual health, teen parenting, or general philanthropy for women and girls around human rights: economic security (employment and expanded access to
economic opportunity); freedom from violence (including domestic violence,
sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking and prostitution), and health (access
to services and information related to mental, physical and reproductive health).
see:
the catalyst fund brochure.
visit the chicago foundation for women website
the donation page for the catalyst fund