Forward Together at 25: #NoTeenShame for Young Moms

The following blog is from Natasha Vianna, co-founder of #NoTeenShame, to commemorate Forward Together's 25th anniversary.

When I gave birth to my daughter at 17, I finally met the person who would drastically change my life. With trembling hands, I held her close to my skin and cried in a way I never cried before. There was this moment of overwhelming emotion, having felt a different kind of love I never knew before, but I felt a deeper darkness lurking within me. I was young and afraid that what everyone told me would come true – that the baby lying on my chest would ruin my life. Months after my daughter’s birth, those harmful words were constantly being repeated in my mind and I questioned whether I would ever be capable of being a good mother.

Pushing back against negativity and judgment is difficult when you don’t recognize it as a problem, but only see it as your reality. Until there were people who stood up with young moms, I didn’t even realize there was something to stand up for or that my destiny didn’t have to be pre-determined. The pain and discomfort I often felt eventually pushed me to start asking questions and wonder why I was not seen as a valuable woman in our society – but I didn’t want to stand alone. So when I discovered that Forward Together and the Strong Families Coalition members recognized the need to include young mothers and fathers within their intersectional movement, it helped reinforce that feeling that, yes, I am valuable. Having a powerful and inclusive group of people who dedicated themselves to loving a stranger in the struggle, like me, I had the fuel I needed to keep going and start speaking out.

I wasn’t just raising a child, I needed to overcome intentionally difficult obstacles, disprove stereotypes, and watch my every step or risk losing my child to the system because I was Latina, because I was 17, and because society labeled me as a bad parent before my child was even born. Every time I would stand up tall and feel like I was getting close to accomplishing something great, there was always a system ready to shut me down. In 2006, I was told that my baby would interfere with my motivation to finish high school and go to college, but the only people interfering with my education were people with power who focused too much on regurgitating statistics on my likelihood of graduating instead of getting out of my way.

Why are we pushed to the side, strategically isolated from support systems, asked uncomfortable questions about our lives, and pressured to make decisions that align with societal expectations or risk the possibility of losing our children? When there are overwhelmingly negative messages in the media, narrowly framed data, and biased images of teen parents influencing everyone around me, it felt impossible to try to accomplish anything. Why would anyone listen to me when there’s contradicting data from an academic organization? I learned quickly that by ignoring some of our individual voices, it’s easy for many to render us invisible or exceptionalize our success, but together our voices build power. And that is why Forward Together’s work is so meaningful and important to me and my community.

One of the most valuable things I learned through my partnership with Forward Together is how a healthy relationship with an organization should feel. While there are so many predatory nonprofit organizations who simply seek to exploit the lives of marginalized communities for their own funding and public relation needs, there are few organizations that work to build a better world for us, our families, and families everywhere through patience, respect and meaningful engagement. They work hard to listen, learn, and help us move forward together.

Natasha Vianna is a Boston-based Latina activist, public speaker, and a co-founder of #NoTeenShame. As a former teen mom, Natasha works with activists and organizations across the country to launch and support strategic messaging campaigns that dissect the realities of teen pregnancy while eliminating the unnecessary stigmatization of young families. Recently, she took the stage to share a TEDx talk on the culture of shaming young mothers for their reproductive choices. Follow her on Twitter: @NatashaVianna.

Forward Together at 25: Forward Together Youth Take It To The Streets

In honor of our 25th anniversary, let's take a look back and honor the Forward Together youth organizers and leaders who helped to transform communities and make them safer for all families. 

Incinerator flyer and protest picture from 2001: 

A flier and photo from a campaign that our youth were part of, to shut down one of the last remaining medical waste incinerators in the country, located in East Oakland. Our youth brought a youth voice and gender lens to the campaign, revealing the particularly harmful impacts of Dioxin (a reproductive toxin) which is one of the chemicals that was spewing out of the incinerator. We won that fight and the incinerator was shut down.

Collective Voices (2009):
Collective Voices is a print newsletter by SisterSong that highlights work in the RJ movement. This article was written by Diana Ip (former FT staff) about our work to support Asian parents to talk to their kids about sex and sexuality. It highlights the toolkit we created for this purpose, called “Transforming API Community: Tools for Sexuality Education.”

Urban View & HOPE Freedom Tour Flyer (2001): In 2001, members of the HOPE Organizers-In-Training program spent 4 months surveying welfare recipients, interviewing Oakland students about sexual harassment, and protesting the medical waste incinerator in their neighborhood. These Asian youth organizers then took their research to the streets with a Reproductive Freedom tour of their community.

Forward Together at 25: The Power of Collaboration and Community

As we commemorate Forward Together's 25th anniversary, we are celebrating the work of our various programs and partnerships. The post below was authored by Maia Weiss of Health Initiatives for Youth.


I work for an organization called Health Initiatives For Youth (HIFY), and I’ve been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Forward Together. I first met Forward Together Youth Program leaders Deanna Gao and mai doan at a Queer/Trans Network meeting, a place where a variety of organizations regularly meet with the goal of improving the services we can provide to LGBTQ youth in Alameda County. Recognizing that both of our organizations strive to provide community, safe spaces, leadership opportunities and health education to young queer folks in Oakland, we decided to see how HIFY and Forward Together could support one another.

As this partnership has grown, I have been so impressed by the youth in Forward Together’s afterschool leadership program, and deeply moved by the community and culture that the adult leaders have helped to shape. My first visit to Forward Together headquarters in Downtown Oakland was to facilitate a workshop for the youth on Allyship and the LGBTQ Community. Entering their space felt a little like going to my grandmother’s house. I was asked to take off my shoes and to help myself to snacks. Youth were hanging out, cooking food and doing homework. The environment felt so warm and inviting, I understood why young people would gravitate to this space. As we began our workshop, youth were eager to participate and ask questions. I heard them challenge each other respectfully and affirm diverse points of view; I could tell this was a space where youth engagement was celebrated and the young people felt empowered to make their voices heard. This is both a testament to the incredible youth in program and to their passionate and dedicated adult leaders.

Forward Together and HIFY partnered to throw a mixer for young people interested in connecting over their shared passion for LGBTQ activism and allyship. We held the event at HIFY’s drop-in space for queer youth in West Oakland, and invited BAY Peace, another Oakland youth organization, to lead us in a movement workshop exploring gender identity. It was so exciting to see youth leading both youth and adults in a series of movement and improvisation exercises which stretched many people’s comfort zones. Simultaneously laughing and perspiring and having intimate, difficult conversations about gender, I felt a powerful sense of community in that room that evening. I am so grateful for the work that Forward Together is doing to empower these communities today, and eager to see the new generation of change makers that emerges as a result of Forward Together’s support.

Maia Weiss is a Lead Trainer at Health Initiatives For Youth. At HIFY, she facilitates groups for LGBTQ street-involved youth and leads trainings on a variety of social justice and health education topics. Find out more about HIFY’s work and our queer youth drop-in space at www.hify.org

Forward Together at 25: What is "Forward Stance" Anyway?

So what exactly is this "Forward Stance" thing that you hear us talk about? The Forward Stance Leadership model is a mind-body approach that cultivates fierce individuals, effective organizations, and powerful movements that strengthen our families and communities. It is an empowering way to learn and gain new insight through physical movement and by reconnecting our bodies with our minds. It is the secret to our longevity as we celebrate 25 years of #buildingpower so all families can thrive.

It makes more sense when you see it, and even more sense when you do it. The video above is the best way to highlight how we are #buildingpower through Forward Stance leadership.

Forward Stance Leadership means:

• Stepping into leadership: embracing our personal power and strengths to provide vision, energy and expertise in service to social change.

• Non-violent communication: assuming that disagreement is an opportunity for growth transformation and finding ways to build common ground or agree to disagree while moving forward together.

• Building leadership opportunities for others: there are actually no bounds in terms of the amount of leadership our movement can contain.

It is not something we do, rather it is something we are and embody through daily practice. It is the strategic basis from which we move.

Will you join us in building power to create a better world for our families?

Forward Together at 25: #buildingpower so all families can thrive

As we commemorate our 25th anniversary, Forward Together's Executive Director, Eveline Shen, reflects on where we were, where we are, and where we are headed.

Twenty five years ago, our founders recognized that while all women need rights and  resources to insure their reproductive health, too many women of color and low-income have needs that are not recognized by the established leaders of the reproductive rights movement.

Our founders – a group of passionate Asian women – knew that in order for Asian women and other women of color to have the agency and access we all need to make decisions about our sexuality and reproductive lives, our voices need to be heard. In particular, they knew that in our communities, it was young, low-income Asian women who were facing some of the biggest challenges when it comes to having the agency and access to make decisions about their reproductive lives and sexuality.

So they did something that seems so common sense, but at the time was in fact revolutionary: They talked to young Asian women about what they need in order to thrive. They started where they were, in Oakland. And they asked them: what challenges are keeping you from living the life that you want to live? And they listened. And they learned. And they partnered with young Asian women and together began advocating for themselves and their needs: Comprehensive sex education. Access to culturally relevant health care. A healthy environment for their families. Safety from the harassment that keeps them from reaching their educational goals.

None of these issues were being addressed by the mainstream reproductive rights movement at the time, but all are essential to helping women and girls of color to access the power and resources we need to make our own decisions about our bodies, our families and our lives. Through the leadership of our young Asian women, we won concrete policy changes that have improved their lives and their communities.

Our early successes generated more opportunities to lead, so we began advocating at the state level, and partnering with other groups across the country to bring the needs of women of color to the center of the conversation about reproductive health.

Together, we formed a movement of people who sought reproductive justice, a calling that goes beyond the legal right to choose, and also recognizes that real, meaningful change that challenges the power structures that oppress our communities must be led by the people most affected by the issues we are seeking to change. For us, this meant always centering the leadership of women and girls of color.  

The term “Reproductive Justice” was getting so popular that the women of color who were doing this work were being sidelined again in its uptake. Seeing a need to establish women of color and their voices as the core of the emerging field, we generated a definition and framework of Reproductive Justice.  Published in 2005, A New Vision is still the most widely used text on the issue.

Our paper defining and recognizing the Reproductive Justice Movement put us on the map with funders, organizations and decision-makers nationwide. Our phones were literally ringing off the hooks from people across the country who saw the power and potential of this framework to be a game changer. The attention was sometimes overwhelming for our small staff, but we also knew it was a huge opportunity to harness the excitement and build momentum.

We began to grow. Through the use of Forward Stance – a mind-body approach that allows us to learn and gain insight through the use of breath, voice and physical movement – we developed an innovative leadership model that allowed us to evolve tremendously. We grew from a local organization working with Asian women and girls into leading a national network that bridges diverse communities toward a common purpose.. THs   The Forward Stance Leadership model allowed us to stay grounded and focused throughout the evolution, and has been the secret to our success and longevity.

In recent years, Forward Together has worked with more than 200 organizations across the country to build a strong and vibrant Reproductive Justice Movement. Through values-based collaborations, we shared resources, built strategic alliances and began taking collective action. From this work, the Strong Families initiative was born. Through Strong Families, we are working together to change culture and policy to reflect the realities of our families so that all of us can thrive.

Our campaigns emerge from the real concerns of real people who are standing up for ourselves and our families. We continue to recognize, call out and eventually overcome the roadblocks that pop up in the intersections where our race, class, gender and sexuality are used to keep us from the future we want for all of us.

And through it all, we continue to train Asian youth in Oakland to advocate for themselves, their families and their futures.

  

We listen. We learn. We lead. And we move forward, together.