unsilence here

3 PHASES of
​UNSILENCING
​

Unsilence Here workshops break down barriers to open dialogue and sustainable change by unpacking the fundamentals of institutional, cultural, and personal silencing. 

Program inquiries  >

BEFORE YOU UNSILENCE...

...it's important to understand the concepts of "silencing" and "unsilencing."​

Explore ​Secrets, comprised of interactive stories, based on real events, that introduce these concepts and illustrate how institutional silencing, cultural silencing, and personal silencing create social taboos.

SECRETS  >

​​Guiding Questions

• ​How might we define institutional silencing, cultural silencing, and personal silencing?
• How do institutional silencing, cultural silencing, and personal silencing connect and overlap?
• ​Why are some injustices more difficult to talk about than others?

1. identify

1a. NAME TABOOS

Guiding Questions

• ​What issues of social injustice does your community find difficult to talk about?
• ​What kinds of conversations make you feel embarrassed or nervous?
  
• ​​Which local, national, and global issues are hard for your community to face head on?
  
• ​​What do you wish you could talk about openly?
• ​How does it feel to be silenced? How does it feel to witness silencing?

1B. IDENTIFY BARRIERS

Guiding Questions

• ​What prevents your community from having certain conversations?
• What specific institutional barriers, cultural barriers, and personal barriers prevent your community from talking about these issues?
• How do these forms of silencing make you feel?

Unsilence Framework  >

1C. EXAMINE HUMAN RIGHTS 

Unsilence Feature
​Use our summary of "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (UDHR) to identify where your community taboos fit within International law. 

UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS  >

​Guiding Questions

• ​How do the taboos and barriers you identified fit within our understanding of human rights?
• ​Do the taboos and barriers you identified fit under multiple Articles in UDHR, or just one single Article? What does this tell us?
• ​Why are so many people unable to name all the rights in UDHR?
• ​​What is most surprising about UDHR?
  
• ​​How does UDHR change how you think about injustice?
  
• ​​How does UDHR change how you think about your community and its taboos?
• ​How does learning about UDHR make you feel?
• ​Why is UDHR a promise that remains unfulfilled?

2. engage

2A. RESEARCH ROOT CAUSES 

General Questions

• ​What taboo social issue or injustice (or set of issues) do you care about?
• ​As you conduct research on your chosen issue, a focus will emerge. What specific aspect of this social issue will you focus on, and why?
  
• ​Why should we care about this particular issue? Why is this issue important?
  
• ​What is the history of this social issue? What events in history are connected to this issue? How can history help us grasp what people are experiencing today?
• ​What urgent questions do you have about your social issue? What do you need to know and understanding about your issue?
• ​What must change in society, and why? What is needed, and why is it needed?
  
• ​Who are the stakeholders? (i.e., who are the people affected by this social issue?) What do they need? What do they want? And what specific assets do these stakeholders have? Are they motivated to find a solution? Do they have great networks and social supports?
  
• ​How does what you find make you feel?

Secondary Research

• ​What existing data may explain why your chosen injustice persists?
• ​What are the key statistics, studies, and public reports about your social issue? What do those studies say? What evidence do we have that this social issue is a problem worthy of our attention?
  
• ​What do government reports and nonprofit reports tell us about this issue? What do these reports not address?
  
• ​​Are there real-life stories or testimonies you can find that will provide insight into your chosen issue?
• ​What programs already exist that address this social issue? You don’t want to “reinvent the wheel"; what gap needs to be filled?

Primary Research

• ​What data can you collect to help you dig deep into this specific taboo?
• ​How do the people around you perceive this issue?
• ​What do social workers, teachers, and other professionals think about this issue?
• ​What are the burning, unanswered questions you have about your issue? What key information on your issue are being kept out of sight?​​​

2B. ENGAGE IN DIALOGUE

Reflection
◆ ​Identity
◆ ​History

Empathy
◆ ​Respect
◆ ​Trust

​Healing
◆ ​Individual
​◆ ​Collective

More content coming soon

2C. EXPLORE SOLUTIONS

Potential projects:

• Workshop series
  
• Lunchtime discussion group
• Breakfast support group
  
• Poster campaign, supported by workshops
  
• "Courageous Conversations" skills training for students
  
• Training for teachers and administrators
  
• After-school club
  
• Book club for students and parents
  
• Create a video, accompanied by a workshop series
  
• Slam poetry workshops and culminating event
  
• Community service project
  
• Film festival, accompanied by workshops
  
• Community dialogue events
  
• Social justice concert
  
• Interactive art installation or exhibition
  
• Field trip series
• Community organizing and/or political action

3. sustain

3A. DESIGN INTERVENTIONS

 Goal Setting

• Based on your research, what does your community need in order to break the taboos that prevent you from talking about important issues?
• Who is your audience? What do they need? What do they want? How many people do you hope to reach?
• What are your specific goals? What specific skills do you want your participants to walk away with? What do you want your participants to learn? In what logical sequence will you achieve your goals?
• How will you measure what participants have learned? How will you know if your program has been successful?

Design

• What is your program? What do you need to design? How do elements of your program help you achieve your goals?
• What is your timeline for designing your program?
• What community rules or policies do you need to follow? What best-practices should you follow?
• Where will your program take place?
• What is your timeline for program implementation?
• Who will facilitate your program? What qualifications or skills will they need? How will you ensure they are fully prepared to lead difficult conversations? What training will they need?
• What resources do you need? How will you secure these resources?
• What implementation supports do you need? What professionals need to be present throughout your program?

3B. IMPLEMENT SOLUTIONS

​Preparing for Implementation

• Who will manage your project once it's started? How and how often will your implementation team communicate? What will you do if conflicts arise?
• What known challenges will you face?
• What are the potential pitfalls of your design? What are you feeling nervous about?
• How will you promote your program? What happens if nobody signs up? What will you do if nobody shows up?
• How will you prevent attrition? How will you keep your participants fully engaged?
• As you go along, how will you record what you learn and keep track of improvements and changes that will need to be made?
• ​How will you prevent burn-out within your team? How will you keep yourself engaged and excited about this project?
• How will you support participants' emotional responses? How will you support facilitators' emotional responses?

3C. EVALUATE & PLAN for FUTURE

Change is only sustainable when it can be seen, experienced, and most importantly quantified. As part of the design and implementation process, participants will define metrics to evaluate impact. 

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GUIDELINES FOR
​DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS

PREPARING FOR CONVERSATIONS

• Stay up-to-date your community's disclosure policies. If someone chooses to share a personal experience of abuse or violence, help them get the right support. (We recommend these professional 24/7 helplines and resources in the U.S.)
• Communicate in advance with community social workers and counselors about the upcoming program, to let them know that community members may need support.
• Facilitators can't prepare for everything, but they can research topics in advance and reflect on their own emotional responses to different topics and issues. 

STARTING CONVERSATIONS
At the start of a difficult conversation, help the group set some ground rules for dialogue - these may include:◆ ​​

• Listen and create space for everyone to contribute. Practice active listening. Listen more than you speak.
• Use “I” statements (we can only speak for ourselves).
• Accept and expect discomfort, anxiety, and frustration.
• Ask open and genuine questions. Everyone is learning.
• Trust that everyone is sharing with good intentions. It’s okay to make mistakes. Say sorry, forgive quickly, and move on. Demonstrate empathy for each other.
• Don’t expect to solve everything. But do celebrate small wins.

LEADING CONVERSATIONS

• Never put pressure on someone to share private information or a personal experience.
• Remind the group to always assume there's at least one person in the room who has direct experience with each social justice topic.
• If a participant shares something personal with the group, always thank them.
• Whenever there's an awkward moment, acknowledge the discomfort. It's okay to make a light joke about the awkwardness. This will help to break the taboo even further.
• Avoid competitions of victimhood (e.g., "my issue is worse than yours"); Pain is pain and we cannot compare suffering.
• Help the group see that there's no "right" emotional response to an issue; any emotional response is valid and normal, including a combination of responses and even no response.
• Help participants see that, as long as everyone has good intentions, it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay to say something in the wrong way; we're all learning.
• Remind participants that talking openly - with a trusted friend or trusted adult - is a reflection of strength.
• Throughout an extended program, give everyone time and space to reflect, alone and with each other.
• As you talk about difficult topics, news stories and references to TV shows and movies may arise; take time to acknowledge what is often sensationalized or over-simplified.
• Promote a culture of honesty, openness, and no judgement of others; everyone is different.

CONFRONTING DIFFICULT SUBJECTS

• If you're sharing images, film clips, written text, or other media that depict any form of violence, injustice, or suffering, prepare the group for what they might experience.
• You might say, "We're about to watch a documentary clip about mass-incarceration. What do you expect to see? How might that make you feel?" This will minimize unnecessary shock.

For more on how to manage emotional responses to violence and injustice, check out Oxygen​:

OXYGEN  >

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Sample outcome: ​UNSILENCE ACTION PROJECT

​After exploring the concepts of silencing and unsilencing, 9th grade students name “transgender rights” as a taboo issue that is affecting members of their community (different communities identify different issues based on what is prevalent, marginalized, and taboo to them). The students work with their classroom teacher to identify barriers - personal (e.g., fear of exclusion), cultural (e.g., parents and teachers don’t know how to talk about trans experiences), and institutional (e.g., school doesn’t recognize gender identities of trans students) - that prevent them from talking about transgender rights.

They begin to explore the issue through secondary research that includes interactive, digital Unsilence Learning Experiences and guided reviews of published literature, research, and NGO reports to learn about trans experiences and the root causes of its silencing. This exploration leads students to understand the trans experiences in the context of human rights. Next, students engage in primary research, which includes interviews, surveys, and concept mapping to better understand both the historical and present-day contexts of transgender rights, as well as connections to other human rights issues.

Now, armed with information, agency, and growing skills in having difficult conversations, students design  community-based interventions that serve to unsilence the transgender rights and trans experiences within their community. The students are then ready to implement their solutions (e.g., hosting a weekly lunchtime discussion group with their peers and teachers around trans experiences).

During this entire process, the students and their teachers receive Unsilence Leadership Training, document each phase, reflect on their learning and understanding, and evaluate their challenges, progress, and successes. As the students gain comfort with facilitating difficult conversations around taboo issues, Unsilence supports them to share their work with their community through various events and public speaking opportunities and then plan future action.
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Our work at Unsilence builds a foundation for young people, educators, and the public to engage and reflect deeply on how they see the world, to develop empathy for others, and to begin personal and collective healing. Above all else, we elevate young people to be informed and engaged citizens who know how to lead.