‘I love that International Women’s Day focuses our attention and prompts us to consciously connect with women from other parts of the world’
This week, I've been thinking a lot about the communities I am part of, and also how I’ve marked International Women’s Day in the past. Whether I’ve attended local community centre events or spoken at a university event, I have always thought that International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to spotlight all the brilliant work that women do every day, often unsung, without accolade or adequate financial reward.
This year, on 8 March, International Women’s Day is on a mission centred on ‘Choose to Challenge’. International Women’s Day says:
“A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we're all responsible for our own thoughts and actions - all day, every day. We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality.”
And this has led me to think about the invisibility of many women who have contributed to their families, close circles and wider communities this past year.
I love that International Women’s Day focuses our attention and prompts us to consciously connect with women from other parts of the world. And through making that connection, I feel I am effectively choosing to challenge. It prompts me to think beyond a narrow frame of myself and towards others, accepting a larger responsibility around what I feel to be right.
Through considering connections and responsibilities, I reorientate myself towards considering the varied experience of women within a frame that can bond us together, rather than drive us apart. Feeling a connection with women across the world is always important, but in a year of disconnection and tremendous loss, I feel that this is more important than ever.
Since we launched on Instagram in November 2020, I have been so proud to be part of Conscience Collective and use our posts to spotlight the brilliant and community-minded contributions made by women from our community.
Masks, produced in the Czech Republic by women in response to a requirement to wear masks and little opportunity to buy them.
Photo Credit @KrulisovaKatka (Twitter) and @katthurner_(Instagram)
I have loved our ‘CC Challenge’, ‘Christmas Countdown’ and New Year ‘Resolved to’ campaigns that highlighted a sense of being ‘in this together’ and joining together through fitness goals. When we asked our community what taking part in these campaigns meant to them, they shared that they felt motivated to stay fit and healthy, and that they were pleased that they could be part of the Conscience Collective community at this time.
As Audre Lorde says- “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation”. Joining with family, friends, new and old, to build a new community of women pursuing similar goals and celebrating one anothers’ successes has been so important as a source of motivation and inspiration for me. So in response to the upcoming International Women’s Day, I would like to express gratitude to all members of our Conscience Collective Community. You mean the world to me.
Written by Amirkaur - Conscience Collective
