SKILLS! SELF-DEFENSE! BOUNDARY SETTING!

Building Autonomy and Safety for Everybody (BASE) is a wellness and self-defense class that is a response to the violence happening to women, trans and queer people in Seattle and all over the world. Created by and for queer people of color. We see self-defense as a community-based strategy to defend our bodies, livelihood and communities and as inherent to self-determination. We believe that cultivating healing and resilience combats trauma from violence and oppression. We want to create a space where survivors can build power to transform systems that perpetuate violence in our lives.

We hope participants will leave with a better understanding of the larger systemic context of sexual violence and its particular impacts on immigrant survivors and trans and gender non-conforming survivors of color. We will also spend time learning basic skills of self-defense including ways to effectively communicate boundaries and consent. This session will include a mix of free writes, role plays, and sharing. All bodies, all genders, all ages, all abilities are welcome.

*This event is for LGBTQ and Ally People of Color. Please respect this event is for people with POC heritage (including mixed folks!) Please join us if you self-identify as African American/Black/of the African Diaspora, Asian, South Asian, West Asian/Arab/Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, First Nations/Alaskan Native/Native American/Indigenous, Chican@/Latin@, or Multiracial/Mixed-Race. White partners and allies are respectfully asked not to attend.

Accessiblity information:
The 2100 Building has a wheelchair accessible entrance with no steps. There is street parking surrounding the building, and a loading zone directly in front where vans can park to unload wheelchair users and their chairs. The bathrooms are accessible to wheelchair users.

Buses 7, 9, and 48 stop one block away. We will try to provide a space that is low-scent. The bathrooms are gendered and are not guaranteed scent-free, but API Chaya will provide scent-free soap. We are working towards ensuring scent-free spaces in our future events. To honor that goal, we are asking all participants to please come to the workshop fragrance-free (no perfumes, colognes, scented laundry soaps, etc) so that our valued community members with multiple-chemical-sensitivities or environmental illnesses can participate (including our presenters!) and to use the scent-free soaps provided by API Chaya in the restrooms. There will be an air purifier in the fragrance-free seating. For more information on being fragrance-free please see http://www.brownstargirl.org/1/post/2012/03/fragrance-free-femme-of-colour-realness-draft-15.html or http://eastbaymeditation.org/accessibility/scentfree.html

Childcare provided upon request.

We’d like to work with you to make this and future events as accessible as possible. Please let us know your access needs (including interpretation) by emailing priya@apichaya.org, and we’ll do our best to work with you to ensure our events can fit your needs.

Brought to you by API Chaya’s Queer Network Program.The Queer Network Program creates spaces for LGBTQ Asian Pacific Islanders to connect, share stories, and increase visibility, in an effort to build safe, loving and violence free communities. The Queer Network Program welcomes all LGBTQ people of color to access its events and services. Throughout the year there will be social events, natural helper trainings, queer educational workshops and media arts projects. We’d love your voice in shaping these events and workshops! 🙂

This event is part of NW Pride of Color, a movement to coordinate and promote events and organizations that serve the LGBTQ PoC community. It is the last 2 weeks of July, from Friday July 14th to Sunday July 30th.