January 2022 - oh my!

We are almost 2 years into the Covid-19 pandemic and I can sense the restlessness in myself and exhaustion in others. It has been a rough and tough period not being able to connect with friends and family. Just recently, we had to cancel our family Christmas celebration because my niblings were exposed to someone with covid-19. Since they have been extremely busy juggling work, life, and everything young people become obsessed about, I did not have much time with them. This was one of the very few times we could have connected. Don’t get me wrong. I have not become a hermit, almost but not completely. I have made some effort to build up relationships with YouthPlatform leaders. We went out for boba and mochinuts (the best donuts made from rice flour) and we had a small K-galore get-together at my house. We had K-food, played K-games (yut nori), and listened to K-pop. I blame K-drama for their interest in K-everything. I would share photos but I forgot to take pictures of our first gathering and one of the youth did not wear her hijab in our second meeting. Life does happen without photos - it really does no matter how our social media has changed our definition of life. 

Despite the limitations that covid-19 has placed on us, we will have an exciting New Year ahead of us. We will be offering two sections of Activism@Work for youth and we will be launching the adult version, Embodied Presence, all in February. Yes, we were unsuccessful in marketing both programs in Fall of 2021 but hopefully this time we will have a better approach. I have enlisted two people to help me with marketing, Erica Wright and Dafne Ruiz. I have met with them face-to-face to discuss strategies on how we can market these two excellent programs. Well, we talked mostly about life and 5-10 minutes about strategic marketing. I hate business talk during our meetings. All that professional jibber jabber never really appealed to me unless I have to get down to business. And I will be more proactive because I am finished with the drafts of the guidebooks and workbooks. If you really want to know, there are four versions, Guidebook for Activism@Work, Textbook for Activism@Work, Guidebook for Embodied Presence, and Workbook for Embodied Presence, which I have laboriously written in the last two years. They will all be made available to participants because they are phenomenal, not because I wrote them (well, sort of) but because these books were based on my observations of social activists and collaboration with many bright people. I did not research books or articles but collected the wisdom from conversations based on decades of experience. WOW is it.

We hope to make 2022 the year in which Platform grows to make a deeper impact in its community. We will be intentional about realizing our vision because we absolutely believe in the leadership of youth and women in our communities. We really DO.