Dare to Dream: Reports from the AWID Forum in Bangkok
by Shawna Wakefield, Root. Rise. Pollinate!
Author’s Note: Root. Rise. Pollinate! and JASS have been in virtual community together over the past 4 years. This December we took a leap to collaborate and create an in-person “liberation zone” at the AWID Forum in Bangkok. We were excited to combine our gifts in this space. JASS strengthens feminist movements globally; their Feminist Live Schools use a feminist popular education (FPE) model as the foundation for critical consciousness and movement leadership. Root. Rise. Pollinate! gathers feminist changemakers across cultures, geographies and generations to tell the stories of the future, the big transitions we need to make, and how these transitions are unfolding now. Together, we created a daily space that included moments for participants to pause, breathe and connect, and engage in speculative storytelling practice. This blog tells our story of the collaboration and the imaginal space we were able to co-create for Pollinators of peace, love and thriving.
Dare to Dream
In early December, I arrived at the AWID Forum in Bangkok and met our co-conspiritors from JASS. Upon entering the Forum space, I immediately noticed how the corridors and gathering halls felt like airplane hangars — big, expansive, almost awe inspiring. I imagined the Forum as a Global Council for the Women of the World. The 4,000 people about to assemble here were delegates from communities across the globe, coming to discuss the state of our communities, our feminist politics and wellbeing, and our collective future across borders. The physical scale and spiritual importance of this gathering felt massive. In order to navigate these days in a purposeful, spacious and nourishing way (a mantra since Root. Rise. Pollinate!’s first labs in 2020) would require a strategy. As so often happens, our advance plans and our purposeful, emergent ways of collaborating became our compass for navigating the terrain of the AWID gathering.
Personal dreams as strategic
“My dream was very personal, about my family, and I was thinking how do I bring that as a strategy? How does this fit with a larger movement building strategy? And then I saw that everything I was dreaming can fit a strategy; what we want to achieve is also contributing to the larger process. I felt happy about that. Like, I can do that.” — RRP! Story Circle participant at the JASS Feminist Live School
Every day at the Forum, Root. Rise. Pollinate! integrated embodied practices and story circles into the Feminist Live School. Our sessions helped participants slow down, just a bit, take deep breaths, soften their gaze, trust the people around them, and listen. It was beautiful to see how, as we created space to dream — even when it was uncomfortable — our visions became a powerful, connective gift to others. We turned our attention to what lives of more freedom and possibility might look and feel 25 and 50 years out, experiencing in those moments what life giving power, beyond discrimination and violence, would mean for our people and environments.
The experiences of Feminist Live School participants — Pollinators in the making — highlighted what the RRP! teams have known for a long time: daring to dream is a vital element of the courageous presence we need as agents of a (r)Evolution of Being. Dreaming as a Feminist Live School community helped us identify and interrupt patterns that keep our minds and spirits confined, our visions privatized. Participants drew connections between their personal dreams, movement building, and social transformation. We practiced facing real and imagined crises with hope and creativity.
This daring to dream flowed through the entirety of our days.
Community refuge and living
“In all those years, these sustainable communities have become interconnected, and our community that started 25 years ago, our little Feminist Collective, from a few houses in the remote Bulgarian countryside, was connected to a network of villages of people from all around the world who are looking for peace.” — RRP! Story Circle session participant at the JASS Feminist Live School in RPP!
eal magic emerged in our story circles. As we slowed down and wove our collective story, we dreamt of well rested communities, where our skills and resources are shared generously, with few borders and abundant, healthy food that many of us had a hand in growing. We’ve planted trees and herbs, regenerating and harvesting from ‘mini forests’ that help us to heal ourselves. As one participant took her turn in weaving what became a collective story, she said “Yeah, it will be like a feminist open house!”.
We dreamt of having more agency over our lives, even in the face of government resistance and personal struggles.
We dreamt of different generations coming together, celebrating each other and at the same time, supporting the new generation.
We dreamt that being in a wheelchair, or having mental distress, did not require specialist attention and did not mean loneliness but was instead met with community care.
We saw interconnected yet self-sufficient communities, where ‘mutual aid’, respect for our diversity, and healing are a way of life. Knowing the road to more peace, freedom and love will not be without friction, our community members are skilled in navigating trauma, resilience and collective action.
In the global community, our dreams braided together from Kenya, to Honduras, to India and Palestine. We offered each other refuge in times of need, and, from time to time, traveled to visit other communities around the world, organizing festivals, dancing, eating, and celebrating together.
Going home
“What do I need to do now to be able to get to the dream, so by the time I get there, it will not just be a dream? It will be a reality that other younger generations of activists will also be able to use as they make their own.” RRP! Story Circle session participant at the JASS Feminist Live School in RPP!
One of the most beautiful things to emerge from our time in the Feminist Live School was the ways people made connections between our personal visions and transformative strategies. I look forward to hearing about the ways my JASS co-facilitators and participants continue to practice taking space, nourishing visions and sharing with others.
Personally, I left the Forum inspired — and exhausted. I traveled North with a small group of Georgian and Armenian leaders to visit a friend I met at the last AWID Forum in Brazil who has a beautiful retreat center in Chiang Mai. The visit became an extension of our storytelling during the four days of Feminist Live School. Our new friends shared experiences of creating community spaces for refuge and healing in the midst of revolution and displacements. I reflected on my past life living in the region — pre-children — and my future vision of creating healing spaces where, as a grandmother, I may host young Pollinators as part of a global network of ‘feminist open houses’.
Our experiences at AWID affirmed our deep belief: investing in our individual and collective capacity to dream is a radical act. Our dreams can embolden us to set off in a new direction with more confidence. Even if the destination does not look exactly as we imagined, daring to dream, finding our people, and celebrating the journey along the way will have led us somewhere we have never been and need to be and can experience now. These seeds we plant in our imaginal space may seem small, but if we tend to them, they have enormous potential to catalyze hope, collective action and peace and thriving at scale.
A participant in one of our sessions shared that in the future they want, ‘we plan for our sunsets’. This image has stuck with me, and I want to practice this. Will you join me, and see what happens next?
