Responding to Defeat and Creating Communities of Hope 2023

This session is part of The Wellbeing Monthly 2023, a monthly virtual workshop will be led by diverse mental health professionals, and will focus on psychoeducation and coping mechanisms on diverse topics including anxiety and fear, guilt and survivors guilt, defeat and hopelessness, trauma, and burnout and stress.

• Who: Jehanzeb Baldiwala
• Date: Tuesday, August 8
• Time: 9am EDT / 1pm UTC (What time is it in my city?)
• Language: English
• Location: Zoom

👉🏽 RSVP: https://digitalrights.formstack.com/forms/wellbeingmonthly3

Responding to Defeat and Creating Communities of Hope

Individuals that work on digital rights do their work in oppressive contexts, usually with minimal resources, that can challenge their sense of self, make them feel demoralized, and question whether their work has any significant impact. In this session, participants will explore experiences of defeat in their activism, and learn how to create communities of hope. By attending, participants will:

• Explore what defeat and hope means and looks like in their lives/work.
• Discover visible ways in which their communities and networks are already responding and holding on to hope.
• Learn how to create safe spaces to talk.
• Gain wisdom on how to build a sense of solidarity and connectedness.

The session is guided by narrative ideas and practices, which are respectful, non-judgmental, culturally relevant approaches to counseling and community engagement which centers people as the expert of their own lives. These approaches also recognize that all problems are rooted in oppressive structures rather than in communities, individuals, or identities.

Jehanzeb Baldiwala has aligned herself with narrative ways of working for over twenty years and is a voracious reader who believes in dreams and magic. She loves to travel and to connect with people. She is a therapist, supervisor, trainer and co-founder of Narrative Practices India. Her work includes consulting with persons, families, and children in responding to a range of issues that include anxiety, depression, school related issues in addition to training and supervising mental health work. She has been instrumental in developing several long and shorter training programs in narrative practices with a team of narrative practitioners and mentors Shona Russell, Maggie Carey and Peggy Sax. More recently, she has developed an interest in documenting the narrative work done in the Indian context.

Notes & Resources