OUR OFFERINGS AT A GLANCE
Steeped in various feminist traditions and honoring transnational liberatory models, our Institute For Gender and Cultural Competence brings culturally-specific, structural competency, in-depth anti-violence analysis and expertise to you. Whether new to the field or a long-time advocate, you can engage in learning exchanges, seminars, workshops, webinars, podcasts and teach-ins that center survivors, survivor informed and current practices, debates and innovations to prevent sexual violence.
Silent No More: Supporting the Survivor and Creating Response to Rape and Sexual Assault in Black Communities
An interactive workshop on unique impact of sexual assault on African-American communities and other communities of African-descent, this training will allow participants to examine the realities of sexual assault and deepen their understanding of sexual assault as it specifically affects African American women.
Using an anti-racism and intersectionality framework, the training seeks to further cultural awareness, sensitivity and understanding of those who work with trauma survivors, and specifically sexual assault and abuse survivors. Participants will analyze the ideological history of Black female sexuality, Black sexual politics, and the history of violence against women of African descent within the context of the United States. In addition, the training will explore concepts of race, class, gender, sexuality as well as poverty on communities that experience disproportionately high rates of sexual assault. Participants will increase their understanding of how African-Americans recall and respond to traumatic events, and learn to use a lens of intersectionality to work with and to understand survivors, organize communities against sexual assault and shape their own organizational culture in order to be responsive to women and communities of color in crisis.
Mother Tongue: Art and Culture as Sexual Assault Prevention
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Mother Tongue (now Mother Tongue Theater Project) is as a vehicle for addressing Black sexual politics in Black communities, the complex sexual/social contracts operating in communities of color when sexual assault and sexual abuse are at issue, and a tool for communicating Black feminist thought on the issue of rape.
Using theater to teach and speak the unspeakable, Mother Tongue Monologues (now Mother Tongue Theater) blow the lid off the unacknowledged ways in which Black family, community, the state and global identity are constantly accessed and assessed through the site of Black girls’ bodies, from the young girl taken from South Africa’s shores and later named the “Venus Hottentot”, to Missouri’s fourteen-year-old Celia hanged for defending herself from her Masters repeated rapes, to the eighteen year old blamed for being raped by 5 boys and men in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Conceived by Farah Tanis, Executive Director of Black Women’s Blueprint, Mother Tongue is multimedia production, using performance and training bringing together actors, artists and activists who take the audience through journeys, moments, incidents and historical narratives giving new life to pedagogy and infusing our theories of change with a mandate to end sexual violation.
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BUILDING CULTURAL COMPETENCE
Brief Description: Systems and organizations may be at different stages at different times with different populations and cultural groups. This workshop provides a framework
and process for achieving cultural competency along a continuum and sets forth six stages. Participants will develop tools to assess and measure cultural competency in: physical environments, materials and resources, communication styles, values and attitudes; and learn to incorporate what they’ve learned in all aspects of policy-
making, administration, practice and service
delivery, systematically involve consumers,
families and communities.
ADDRESSING PATRIARCHY AND SEXISM USING A VOLITIONAL FRAMEWORK
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A term coined by Farah Tanis, Volitional Feminism refers to the faculty or power of using one's will and the revolutionary potential inherent to all our identities.
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This workshop draws its audience into a deeper debate about sexuality continuing to center sexual assault survivors' experiences, and expanding the conversation around the notion of gender-nonconformity, gender fluidity, and refute the claim that trans and queer identities among Black people is a post-colonization, post-slavery phenomenon.
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Rooted in patriarchy, sexism is often uncomfortable to discuss and address, and yet it is one of the most pervasive form of oppression experienced today. This workshop engages in analysis which goes beyond intersectional framework to introduce volitional feminism, using gender and other axes of gender identity and experiences, helping participants build comprehensive strategies to
use a full volitional framework in their work.
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The workshop also addresses transgressive identities that still remain hidden, intensely controversial, and/or dismissed as an insignificant aspect of people's lives, discusses the complexities around the belief that female sexual energy deserves punishment, or to be colonized, hypersexualized or reduced to media exploitation, ridicule and displaced anger. The workshop challenges the dominant paradigm that insists on seeing only tragedy in certain sexualities and identities that represent a threat to the patriarchal status-quo.
When Truth Is Justice: Violence, Forgiveness and Reconciliation
The U.S. is one of the few places in the world where mass rapes have occurred systematically against an entire race of people and particularly the women—generations of Black/African American women, and yet there has been no outcry by human rights communities, no processes for justice, and little recognition of such violations or their impact on survivors. Centering on the story of the Black Women’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (BWTRC) on sexual assault of 2016, special focus will be placed on reconciliation and forgiveness after violence.
This is not a workshop about forgiving all the rapists. This is not a workshop about forgiving all the batterers. It is not a workshop about forgiving all the traffickers. This is a not a call to all to practice forgiveness and all will be well. No. We know too well as Black women we are often trained and even coerced into forgiving and just surviving. The workshop is about confronting the past that is ever present in the structural and the historical inter-generational dynamics in our community. Participants will gain a blueprint which can inform and transform future strategy in intervention and healing.
The Power at the Margins:
How People, Communities and Organizations Can Deploy Grassroots Storytelling Strategies to Resist Oppression
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In this training Black Women’s Blueprint infuses political education with trauma-informed dialogue and tips to offer concrete strategies on how anti-violence advocates and activists can use testimony and storytelling as potent tool to counter oppression at structural and systemic levels. The workshop offers rapid response strategies which can be used to compel policymakers to confront the cost of harmful policies head-on. Creative and unexpected strategies are desperately needed to disrupt any current or future proposed disastrous budget or policies before they become our new reality.
Participants will gain literacy in best practices for narrative collection/facilitation and deployment of stories from survivor-constituents for maximum impact and for the purposes of political-action-as-healing.​
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Intergenerational Trauma and Colonization on Communities of Color: A Context for Understanding Sexual Assault and Other Violence in Communities of Color
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This workshop is intended to bring further cultural awareness, knowledge and a framework for understanding historical trauma and its relevance to your work with survivors of color in a variety of culturally and linguistically specific communities. Participants will learn the history of violence against women and people of color within the context of U.S. history. Participants will explore the intersections of race, class and gender in the lives of victims and survivors of sexual violence. Participants will increase their understanding of how people of color in the U.S. recall and respond to sexual violence as a community.
Participants will learn to use an anti-racist/anti-sexist and anti-oppression lens to work with survivors
CRISIS INTERVENTION ON CAMPUS: IN THE AFTERMATH OF SEXUAL ASSAULT.
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Whether or not it is disclosed, sexual assault can disrupt an entire campus community, including friends, dorm residents, student groups, staff, and faculty. Crisis management training will build the capacity of campus staff or student leaders, as well as provide tools to improve preparedness and response at all levels before, during and after crises so that all involved groups, departments or agencies can work in a coordinated manner. The focus of crisis intervention and management training is to improve both the technical and support skills of the participants, as well as help participants manage their own secondary trauma, which is trauma that is experienced when supporting or advocating for a victim or survivor of violence.
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This training aims to encourage an exchange of experience and knowledge and the creation of networks among crisis managers, as well as help participants foster a campus environment that responds to a violent crime that occurs in healthy and responsible ways. This training also aims to improve coordination of crisis response and the quality and availability of crisis management tools and resources.
HUMAN RIGHTS 101 FOR FEMINIST, SOCIAL WORKERS AND ANTI OPPRESSION ACTIVISTS
The Human Rights 101 Training for Feminists is intended to add value to our feminist ideology and to transform that ideology into something practical by providing the tools to move beyond thought, critique, and theorizing ad debate, towards concrete organizing, and new forms of action.
This training will bring further understanding of the concept of human rights, its roots and how its instruments can be used to transform the way that power is exercised throughout society, locally and globally, in public and in private, so that women’s human rights can become a reality.
