DeepSummary
The podcast episode revolves around Letsema, an innovative community-based intervention aimed at addressing gender-based violence in the Vaal township in South Africa. Letsema combines feminist leadership with organizational and community development ideas, bringing together diverse stakeholders to collaboratively address the issue through various approaches like storytelling, World Cafes, and Open Space sessions.
Letsema's approach involves raising awareness, shifting practices, and ultimately changing societal norms around gender-based violence. The initiative recognizes the normalization of violence in the Vaal due to its history and socio-economic challenges, and attempts to model a different way of living and working together while addressing structural issues like unemployment and poverty.
Despite setbacks like the brutal murder of one of Letsema's members, the process has helped shape a different dynamic of engagement and create experiences of working collaboratively across age, gender, race, and spheres of influence. The impacts extend beyond the immediate community, influencing the work of partner organizations in areas like the labor movement and addressing issues like xenophobia.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Letsema is an innovative community-wide initiative aimed at addressing gender-based violence in South Africa's Vaal township.
- It combines feminist leadership with organizational and community development approaches, bringing together diverse stakeholders.
- Letsema employs inclusive methods like storytelling, World Cafes, and Open Space sessions to raise awareness and shift societal norms.
- Despite challenges, the initiative has modeled a different way of engagement and collaboration across demographics and spheres of influence.
- The impacts of Letsema extend beyond the immediate community, influencing broader work around issues like labor rights and xenophobia.
- A key aspect of Letsema is the inclusion of both women and men, working together across age groups to address power relations and gender dynamics.
- The initiative recognizes the need to understand and address structural factors like unemployment and poverty that contribute to gender-based violence.
- Letsema represents a unique example of movement-building and creating change through lived experiences, not just advocacy and lobbying.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “We women will no longer be manipulated for political ends.“ by Aruna Rao
- “We can't ignore the way the world is structured if we want to change it. It's as simple as that.“ by Michelle Friedman
- “The idea is to work in a more whole community kind of way and find ways where you can raise consciousness, maybe shift practices, ultimately working towards changing norms.“ by Aruna Rao
- “I think another key issue with Letsieme is this is women and men working together. There's kind of a range of ages, and it's also been, for me, a very unique experience of seeing men and women work around power relations together.“ by Aruna Rao
- “So I think that mix of what happens in an ordinary community and not working as separate women's organizations, although there is separate, that is also claimed, I think that's different.“ by Michelle Friedman
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Episode Information
The Gender at Work Podcast
Gender At Work
12/10/17
In this episode, we travel to the Vaal---a semi-rural area in South Africa, whose violent past still haunts it. We take a look at Letsema, an innovative community wide effort to combat gender based violence, and negative social norms around women and the LGBT community. We talked to Nina Benjamin and Nispho Twala from the Labor Research Service in South Africa, and found out why the Vaal can be such a violent place, and why the Letsema program was so successful. We also spoke with Michele Friedman, a Senior Associate of Gender at Work, to reflect on the systemic impact that Letsema had.
“I used to solve all my problems with violence especially when it came to these initiation schools. Letsema taught me how to better work with the community and work with many places and find better ways to solve issues in all these communities.”