Members of the Speak Your Peace Team posing together at the event

Storytelling to Build Community: 2023 Peace Fellows Hold Speak Your Peace Workshop

Storytelling serves as an important medium for many Chicago Peace Fellows to raise awareness and promote solutions to problems that they face in their community. On October 21, the 2023 Chicago Peace Fellows hosted the Speak Your Peace workshop, dedicated to building power and community through inter-generational mixed-media storytelling. The event was held at the Chicago Center for Arts and Technology (CHICAT) on the West Side of Chicago. Peace Fellows on the Speak Your Peace team included: Nachelle Pugh, Antwan McHenry, Kanesha Walker Amaro, Carlil Pittman, Devonta Boston, Alexandra Auguste, Zahra Glenda Baker, Diane Deaderick DeMarta, Ceola Henderson-Bryant, and Lauryn Collins.

Speak Your Peace was one of a series of Summer Projects organized and hosted by the 2023 Chicago Peace Fellows to apply lessons learned through the GATHER curriculum to build peace within their communities. Peace Fellows participate in GATHER, an online asset-based community engagement course, as well as in-person training, collaborative action projects, and networking experiences with civic leaders, academic researchers, and policy makers throughout the year. These lessons culminate in a series of planning workshops where Peace Fellows can apply their newly learned skills and connections to a summer project that builds on the talents of their neighbors and the assets of their communities to make real and lasting change.

 

The Speak Your Peace Team posing at their storytelling event

 

Throughout their fellowship, the 2023 Peace Fellows had a series of planning meetings where they set the scope of their Summer Projects: determining which beneficiaries to target, choosing potential community partners, and drafting a program. After determining projects and team members, the Peace Fellows met on their own to plan. “We were all sitting at the table and picking these projects, and our group felt it was really important for people to tell their story".

"In our community there are so many different things that go on, some of which are great and some of which are harmful and violent. We wanted to give people an opportunity to think about those things so that we can build on their experiences and make changes.”

- Nachelle Pugh

 

Photograph at speak your peace event titled "God Help Me!". Shows a man screaming in the air with the words: anger, frustration, pain, hopelessness

 

Centering Community Voices

The Speak Your Peace team sees storytelling as a way to show people from outside of their communities the challenges and triumphs of their neighborhoods. Nachelle elaborates, “Just looking [from outside] and trying to decipher what is going on is different from someone telling you what is going on. I think that’s what we were able to do with the storytelling at this event.” By providing a workshop and creative space for community members on the South and West side, Speak Your Peace aimed to center voices that are often ignored.

“To me it’s important to speak your piece, because if you don’t speak it, someone else will.”

- Kanesha Walker Amaro

By focusing on affirmative storytelling and highlighting the voices in the community, Speak Your Peace aimed to combat harmful narratives that are imposed from the outside.

 

 

Storytelling at the workshop showcased a variety of talents within the community with photography, art, poetry, music, and film working in unison to express a variety of voices. Hip hop artists, filmmakers, poets, and photographers from the community all had opportunities to present their talents. One of the featured artists was a filmmaker who started making films at the age of 17. At the event, the audience watched her documentary, filmed 7 years ago, which captures instances of police brutality that were spotlighted prior to the Black Lives Matter movement and shows the filmmaker’s view as an insider witnessing the violence. Another artist was a poet who used the space to share poems about her refusal to let any disabilities define her and allow her to center her experiences through poetry. The stories shared at Speak Your Peace were inter-generational and mixed-media, allowing for new connections to be generated between a range of communities.

 

speak your peace flyer

 

Mixed-Media Storytelling Build New Connections

Many of the Peace Fellows involved also had an opportunity to showcase their own artistic talents, which often do not have a chance to take center stage in their community work. For instance, Antwan McHenry curated a photography exhibit that showcased a variety of artists as well as his own work, which included a series of self-portraits he took during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nachelle expressed admiration for his photographs, “Antwan, is an amazing photographer. […] Those pictures told a lot of stories of what was going on in his life, but probably also the lives of many others who were self-isolating. It was depression, it was confusion, it was chaos, it was sadness, it was the happiness at the end of the tunnel. All of those photos told the story of his experience.“ Kanesha, another 2023 Peace Fellow, also had the opportunity to share her poetry and bring in other local poets to perform.

 

 

Speak Your Peace allowed for new connections to be made between artists and community activists across the South and West Sides. Reflecting on Speak Your Peace, Nachelle said that the most important thing accomplished was: “Building relationships with the community that was there."

"Working with the folks in our group, we got a chance to know each other, for real."

- Nachelle Pugh

We had been doing different workshops and activities, but we never really had a chance to [...] do the work that we do together and watch each other shine, and to be able to make suggestions with our personal experiences to help each other and make this event amazing. I think that’s the most important part and what I loved the most. Once we were done, everyone was like ‘yeah we gotta do this again and make it into something we do regularly’”. After the event, artists continued to connect and plan collaborations that will continue to center lived experiences for the world to experience and reflect on.


SHYNE On You Crazy Diamond

For two weeks starting on January 17, Shyne San Diego—founded and led by Global Gather alumnus Cynthia Austin—partnered with area organizations in the San Diego and Orange County area to mount a first-of-its-kind exhibition on sexual and human trafficking entitled, “Behold Her: Portraits of Survivors of Human Trafficking” at You Belong Here, a co-working and community events space in San Diego.

An exhibit of photographic portraits of trafficking survivors by Amari DixonPhotography, “Behold Her” is the first photo exhibition undertaken by SHYNE. More than 100 people attended the premiere evening, and Cynthia said the highly successful endeavor was the culmination of a long-held dream.

Cynthia supporting Women in Business at the #linkedinlocalsd kick off 2020 event in San Diego hosted on January 31, 2020.

“I knew from the beginning that the survivors’ voices were the key to reshaping the public’s view of then,” she explained.

“The message I believe people took away from the show is hope. Each image represents 1000 victims of trafficking in San Diego every year. These women give hope to those victims as examples of what is possible with community support and a desire for change. Each image also represents a woman giving back to other victims by providing services, work opportunities and resources to assist with healing.

One of the survivors, Jessica, said it best:

"Nothing that has happened to me in the past will hold me back. I am here. I am empowered. I am a new person. I am breaking all stereotypes...Something that somebody else did to me is going to put a label on me? I don't think so! That’s not going to happen. That's not who I am.’”

The city of San Diego, California, ranks eighth-highest in the United States for intensity of Commercial and Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) and drives an estimated $810 million in the underground sex economy.

“My vision for SHYNE in 2020 [is to] continue building the Survivors Business Network, where survivors and businesses with NGOs (non-governmental organizations) work collaboratively to support the women, girls and children who survive trafficking.”

Two days after the exhibit opening, a Survivor Business Pop-Up Boutique was held at You Are Here. The timing of the show was not coincidental, as National Human Trafficking Awareness Month is observed annually each January in the United States.

Cynthia participates in the January 24th Media Symposium: Changing the Narrative/Media Impact on the Human Trafficking Movement hosted by the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking with Amy McClelland Bril and Ana Mony.

Cynthia and SHYNE’s journey began a little over a year ago, and she remains steadfast in her desire to not only provide holistic support to survivors, but also to let “people know that [survivors] get caught in a life of exploitation due to their upbringing, where some form of abuse occurred making them vulnerable to predators.

"When a victim can feel their inherent value and understand it wasn't their fault, that there's nothing wrong with them, there is a turning point in their lives. I hope this work will perhaps help society to stop blaming victims for the suffering they've endured. I hope it gives people empathy, compassion and understanding about exploitation, it's nature and what we are up against with sex trafficking.”

After the show, “Keelin,” a pseudonym for one of the women whose portraits was hung as part of the exhibition, wrote to Cynthia. Eerily, the exhibition was on the same street where she’d been first sold for sex by the individual who trafficked her. "You have helped me share my voice and my story and it means the world to me,” Keelin wrote to Cynthia. “I will always cherish our friendship and will support you in any way I can."