By Arti Panday
Dozens of Indo-Caribbean females, ages 10 to 84, have been gathering once a month at Black Creek Community Farm since the beginning of the year to connect, teach, and learn about their culture. With traditional curries and dhal puri on the menu and storytelling on the agenda, these women have been meeting to cultivate a community through shared experiences.
Lotus Toronto is led by four female, Indo-Caribbean, academics and activists: Rajanie Preity Kumar, Suzanne Narine, Talisha Ramsaroop, and Preeia Surajbalie.
Kumar, Narine and Surajbali are all PhD students whose work focus on various social, political, and educational aspects of Indo-Caribbean women in Guyana and students in Toronto. Ramsaroop is a local activist, with a Master’s in Sociology, who works with racialized women in various capacities.
Following the group’s third session on March 15, they took some time to answer questions about the initiative.
Q: What inspired this project?
A: This project started with a desire to create an inter-generational space where self-identified Indo-Caribbean women can gather together, to share stories – whether it is a story of migration, violence, accessing education or leaving a marriage. This project started in hopes of building connections to other women in our community, to carve out a space where we can come together to support each other, to learn about our “herstories,” and to also heal collectively from our history of ongoing violence and trauma.
Q: What requirements did you have to meet to qualify for funding?
Our group is currently funded by the Multicultural Community Capacity Grant Program, which is offered through the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. The grant was aimed at funding projects which would help reach vulnerable, otherwise hard to reach communities, addressing programming gaps in these communities and improving civic and community engagement to build stronger communities.
Q: How would you like to see the program grow?
A: We would like to expand our program to have various sessions in different communities. While we are currently working with women in the Jane and Finch area, we would like to broaden our scope to working with women located across the GTA, Brampton and Mississauga, as these areas also have a huge Indo-Caribbean population. Another objective would also be to connect to younger women in the community, and ideally, have monthly programming. We would also like to expand our topics and themes to include subjects like sexuality, race relations, violence among others.
Q: How do you determine the session's themes and topics?
A: As a part of the grant application we identified four key areas that our program would cover: women’s empowerment; storytelling; cultural archiving; and political education. Through these overarching themes we develop programs that fit under each category, using culturally relevant material.
The fourth Lotus Toronto event is set to take place on Thursday, April 12. The group is now seeking additional funding to ensure they can maintain the program past next month. For more information on how you can become involved with Lotus Toronto or help keep the program running, contact lotusinthe6@gmail.com.