PARC's Response to Anti-Blackness, Fall 2021 Update
PARC's Response to Anti-Blackness, Fall 2021 Update
PARC first shared our Response to Anti-Blackness in Fall 2020 and pledged to revisit it on a regular basis. Below is our update for Fall 2021 with information about progress and additional goals for moving forward. This plan will continue to be revisited by members of the PARC team and shared with the Brandeis community.
Oppression is the foundation upon which violence is enacted-- whether that be sexual or relationship violence, racialized violence, institutionalized violence, or any other type of violence. Acknowledging how interconnected our work must be, PARC seeks to stand in solidarity with the student orchestrators of the Black Action Plan and contribute to addressing the concerns.
- Prevention
- Actively consider and address anti-Blackness in all training and event planning.
- Continue to make connections between interpersonal violence and anti-Blackness explicit in Bystander Training, including but not limited to discussing The Cycle of Privilege and Oppression and examples of microaggressions in scenarios.
- Continue to think critically about our use of language personally and as a team.
- Continue to learn and discuss how intersectional anti-violence work is our foundation by requiring ongoing reading and conversations as a team and a willingness to admit and learn from our mistakes (acknowledging that reading is not the same as doing, but is an important element of ongoing learning).
- Fall 2021: PARC team members revamped Accountability presentation for the team, to be presented at the beginning of Spring 2022 and incorporated into PARC New Team Member Training moving forward. This presentation covers strategies for improving both interpersonal and institutional accountability.
- Actively consider and address anti-Blackness in all training and event planning.
- Advocacy
- Affirm to our community that as a resource that is designed around sexual and domestic violence, we cannot do our work without also working to counteract all violence and oppression.
- Strive to provide culturally humble support to our community, acknowledging that we don’t know what we don’t know and that making assumptions will not help us empower those who have experienced violence.
- We acknowledge that no PARC team internal training focused explicitly on anti-Blackness this semester, and will create learning opportunities for our team on how to incorporate understanding of historic and current anti-Blackness into our anti-violence work overall.
- Through the continuation of our Community Engagement Group, build partnerships with people directly impacted by violence
- Resources
- Continue striving to decenter whiteness in our materials by expanding our resource library and training materials to include more BIPOC and LGBTQ voices.
- Commit ourselves to learning and incorporating tenants of restorative justice and transformative justice as options for non-carceral and non-punitive options after violence, both internally and externally.
- In Fall 2021, we worked with the Office of Equal Opportunity, the Ombuds, and many other staff partners to train a team of Restorative Justice Circle facilitators to provide a process alternative to the OEO formal investigation.
- Aim to hire and retain a team of professional staff, peer advocates, and violence prevention educators that is representative of our Brandeis community by advertising openings intentionally and improving transparency around hiring processes by hosting open information sessions.
- Continue to improve our website to ensure information about us, our work, options, and resources are as easily accessible as possible.
- Center(ing our Community)
- Created an ongoing Accountability Committee of professional staff and student staff in Fall 2020 to evaluate the PARC team’s progress on these goals, solicit community feedback, and develop new goals. The Fall 2021 Accountability Committee is: Sarah J. Berg, Juan Bordón, Hannah Defay, and Vilma Uribe.
- Updated and expanded this document, PARC’s Response to Anti-Blackness
- Continue to center dialogues around the role of identity, positionality, and intersectionality in anti-violence work during new team member training, ongoing team training and retreats, and in the day-to-day functioning of our program.
- Incorporate new perspectives in our work, especially events and programs, by collaborating with different clubs and offices.
- Begin to build meaningful relationships with culture clubs through supporting their programming and having a strong, supportive presence at their events.
- Continue to solicit feedback from community members.
- Created an ongoing Accountability Committee of professional staff and student staff in Fall 2020 to evaluate the PARC team’s progress on these goals, solicit community feedback, and develop new goals. The Fall 2021 Accountability Committee is: Sarah J. Berg, Juan Bordón, Hannah Defay, and Vilma Uribe.