A group for ‘Black, Indigenous, People of Colour’ to share personal experiences of systemic racism.
Online and ongoing
Lead by Sarri, scholar-practitioner and founder of OpenEdge, together the group will share experiences of racism and domination systems in our personal lives, communities and organisations. Through telling and hearing our stories together we will work with whatever comes up, reflecting, learning, raising our critical consciousness, moving into collective grieving and creative empowered, transformative responses. (We may look at experiences of identity conflict, reductionism, dominant group defensiveness, intersectionality, internalised oppression, microaggressions, code switching, and consider strategies to connect, respond and dialogue.)
To register for this group or for more info, please contact Sarri: [email protected]
A bit about Sarri:
Growing up in SE London in the 1990s, experiences of extreme racism left me very traumatised. By age 16, three of my friends were murdered, the police and criminal justice system, in denial of their violence, silenced and de-validated our cries for change, while another friend was murdered in police custody. Closely involved in the Stephen Lawrence campaign, I went on to study and work professionally in identity conflict and anti-oppression work in the UK and internationally. I spent my early years campaigning for, then supporting the implementation of the Macpherson Recommendations (1999) which declared the UK police institutionally racist. I became an independent advisor to the Home Secretary, then worked for the Commission for Racial Equality, Universities, Schools, local government, and community organisations. As a person of ’mixed race’ I felt debilitated by the impacts of my continuous encounters with prejudice and discounting in both white spaces and within communities of colour. Consequently, no longer able nor willing to participate in institutions and organisations reproducing the very cultural and structural violences I am trying to address, I registered OpenEdge as a UK charity in 2017.
As well as her work in the UK, Sarri has spent 20 years in the war-zones of Sri Lanka with international NGOS’ and local NGO’s Peace and Community Action (PCA) and the Butterfly Peace Garden. Sarri now works with Sagacious Youth Led Consortium (SYLC) with all three of Sri Lanka’s deeply divided ethnic communities. This structural racial justice work accompanies communities to find their own answers to what justice, reconciliation and peace looks like for themselves.
People of colour that have worked with OpenEdge have shared that they have experienced the following impacts:
Online and ongoing
Lead by Sarri, scholar-practitioner and founder of OpenEdge, together the group will share experiences of racism and domination systems in our personal lives, communities and organisations. Through telling and hearing our stories together we will work with whatever comes up, reflecting, learning, raising our critical consciousness, moving into collective grieving and creative empowered, transformative responses. (We may look at experiences of identity conflict, reductionism, dominant group defensiveness, intersectionality, internalised oppression, microaggressions, code switching, and consider strategies to connect, respond and dialogue.)
To register for this group or for more info, please contact Sarri: [email protected]
A bit about Sarri:
Growing up in SE London in the 1990s, experiences of extreme racism left me very traumatised. By age 16, three of my friends were murdered, the police and criminal justice system, in denial of their violence, silenced and de-validated our cries for change, while another friend was murdered in police custody. Closely involved in the Stephen Lawrence campaign, I went on to study and work professionally in identity conflict and anti-oppression work in the UK and internationally. I spent my early years campaigning for, then supporting the implementation of the Macpherson Recommendations (1999) which declared the UK police institutionally racist. I became an independent advisor to the Home Secretary, then worked for the Commission for Racial Equality, Universities, Schools, local government, and community organisations. As a person of ’mixed race’ I felt debilitated by the impacts of my continuous encounters with prejudice and discounting in both white spaces and within communities of colour. Consequently, no longer able nor willing to participate in institutions and organisations reproducing the very cultural and structural violences I am trying to address, I registered OpenEdge as a UK charity in 2017.
As well as her work in the UK, Sarri has spent 20 years in the war-zones of Sri Lanka with international NGOS’ and local NGO’s Peace and Community Action (PCA) and the Butterfly Peace Garden. Sarri now works with Sagacious Youth Led Consortium (SYLC) with all three of Sri Lanka’s deeply divided ethnic communities. This structural racial justice work accompanies communities to find their own answers to what justice, reconciliation and peace looks like for themselves.
People of colour that have worked with OpenEdge have shared that they have experienced the following impacts:
- relieved, strengthened, hopeful, inspired, encouraged, courageous
- felt they and their experience matters
- making sense of experiences they couldn't articulate -can understand themselves more
- confident and empowered, able to show themselves more and are more clear on what they want to say to the world
- being conscious of when they are minimising, code switching, facing dominant group defensiveness, reductionism etc and have tools and capacities to respond to these
- moved into continuous collective grieving as alternative to blame and shame, and a way to get to creative powerful responses (rather than being stuck in pain and reactivity)
- articulating and enacting their causes and needs beyond problematising individuals, become more powerful at engaging white communities in systemic consciousness, beyond defensiveness and fragility, increasing the possibility of people making different choices at individual, structural and cultural levels.
- being accompanied, less alone, and building more support systems for collective trauma
- moving beyond representationism as a way of thinking about, structuring, actioning and measuring diversity.