Project Hajra is a community organization run by AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South/Central Asian) women and families who are invested in strong intersectional and community-based approaches. We have around 258 members based in Queens, NYC. Our primary focus is creative community organizing by migrant women of color to end state and interpersonal violence in our communities through healing and transformative justice. We develop culture-specific programs related to gender justice and community defense.
We understand that our communities will not be safe unless we address root causes of violence. We have to develop and support natural organizing that is already happening, building systems of care which can help to address core needs of our communities. In our bi-weekly meetings, we generate questions that form our social justice vision, including:
What does safety mean to us?
What are the root causes of violence?
How can we better show up for each other in times of crisis, and plan for future crises?
What aspects of state violence impact personal relationships and violence in the home?
What does community defense look like?
Through these conversations, we have generated a list of needs that must be met in order to eradicate interpersonal and state violence:
- Abolition of prison and police
- Secure and affordable housing
- Secure employment that fits with our needs, including valuing caregiving as part of work
- Affordable or free childcare
- Increased trust in others (both inside and outside community) and nurturing networks
- Training in bystander intervention, emotional CPR, and community defense
- Ongoing support and collaboration in response to racial profiling, police brutality, and anti-immigrant violence
- Spaces for healing and gathering
Since 2014, Project Hajra has addressed these needs primarily through ongoing programming of the Community Safety Initiative (CSI), a weekly organizing gathering committed to deepening gender justice in our communities. We also organize around 75 “networks”*: groups of friends, neighbors, in-laws, people in religious organizations, and others. The leadership for these networks come from our membership base. Although the Community Safety Initiative started as a way to decrease isolation in our communities and regional spaces; the resulting outcomes have moved into deeper relational organizing.
Of Project Hajra’s membership base, about 40 people participate in activities on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
*View Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective about the information on pods. Project Hajra began focusing on the same types of networks around the same time as BATJC. We want to honor their work on naming this framework and actively supporting materials and tools to teach it to others. BATJC named the reasons why we support the network modeld Please support BATJC and their work.
What do we try to do?
- gender justice
- community defense
- first responder and rapid response
- economic organizing
- housing justice
- emotional healing, community health, and healing spaces