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Workshop: Processing to Witness - Holding Grief, Mutual Aid, and Heartache in Conflict-Facing Work
I'm hosting a small gathering for those of us doing humanitarian and movement work while directly engaging with communities in conflict zones—particularly those receiving messages, calls, and stories from people experiencing genocide, war, and ongoing violence.
The Reality We're Naming:
You get WhatsApp messages from people living through unimaginable circumstances. Sometimes they're sharing what's happening. Sometimes they're asking for help—rent, medicine, escape routes. You send what you can while navigating your own precarity. You hold space for people literally suffering in the room with you. You carry survivors guilt and privilege guilt. You feel the collective toll of conflicts that never end. You're changed by what you carry, and there's nowhere to name that change.
Additionally, we are often doing direct mutual aid outside formal structures because institutional aid fails, gets cut, or can't move fast enough. There is value in processing witness—the emotional weight, the material responsibility, the heartache—together.
What We'll Explore Together:
On Witness & Relationship
Listening to witness vs. listening to support: What does "spacious vulnerability" require?
The event vs. trauma dumping: How do we hold stories without flattening or reducing?
Being someone's lifeline: The emotional weight when your response matters materially
On Material Reality & Mutual Aid
How do we give mutual aid sustainably when we're also precarious or facing an unstable economy?
The private economy of direct support: When aid flows through personal relationships, bypassing institutions
Navigating limits: Who we can help, who we can't, and living with those choices
On Collective Toll & Integration
Processing while doing: Maintaining integrity in our work while carrying our own grief
Guilt's emotional tax: Survivors guilt meets privilege guilt—what's the cost?
Collective heartache: How ongoing conflicts change us—disposition, depression, anguish—and naming that together
Humanitarian fatigue: The lifelong toll when systems fail and we keep showing up
Trust and integrity: What self-work enables us to build containers that hold people safely beyond the room?
Centering the Global South without saviorism - how to be with grief compassionately without negotiating your capacity or emotional bypassing
This is collective processing of what we carry—the grief, the material responsibility, the ethical complexity, the heartache. We're creating space to name what's usually unspeakable.
Details:
When: Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Time: 8:30pm Bangkok / 8:30am New York / 2:30pm Ramallah / 12:30pm London / 3:30pm Nairobi / 8am Yangon
Format: 3-hour virtual gathering via Zoom
Size: Limited to 10-12 participants for intimacy and depth
Approach: Grounded in contemplative practice and communal witnesss, decolonial / liberatory perspective (non-Savior/Non-Western)
Investment (Sliding scale based on capacity):
Free for people in conflict zones doing this work
$50 for directly impacted individuals in diaspora (refugees, community organizers)
$95 for freelancers and contract workers
$150-200 for those employed by institutions with capacity to pay
Over the past two years, I've facilitated conversations with people carrying this work, and what emerges consistently is the need for collective space to process our capacity and name the heartache. This gathering is a response to that need.
A note on my positioning:
I'm a Muslim Somali American woman doing movement work while supporting communities in conflict zones in the Global South. I am also a writer, public interest technologist, facilitator and fellow witness. This gathering is about processing together what we each carry alone while recognizing we can go further, together.
I'm hosting a small gathering for those of us doing humanitarian and movement work while directly engaging with communities in conflict zones—particularly those receiving messages, calls, and stories from people experiencing genocide, war, and ongoing violence.
The Reality We're Naming:
You get WhatsApp messages from people living through unimaginable circumstances. Sometimes they're sharing what's happening. Sometimes they're asking for help—rent, medicine, escape routes. You send what you can while navigating your own precarity. You hold space for people literally suffering in the room with you. You carry survivors guilt and privilege guilt. You feel the collective toll of conflicts that never end. You're changed by what you carry, and there's nowhere to name that change.
Additionally, we are often doing direct mutual aid outside formal structures because institutional aid fails, gets cut, or can't move fast enough. There is value in processing witness—the emotional weight, the material responsibility, the heartache—together.
What We'll Explore Together:
On Witness & Relationship
Listening to witness vs. listening to support: What does "spacious vulnerability" require?
The event vs. trauma dumping: How do we hold stories without flattening or reducing?
Being someone's lifeline: The emotional weight when your response matters materially
On Material Reality & Mutual Aid
How do we give mutual aid sustainably when we're also precarious or facing an unstable economy?
The private economy of direct support: When aid flows through personal relationships, bypassing institutions
Navigating limits: Who we can help, who we can't, and living with those choices
On Collective Toll & Integration
Processing while doing: Maintaining integrity in our work while carrying our own grief
Guilt's emotional tax: Survivors guilt meets privilege guilt—what's the cost?
Collective heartache: How ongoing conflicts change us—disposition, depression, anguish—and naming that together
Humanitarian fatigue: The lifelong toll when systems fail and we keep showing up
Trust and integrity: What self-work enables us to build containers that hold people safely beyond the room?
Centering the Global South without saviorism - how to be with grief compassionately without negotiating your capacity or emotional bypassing
This is collective processing of what we carry—the grief, the material responsibility, the ethical complexity, the heartache. We're creating space to name what's usually unspeakable.
Details:
When: Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Time: 8:30pm Bangkok / 8:30am New York / 2:30pm Ramallah / 12:30pm London / 3:30pm Nairobi / 8am Yangon
Format: 3-hour virtual gathering via Zoom
Size: Limited to 10-12 participants for intimacy and depth
Approach: Grounded in contemplative practice and communal witnesss, decolonial / liberatory perspective (non-Savior/Non-Western)
Investment (Sliding scale based on capacity):
Free for people in conflict zones doing this work
$50 for directly impacted individuals in diaspora (refugees, community organizers)
$95 for freelancers and contract workers
$150-200 for those employed by institutions with capacity to pay
Over the past two years, I've facilitated conversations with people carrying this work, and what emerges consistently is the need for collective space to process our capacity and name the heartache. This gathering is a response to that need.
A note on my positioning:
I'm a Muslim Somali American woman doing movement work while supporting communities in conflict zones in the Global South. I am also a writer, public interest technologist, facilitator and fellow witness. This gathering is about processing together what we each carry alone while recognizing we can go further, together.