How to be an Ally: Key Learnings

Training Across Distance 2 : How to be an Ally

Friday, January 15, 2010. Noon EST.

Facilitator : Jessica Yee, Native Youth Sexual Health Network

Description: Often, our passion for social change means working with issues that don’t touch us directly. This session will focus on strategies for navigating this kind of work respectfully and responsibly.

Key questions :

What are some practical tools - that encourage action rather than inhibit it - for dealing with privilege and positioning in the world? How do we articulate that our experiences in the world may be different but that we'd all like to act together?

How can this information assist with strategies to validate prevention strategies / outcomes?

How can you effectively use your social power as a person of privilege to move projects forward (e.g., open doors within government) without undermining the power of participants?
 

To listen to a podcast of Jessica's presentation, click here!

Key learnings:

Before acting in solidarity or allyship with a community that you don't belong to, consider whether that community has asked that people act as allies to them. Not everyone wants allyship, and sometimes very well-intentioned allies can have harmful repercussions for the community that is theoretically being supported. For example, people who came to act in solidarity with an Indigenous community fighting for a land claim, but who actually ended up creating a more antagonistic situation than necessary, leading to the arrest of primarily Indigenous people.

Power & Privilege: Important to be aware of whose power you are thinking of, who you are thinking about as powerless and who you consider to have power.

Can we ever know that we are 'successful' in our allyship? Is this even a relevant idea? It's important to question the fact that we often seek validation for our actions as allies – are we acting as allies to seek validation?

Looking at allyship in the same framework that we look at decolonization can be helpful, in order to acknowledge that it is truly a neverending process of questioning and thinking, as opposed to the result of a single workshop or action.

If we have a strong belief in the universal right to self-determination, i.e. the right of a people to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development,” how can we act as allies?

One way of doing this: to use the power and privilege we have to educate and act as allies within our own communities, where we can perhaps make the most difference.

Another: if we are going to be working with a community that is not our own, to make sure to act in consultation with them and to have their consent in the work that we are doing. Consultation should happen both prior (a long time before) and pre (just before doing the work). Consent should be both full (giving them all access to information about your project) and informed (and this information should be fully understood by the community you are working with ).

Obviously, when you're consulting with a community, you can't necessarily hear from everyone in the community. So who do we consult with? Preference for consulting directly with the people we are going to work with, i.e. youth, to make sure that their needs are being met.

Good principles to look at: OCAP principles, as outlined by the National Aboriginal Health Association (www.naho.ca): Ownership, Control, Access and Possession of programming by the people the programming is for. You can find the full OCAP principles outined here: http://www.naho.ca/firstnations/english/documents/FNC-OCAP_001.pdf.

For more key points, please check out the attached document, written by Jessica Yee.

You can also contact Jessica at jessica.j.yee@gmail.com.

Resources:

Book (preview available online here) : Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism – Aileen Moreton-Robinson.

Articles: See PDFs attached.