Conference for community-building and healing in the face of anti-Asian racism hosted at Concordia

According to Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crimes against the East and Southeast Asian population rose 300 per cent in the first year of COVID-19.

For France Stohner, BA 13, executive director of the Kapwa Centre, that figure has ramifications into the present. The centre is a non-profit supporting the Montreal Filipinx community.

“Fast forward three years later — what does that statistic mean now? How do we take care of each other in a context where we don’t even talk about mental health in our community?” Stohner asks.

In response, the centre recently held Kapwa Rising, a community conference that addressed mental health from an intersectional and decolonial perspective. The conference is part of a broader project of the same name, created to make spaces for collective recovery from discrimination.

Concordia’s SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation is a key funding partner in the project via its Gateway Program. The program is designed to support teams, organizations or individuals working on community-driven projects aligned with SHIFT’s mission and values.

Uplifting Filipinx voices

Centre Kapwa was created to “unlearn, unite and uplift” the diverse voices of the Filipinx community, including queer and trans people. The non-profit focuses on mental health and seeks to fulfill their mission through art, movement and conversations.

The team develops experiences rooted in decolonization, healing, community capacity building, civic engagement and intergenerational leadership.

The three-day community conference, Centre Kapwa’s first, explored the theme “Healing and hoping in the face of anti-Asian racism.” Kapwa Rising took place in October, with the event kicking off at SHIFT.

Upending harmful stereotypes

Desiree Escalante Ruiz, BA 05, is the Centre Kapwa’s director of communications. She explained that the conference’s first day was focused on “planting the seeds” to equip participants for the rest of the weekend.

Activities included unpacking terms and concepts such as the “Yellow Peril,” used to describe the history of fearmongering about and racism against Asian people.

Participants also investigated stereotypes like the model minority myth and the perpetual foreigner. The former sets a double-edged standard for Asians living in Western cultures. The latter tends to relegate Asians and other visible minorities to second-class citizens within Canadian society.

The rest of the conference consisted of various community-building activities: a Filipino martial arts workshop, an intergenerational anti-Asian racism panel, a “queer debut” community talent show, a collective art project and an art panel.

It also featured keynote speaker Flordeliz (Gigi) Osler — the first Filipina Indian Canadian to be appointed to the Canadian Senate.

Community-based healing

Stohner notes the importance of developing practices and healing methods by and for the community. She says it is critical to find ways to bring people together, to share knowledge and to support each other while navigating the complexity of intergenerational challenges.

“We don’t talk about racism within our community. Can we share that education and then equip our community with the tools to address and heal from it? That’s kind of what inspired this project in the first place,” she says.

“The core value of Filipino psychology is kapwa. It’s a difficult word to translate,” Stohner notes.

“There’s really no equivalent in any Western languages. Essentially, it’s this inner sense of connectedness. It’s something we all have toward each other as human beings.”

Stohner contends that Western frameworks are not adapted to support the Filipinx community’s mental health needs. She says there is a disconnect between Western psychology and the lived experiences of those in the diaspora, which speaks to a need for decolonized approaches.

“We’re more of a collective culture as opposed to an individualistic one,” Stohner says. “I think there are a lot of conversations now — not just in the Filipino community, but in a lot of diverse communities — about what culturally sensitive, culturally relevant mental health services look like.”

Reflecting on the Kapwa Rising conference, Ruiz acknowledges the current and future impacts of the three-day event. “The conference highlighted the need to come together and impart practical tools for preserving mental health and well-being,” she says.

 “While the subject of anti-Asian racism can be difficult to engage in, collective healing is able to happen in safe spaces.”          

Explore more funding opportunities for social change projects at Concordia’s SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation’s webpage.