A SAYHU Sunset
The Window at Big Bend National Park, February 2022 (Photo Credit: Rachel Afi Quinn)
Feminist organizing from the jump!
When we came together to start a feminist collective in the spring of 2017, our goal was to create a summer institute for social justice minded South Asian young people in Houston. With a small innovation fund seed grant from the Resonance Fund we set out to fill a gap we saw in our Houston South Asian community—to build a safe, empowering space for young South Asians to learn about themselves and build community together. The Simmons Foundation, and most importantly all of you, helped to support this work.
Now, SAYHU’s first chapter (Spring 2017 to Spring 2022) has come to an end—there’s no 2022 SAYHU Summer Institute—and as two people who were there from the very beginning as founding members of the feminist collective that initiated this project, we’re ready to celebrate all SAYHU’s achievements over the years.
There’s so much we learned and accomplished along the way!
Over the last 5 years we’ve hosted 5 summer institutes, a Southern Regional summit, started a book group, created a mental health care support group, and hosted over 80 community events—imagine!
Hopefully this blog post will inspire you to plug in and connect with SAYHU’s existing network, use the resources we have here to build up the community space—online and off—and envision a future for SAYHU as you make it what you need!
Creating what we need for ourselves…
All of the infrastructure for SAYHU remains online: the social media accounts to connect with others, the knowledge and experience we produced among our community members over the years. We’ve updated our website so that our content and curriculum is all accessible to you there. SAYHU’s webpage is a digital archive, a resource hub, a declaration of our vision, and just the beginning—it’s a jumping off point for future connections and collaborations among South Asians in Texas. Our Preservation Project remains available to explore and also teach folks how to conduct oral histories and publish community-engaged research, to make visible South Asians in Texas.
What we did together.
Those who’ve invested time, energy and imagination in SAYHU have reaped the benefits and helped us to sustain a successful experiment that has changed how South Asians in Houston see themselves as a diverse and politically engaged community and how we are seen across the state and nationally. This is evident in the publications on our blog, and research and writing that has emerged from this work.
Just A few of the things we are deeply proud of:
Running a summer institute for five years, developing and honing the open access SAYHU curriculum pages
Mentoring numerous South Asian students and supporting transnational feminist research on South Asian communities in Houston
Bringing five SAYHU community members to the National Women’s Studies Association conference to share what we had learned and building meaningful connections
Building a relationship with Houston Coalition Against Hate by serving as part of the coalition and standing loudly against fundamentalist Hindu nationalism in that space
Mentoring several youth on intersectionality and feminist theory who have gone on to work on issues of gender-based violence at Daya Houston
Connecting SAYHU youth with local faculty for research and coursework and training
Internal and community conversations on anti-Blackness and recommended readings
Igniting friendships within SAYHU networks that have provided emotional support and peer mentorship for numerous community members
Network-building, referrals, and recommendations that led to jobs and internships for community members
Collaborations with Advocates for Youth that funded opportunities for programming around youth activism and working with LGBTQ+ youth
Sharing our work with South Asian transnational feminist activists all over the world
Building alliances with Black feminist organizers in and beyond Texas
Collaborating with Daya over the years to build a more LGBT-inclusive community space, from our first-ever Houston Pride event table to the Brown Bodies Bold Stories annual programming for our intersecting communities.
Making space for countless “parking lot” conversations, long after our official meetings and events were done, in coffee shops, or around our dining room table (at SAYHU HQ) , which led us to feel bolstered by our community, challenged us to think expansively about who South Asians in Houston are, and gave us the chance to build feminist solidarity with one another.
With every step of SAYHU, we’ve learned about our own abilities to lead (and areas for growth), ways to collaborate across difference, how to fully share ourselves with others and strategies to apply and practice our Black feminist values and community organizing skills. We also learned a lot about what makes it challenging to organize in Houston (while having full-time careers, being located far apart, having different perspectives on what the work or organizing is, and having very different values and experiences…all during a global pandemic).
Lofty goals and expectations.
We experienced the challenges of organizing a new generation of South Asian youth, particularly college students—our visions and levels commitments and investments in the work as mid-career adults were not the same. One of our most vital lessons, though, was the importance of having an intergenerational community. As queer community leaders, we quickly saw how important it was for young people to have a space that centered South Asian queerness, as well as a clear politics around addressing anti-Blackness among South Asians with ideas on how to respond.
Not everyone who joined our community knew what we meant by feminist theory, community activism, or feminist accountability, and others struggled to live up to the politics that they identified with, but we made a space for all kinds of people who wanted to learn to do so. We modeled our structure and practice on the teachings of The Crunk Feminist Collective (of which Eesha is a part) and the Combahee River Collective (that Rachel regularly teaches about) before them.
We have been transformed through this work
SAYHU’s community remains one that we want to be a part of, even as we no longer seek to lead. We continue to hold ourselves and our community to our political commitments. As always, we invite each of you into leadership. We won’t be managing the blog, newsletters, or social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) any longer but they are there for the community and you can manage them.
SAYHU is not a non-profit, or a business, we are a community and our projects represents the work led by the initial feminist collective and community members who joined us. Creating and sustaining this community over the last five years has been a labor of love (so much love and so much labor!). We are grateful to all of you who worked alongside us to create and sustain SAYHU as a valuable community.
Stay connected?
If you’d like to connect with our vast community, you can easily do so through Slack, but Rachel won’t be in there consistently sharing resources and moderating the conversations and inviting your involvement anymore (you can do that for yourselves!). We will maintain it so that it stays active and can serve as a place for folks to share information and connect. Community members are SAYHU, so you want to SAYHU to stay continue to cultivate this vibrant network, reach out to us via our social media about joining the Slack channel and connecting to some of our current community members (learn more about them on the SAYHU Blog and across our website).
If you are a community member interested in leading any SAYHU project we hope you will jump in! We only ask that you take seriously the spirit and values of SAYHU (all detailed on the website and in the curriculum) and connect with other community members!
We won’t be the ones coordinating a SAYHU summer institute (The full summer institute curriculum is here) and/or any regular community events anymore (How to host a SAYHU event)—but you should be inspired to do so as SAYHU community members with the experience, strategies, and details about feminist values that we have learned and shared. Reach out so we can connect you to the social media accounts for outreach!
So much gratitude!
A big shout out to the other five collective members, those who believed in the project and joined us, and the many community members who came to engage with the project and shared of themselves with South Asian youth and their supporters in Houston. We step away, feeling proud of our work together, and curious about the future.
with feminist love,
Rachel & Eesha, two of the founding members of SAYHU