Looking back and moving forward: Chayn ends 2021 on a high note
Chayn January 2022 Newsletter, Cycle 27
We’re trying out a new format. We’ll send this newsletter at the beginning of each cycle (which is three months), covering exciting highlights and future plans. Do you have thoughts or suggestions? We would love to hear them: team@chayn.co
Chayn Last Cycle: Building Blocks!
In the final few months of 2021, Chayn went through an intense period of development and successfully completed major milestones. First some good news: last cycle, we officially became a charity! We are ecstatic, as this opens up several fundraising opportunities we’ll be taking advantage of in the coming year. Know of any grants we should watch out for? Let us know here.
We also launched our new survivor-facing website chayn.co. While the content is the same, our 120+ resources are now easier to access and divided across 5 mediums and 12 languages, so you can quickly find and jump to what you need. Go and check it out (if you haven’t already), and leave us feedback here!
We continued work on our three-year strategy, a guiding post for 2022-2025. Our co-design consultation workshops with non-profits, policy experts, funders, designers & user researchers from around the world resulted in useful feedback on various areas of our strategy including movement building, impact, and redistributive finance. Read how it went and what we’ll do next here. We’re currently incorporating these perspectives to update and improve our strategy. Next, we will be sharing a strategy draft for public comment. Please get in touch if you’d like to review it.
Project Highlights
Bloom: We updated the titles of our courses to reflect the content. We also ran two courses live with hundreds of survivors. In ‘Recovering from Toxic and Abusive Relationships’ we looked at the full spectrum of abusive behaviour, including emotional manipulation and coercive control, and explored how to live freely and safely after abuse. In ‘Reclaiming Resilience in Your Trauma Story’ we learnt about different types of trauma, including grief, gender-based violence, intergenerational trauma, and oppression, and how these experiences can impact our bodies and coping mechanisms. Ultimately, we learnt that we’ve already been resilient, and created timelines of our life stories that reminded us of this core truth. If you’re interested in hearing from us when the 2022 courses open, fill out this form.
Our pilot with Bumble, the dating app, to offer Bloom’s trauma support to their users who report abuse or assault, is underway. The complete Bloom for Bumble service will be coming soon. Read about our partnership here.
Chayn’s investigative podcast, Less Than 2 Percent, is getting closer to launch! This seven-part series will dig into the reporting processes of sexual violence, focusing on the reporting experiences of survivors with marginalised identities. Our investigative journalists, Emma Guy and Dr Maryam Jameela, supported by Jeevan Ravindran, have recorded rough cuts of the episodes. Support us through donations via PayPal and help us continue this project. And watch out for the launch in March!
We continued working on the final draft of our field guide, Orbits. This is our joint initiative with End Cyber Abuse to produce a global field guide on intersectional, survivor-centric and trauma-informed responses to tech-facilitated gender-based violence. The final draft will be shared with workshop participants and other ecosystem actors for review and comments. If you’d like to see the draft, get in touch.
For Creative Hope, our project exploring healing from trauma through creativity, we held in-person workshops with survivors in London, UK. Through three photography workshops with award-winning photographer, Sophie Green, and two poetry workshops with former Barbican Young Poet, Amani Saeed, we worked with ten survivors. After overwhelmingly positive feedback, we asked for entries for an online exhibition to showcase the work by participants as well as our global community. We’re looking forward to sharing these wonderful submissions with you through a virtual exhibition in February!
We ran our second internal ‘learning circle’ last cycle. For our second topic, we chose sex work and sex worker’s rights. We started by putting together a list of resources, including films, articles and books, which we discussed every three weeks during the cycle. We learnt so much about sex work and the law, the lack of access to resources that sex workers face and more. Flora will be posting a blog about it soon, so stay tuned for a more comprehensive reflection!
Team
Chayn continued growing in the previous cycle! Rehaab Daud joined Chayn as Project Lead for the our investigative podcast, Less than 2 Percent. With a background in Public and Media Relations, Rehaab has previously founded a communications and talent agency in Dubai and held leadership roles at various startups. Currently, she owns a retail brand called Pehhchaan and works as a Development Communications Manager for a global gender equality charity WOW Global. She's been leading on the project since October. Connect with her on Twitter.
Tiffany Lo re-joined the Bloom team in September 2021. Tiffany is a long-serving, much-valued volunteer, who worked on Bloom in 2020. We’re so happy to be working with her on Bloom again!
In December, our new User Researcher, Jenny Winfield, joined Chayn. She’ll be running in-depth research with survivors across our networks to ensure our products are survivor-centred, starting with the Bumble and Bloom partnership. She supports the design of world class products, services, and experiences with her research, and is an expert in trauma-informed methods. She specialises in research about sensitive topics, such as mental and physical health concerns, crime, bereavement, and racism. We are looking forward to documenting and sharing our learnings in the open. You can reach her here.
We’re hiring a Tech Lead, Full Stack Developer, and a Trauma-informed therapist. Find out more here - and help us spread the word! We’ll soon be recruiting translators and course facilitators for the expansion of our service. Email us to be the first to know when the vacancies are live.
Media and Events
In October, our CEO Hera Hussain delivered a keynote speech at the annual Ada’s List Conference and presented the Shadow Pandemic report at the launch event.
Our Movement Builder Naomi Alexander Naidoo was busy out and about last cycle! She presented Bloom at the Ada’s List Conference and spoke at several events including a panel about sexual violence online alongside Laura Bates at Shameless! Festival, a panel event in London on the film River Take Me, a presentation to students for University of Plymouth #LetsTalkAboutSex week and a roundtable for Caribbean United Against GBV. She also did an Insta live with volunteer Chloe Cross for Welsh Women’s Aid. Watch it here.
Flora Butler and two of our volunteers, Vesa and Madeline, conducted a workshop for the New Horizons Festival, organised by Jewish human rights charity René Cassin, on the subject of Tech, Transformation, and Trauma. They gave participants a flavour of what it's like to work and volunteer at Chayn. You can watch the workshop here.
A Bloom participant @bloggeronpole, an amazing academic and pole dance artist, blogged about her experience of the programme. Reading her review was a real highlight of last cycle for our team. We especially loved this quote: “Survivors don’t want to feel patronised, they want to re-gain power over their own life. When abuse strips you of your sense of control, you want to be able to get your power back. This, I feel, is what Bloom helped me do.”
Get Involved
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.
We’re working with AVA Project and several other gender-based violence organisations in the UK to create a kitemark and training materials for trauma-informed service provision, and we’re looking for survivors to work with us as paid Peer Researchers. Find out more and apply here.
Like this newsletter? Give us some love, leave a comment, or share it on your networks using the buttons below.