Recap of Community Debrief Sessions on the Community Health Report
Taking place over two sessions, a debrief on the 2020 Community Health Report was organized for community members. The following are questions and answers, as well as extra resources for you to consider.
You can also find notes from the July 8, 2021 Glitter Meetup (taking place on Mattermost) that focused on this report. Other useful links:
Blog post announcing our report
A note from the team: we love virtual coffees! Please reach out to us if you need support/recommendations.
/// Questions ///
Q: How did you help those who took the survey define/understand what it means to be marginalized? As a researcher, what has been the difference between your assessment of factors of marginalization and how folks self-identified?
Our team debated early on whether or not to include a demographic question in our survey. Questions on race or ethnicity, while common among surveys from North America, are not a common practice globally. The topic of race is complicated when asked of different folks in different countries. Instead, we asked folks to self-identify with groups that have been historically marginalized in the tech space, along with people to select more than one option.
We know that privilege is contextual and that race or ethnicity alone could not capture the total picture of this community. Questions about education, age, socioeconomic status offered other ways for us to see the full makeup of the community.
We recognize that this community has grown, that we no longer only work on technology issues. As the community has evolved to address online harassment, policy issues, disinformation and everything else that makes tech unequal, we’ve also grown in the types of individuals and profiles who make up this space.
Q: I saw that you used Standard Notes -- which is a new tool for me. As a researcher, I am always looking for ways to securely keep notes. Can you talk about the choice of tools you used for this research, given the sensitive data points.
Standard Notes is an open source, encrypted note-taking tool recommended to the researcher by our security manager. When handling interview data (which were not recorded but instead transcribed), there was a great need to put in high levels of confidentiality and privacy safeguard. Moving forward, as our team seeks to provide psychosocial care, we believe that the security framework to handle confidentiality and privacy concerns (especially in dealing with case files or notes) will need to be enhanced.
Q: As someone who is new to Team CommUNITY/IFF but have been working on digital rights for more than 10 years, I wonder if this research can be useful for people like me, who do not feel a part of this community, right now. I feel sometimes, it's hard to know what community expectations are.
The report can be helpful in that it sparks curiosity and helps us understand: why do we feel like we’re not part of the community? In the report, we see that there are different factors that affect an activist's engagement or sense of belonging to the community. Some of these factors are connected to the space itself, and some of them are more internal and individual. Once we identify the barriers to belonging and feeling connected, then we explore ways in which we can increase a sense of belonging.
Q: Can you release your interview questions? I saw the survey questions on the website (thank you).
Yes, the interview questions will be made available on our website by July 23, 2021.
Q: Regarding “adjustment'' category in one of your themes, does that mean people are having to make changes to their life because of covid or something else?
Adjustment speaks to: adjusting and adapting to new work realities , such as switching to virtual work or managing employees during a pandemic while being expected to maintain the same levels of productivity. It also speaks to instability to complete or share your work due to restrictions imposed by the pandemic. This adjustment in itself is the stressor.
Q: For me and my organization, I've reframed the way I’ve restructured my budget to include critical things like legal, security, IT. What is a good percentage of what we should set aside for psychosocial care?
We think this is hard to answer since budgeting needs are contextual to your own operational situation and region. We think there should always be money in your organization to pay for therapy -- oftentimes this is built into your overhead or team building costs. The overall recommendation is for organizations to recognize that mental health support is important and should be considered the same way organizations set aside budget lines for security, technology, or legal services.
It is also important to make mental health and community health care accessible. Oftentimes, therapy is inaccessible and expensive and therefore people are discouraged from seeking support. There are many pathways to mental and community care that are accessible and the small things at work like normalizing check-ins and taking time off make a difference.
Sometimes people don't want to talk about their trauma and mental health struggles. It's important to create room to bond over a coffee, or a movie night. There needs to be a shift in culture to promote self and community care.
Q: How do you start conversations around psychosocial support with leadership that doesn't believe in therapy? Coming from the African background that 'men don't cry' and yet you see that their team needs such support.
I think we need to meet people where they are at. In many countries in the Arabic-speaking region therapy is stigmatized. There will always be resistance, it takes a lot of patience to destigmatize. It's super helpful to be curious about resistances around therapy and asking people why are they resistant? Oftentimes defenses and resistance stems from deeper fears/concerns.
It is also important to shift our understanding of therapy as a “Western” tool and instead we can understand healing and therapy as a way of addressing our unmet needs. Once we accept that our psychological needs are as important as our physical needs, and we de-stigmatize and not shame these needs, we can move forward. It takes: meeting people where they’re at, unlearning, relearning, and patience.
Q: how can orgs get access to private 1-1 debriefings?
Write to team@digitalrights.community. Organizations or groups can schedule time with Selma for private consultations.
PGP: 2E1D CC33 A362 0BD6 236E 540A F60A 89AD 6FF9 7A2F
Note: there will also be more workshops and spaces throughout September and October 2021 to address community health.
Q: Can you speak to how isolation, dealing with trauma alone can have negative impacts and how people can move forward?
Suffering comes from the adversities we experience in life. But what I also saw in the interviews, is that suffering comes from feeling alone and isolated in our pain. When we are connected with others and our experiences are heard without judgement, validated and mirrored - the burden of our pain becomes less. In connection, we find healing.
Q: Sometimes our professional work spaces also normalize emotional avoidance, especially when we're working across time zones. We've tried check-ins, but they've become exhausting because we're all going through our own equally troubling issues. How do we work through making these check-ins times of support?
It is important first to understand where the emotional avoidance is coming from: are we avoiding the check-ins because we’re tapped out and need to fill up our own cups first? Or are we avoiding the sessions as a way of neglecting our needs?
If it’s the latter, then it’s important to push towards connection even if it feels like work, knowing that these check-ins will later on energize us. But if it’s because we need rest and nourishment and that can be fulfilled by taking a step back then it’s about giving ourselves permission to take a step back without judgement.
Q: Is there a list of trusted providers or psychosocial resources? We’re especially interested in mental health care providers that can speak other languages or based in other regions, rather than EU/US. My culture (east asian), we don't have the language yet to describe talk about therapy or mental health issues.
There will be a new list of referrals that will be appropriate for regions and contexts. For Team Community, we'll have in-house mental health providers making sure that we've accounted for the different legal or ethical frameworks.
Q: What are some ways we can address mental health that is not expensive or costly?
A critique of western mental health is that addressing these issues can be costly or feel very limited. In order to address trauma broadly, we can address it both in the mind and the body.
Body work (acupuncture, exercise, breathing exercises, mediation, etc) can be another way to heal. Moving forward, we should be open to receiving and elevating other practices of different cultures that address mental health. The emphasis of therapy may not feel appropriate in some settings, especially in areas or communities where it is not common. Here, we can use methods such as peer support circles, group sessions, or utilize safe spaces in order to address mental health in a communal setting. Increasing access to psychoeducation (toolkits, article) is also an important resource for this space.