Chayn last cycle: Spreading the word about Chayn!
This cycle our team went to Berlin, Lisbon, Swindon, and Cancun! While travelling around the globe, we’ve been spreading the word about Chayn wherever we go.
At the beginning of September, Hera attended the EU Young Leaders Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. She attended sessions on topics like the climate crisis, housing crisis, narrative change, and ocean governance. Soon after, Hera was at a learning retreat by the Robert Bosch Stiftung’s Inequalities program in Berlin with Francesca, our Survivor Services Lead.
And then, it was off to Cancun where Zoe and Hera attended the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) Forum 2022. While at the forum, they attended sessions on disinformation, online hate, chatbots, and more. They also organised a coffee meetup on the topic of tech abuse and trauma-informed design!
Meanwhile, Kim, our Operations Manager, and Nadine, our Head of Product and Experience, began participating in the 12-month OrgBuilders programme by New Economy Organisers Network (NEON). For this, they attended a 3-day in-person training in Swindon, focused on strategy, structure, and culture. They shared some of their learnings with the team during our fall retreat week at the end of September.
As a result of the invigorating discussions we had at the SVRI conference (and around the world!), we’re starting a working group on tech abuse! If you work in research, survivor services, advocacy, activism, or any other role that addresses tech-facilitated gender-based violence, we’d love to have you in the group. Get in touch with Zoë!
Project highlights
We now have Bloom courses available in Hindi, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Bloom in Hindi has launched with ‘Sexual trauma se theek hona’ and ‘Samaaj, Paitrsatta aur Sexual Trauma’. In French, you can explore both 'Guérir d’un traumatisme sexuel' and 'Société, patriarcat et traumatisme sexuel'. And in Spanish, we have 'Sanando del trauma sexual' and 'Sociedad, patriarcado y trauma sexual'. While in Portuguese, we have ‘Sociedade, patriarcado e traumas sexuais’ and ‘Apoiando o processo de recuperação de traumas sexuais’. Explore them all on our Bloom platform by clicking the 🌐EN icon at the top right corner of the page. And help us spread the word! If you’re an influencer and want to partner with us to talk about Bloom through your channels, get in touch!
Due to working non-stop throughout the pandemic in building and expanding Bloom on a small budget, our team is currently working at capacity. We wanted to practise what we preach and give our team the space to rest. As such, we’re not delivering updated content for some of our courses as planned including Managing anxiety, Creating boundaries, and Recovering from toxic and abusive relationships. You can still access this content in other ways, through this form.
Our volunteer team has been tirelessly working on writing and editing an updated version of our Manipulation is Abuse guide, which will now include many more examples of coercive control. We plan to relaunch the guide with a campaign in November, during the 16 Days of Activism, so keep watching our social media!
Our podcast about how the justice system is failing survivors, Less than 2%, is a finalist for The Lovie Awards, awarded to the best of the European Internet. We’ve been selected for three categories: Best Co-hosts, Public Service and Activism, and Crime and Justice Episode. The winners will be announced on 2 November!
We’ve published a series of ten blogs, based on our Less than 2% podcast, with images and details about our interviewees, as well as illustrations and graphics based on our research. You can read it here.
We launched our 2022-2025 strategy in the last cycle, after many months of consultations and edits. Since then we’ve been getting amazing feedback from around the world about our synthesis process, with organisations such as La Sobremesa, telling us that they found our process inspirational for their own strategy co-creation. You can read more about our method here.
Since the launch of Orbits, our global field guide to advance intersectional, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed interventions to tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TGBV), in collaboration with End Cyber Abuse, we’ve heard from many of you around the world about this topic. We’ve realised the lack of community for organisations working on eliminating TGBV, so we’re taking the first step! Get in touch with us, if you’d like to be a part of this. Also don’t forget that you can always spread the word about Orbits, by using our social media pack.
Team
While Chayn’s core team has mostly remained unchanged in this past cycle, we have begun working with many amazing contractors across the world who have played key roles in expanding our Bloom project into French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish. We’re so excited to keep growing into such a diverse and global community.
In August, we sadly bid farewell to our Head of Movement and Partnerships, Naomi Alexander Naidoo. While at Chayn she led and launched our Orbits project, worked on our new co-created strategy, and developed training and partnerships around Bloom, besides setting the foundation for our movement building work. You can read all about her work with Chayn here.
Our User Research Lead, Jenny Winfield, has been writing a series on using our trauma-informed design principles in UX Research. With two of her pieces out already, about safety, agency, and power-sharing when researching with survivors, watch our blog for more in the coming months. If you want to read our latest trauma-informed design principles, check out this blog we wrote as part of Orbits.
Our team has been busy introducing themselves to the Chayn world. Read about our Head of Product and Experience, Nadine, and our User Research Lead, Jenny, and watch out for more blogs coming soon!
Our Operations Manager, Kim, has been participating in a monthly peer group meetings on employment contracts by Dark Matter Labs, alongside organisations such as Huddlecraft, Catalyst, and Civic Square. As part of this process, she has been reflecting on how the culture and values of public benefit organisations can be reflected in employment contracts. Back in July, Kim also wrote about whether annual performance reviews have a place in continuous development for our blog.
We held our first fall retreat week! The team came together to learn about feminist issues from around the world such as period poverty and body autonomy. We also reflected on the previous cycle and planned for the next one!
Media and events
Hera was on a panel about ‘Safety-centred Design: Straddling online-offline spaces — Design for Women Conversations by Unconform Studio’ and also spoke about Chayn at the Manchester Tech Fest.
At a panel on The rise of technology-assisted domestic violence and how to identify and address it, by the Security Awareness Special Interest Group (SASIG), Hera met a lovely Bloom participant who shared how Chayn has played an important role in her healing.
In September, Nadine talked about our trauma-informed design principles at the Speakers’ Corner at Thoughtworks. We use opportunities like this to encourage them, as technologists, to consider and implement these approaches when building technology.
Hera continued talking to the press in this cycle. She was on the BBC Urdu show Sairbeen, discussing the issue of violence against women in the UK, and quoted in a report about the same topic. Hera also spoke to Sky News about the murder of Zara Aleena in London.
Our volunteer, Chloe, spoke to the WAVE Network, about bodily autonomy for Safe Abortion Day. Listen to the podcast episode here.
Get involved
In August and October, Chayn held the second and third training of this year on how we run our flagship service, Bloom. We invited people from frontline services, educational institutions, businesses, tech companies, and other nonprofits to attend. Overall, these trainings have been attended by more than 70 professionals from around the world. Attendees left us amazing feedback, such as: “Intersectional and culturally inclusive design, I think it's amazing that you have a global resource and fantastic to see more languages being added, it's so important to be inclusive and so heartwarming to see this being so central to the design of Bloom courses.” 9 out of 10 attendees said that they would recommend the training to a colleague or friend. And Bloom isn’t the only service we offer training on. We share our decade of sector experience through a variety of customised training packages on trauma-informed HR, design, and digital product development, running trauma support services, and more. Whether you’re a tech company, business, startup, educational institution, or other organisation, get in touch and we’ll work together to find the training package that suits your team’s needs.
If you were inspired by our strategy co-creation process and are implementing it in your own work, we’d love to hear from you. So reach out and share your stories!
We are searching for therapists who can partner with us for Bloom:
Trauma-informed therapist partner [USA & Canada based]: We’re looking for a trauma-informed therapist based in the USA or Canada to partner with us, delivering remote, short-course therapy to survivors.
Trauma-informed therapist partner [French]: We’re looking for a French-speaking, trauma-informed therapist to partner with us, delivering remote, short-course therapy in French to survivors.
Trauma-informed therapist partner [Portuguese]: We’re ALSO looking for a Portuguese-speaking, trauma-informed therapist to partner with us, delivering remote, short-course therapy in Portuguese to survivors.
There are many ways to support Chayn’s work. You can volunteer to join us in the next cycle by filling out this form, talk about us on your social media (we’ve created a starter pack to help you out), and donate to Chayn via PayPal or GitHub. Read this for more ways to get involved with Chayn.
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