How we can all be the change
My name is Elena (21) and I am going to take you on the journey of the Grensverleggers Safe Campus project with several blogs about my experiences. Sometimes, I will also connect these experiences to my research on sexual street harassment. More on this later.
Last Grensverleggers weekend was already our second weekend coming together. I will be writing about the first day of that weekend in this blog. Again we were with 44 young people, coming from all corners of the world (not just The Netherlands!). In total, they formed 8 different project groups, who set up their own project in 10 weeks. We are in the third week of the project and it is already coming together.
We started the day with a check in. Here I got to talk about my research on sexual street harassment. In The Netherland the Law sexual crimes will make this illegal and last Tuesday (March 19th) the Senate voted for the law. This means that we are almost there and then it will be the law of the land!
After that we were able to participate in two workshops of our choice. I chose to participate in a workshop provided by Fairspace about bystander interventions. It was a workshop in which we learned different methods of how we can act when we see (sexual) harassment. This was done by hearing explanations on the different methods, watching videos and talking with each other about how we would react in certain situations and what could hold us back from doing something. This workshop changed my perception. It helped me see how I could help. How I can be the change. How we can all be the change.
We could all choose two workshops that most closely matched our project or that we were most interested in. The other workshops were Inclusive Communication, Use of Artificial Intelligence, The Power of Experience Stories, Ableism and Diversity & Inclusion Strategies. To ensure that we still gained some of the knowledge from the workshops that we were unable to attend, we regrouped after the workshop. About each workshop someone told something about it. We used questions such as: what have you learned?, what did you not know yet?, what surprised you?
The day ended with celebrating Iftar together. We did this because it was Ramadan and we knew that several participants were Muslim. This way we could pay attention to diversity and inclusivity and further strengthen our group bond. After Iftar there was still time to talk about our passions, play fun games and sing-along to Taylor Swift while we did the dishes.
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