Programs: Arts & Empowerment Program

Jahajee Sisters partnered with Sakhi for South Asian Women to offer an interactive Arts & Empowerment training focused on the issue of domestic violence and social justice, and explored through the media of poetry/prose, film and dialogue.  

Workshops were held from January to April, 2009 in Richmond Hill, home to a diverse, vibrant, yet marginalized and under-served South Asian community. Over twenty women across three generations took part in the program, contributed to an Anthology of participants writings, and several presented their work at a culminating Book Launch event held at the Queens Museum of Art.

The Arts & Empowerment Program sought to build the voices and power of women and girls to share their thoughts, emotions, experiences and visions for change. The program was designed to serve as a springboard, fostering community-based leadership among Indo-Caribbean and South Asian women. Participants were equipped to outreach and organize in their communities to intervene against and prevent domestic violence and support the sustained leadership of women.

Participants in the 2009 Arts & Empowerment Program are now helping to host and facilitate regular gatherings, and we are incorporating parts of the program's arts-based curricula in ongoing programs

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We express our deepest gratitude to the Asian Women Giving Circle for funding the 2009 Arts & Empowerment Program, and to the Blue Star Center of New York for providing a beautiful and healing space for our workshops.

"I'm so glad I was a participant at A&E workshops. Without really noticingit made me confront a lot of things I had been avoiding, such as the brutality of all the women of my mother's generation,
and how it continues to tear at my brothers and sisters, and how the bruises were never attended to in a real, whole way. I can tell you right now, it is opening a new path of recognition, cleansing and healing. I always wondered why I never had a picture of my mother visibly around the house.  It was because it
always hurt too much to look at her.  Thank you for the vision and for the work." (A&E Participant from Guyana, 53 years)

"Thanks for showing me how great it feels to write…I have written tons of new stuff…You would not believe the inspiration that those words bring to me and it is just encouragement to keep on writing, and that nothing is impossible.”  (A&E Participant from Trinidad, 16 years)