The WhyPAR Podcast
Episode 9: “How to Empower Themselves in an Industry Not Meant for Them”: On Community-Engaged Programming with Lil Sis (Alma Ahmed, Suzanna Maharaj, Rayan Saied, Belul Kidane, and Kamilah Apong) and Naima Raza
Citation:
Raza, Naima. “How to Empower Themselves in an Industry Not Meant for Them”: A Conversation on Community-Engaged Programming Between Lil Sis (Alma Ahmed, Suzanna Maharaj, Rayan Saied, Belul Kidane, and Kamilah Apong) and Naima Raza.” Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. October 27th, 2021. Podcast, MP3 audio, https://youthresearchlab.org/whypar
Note on attribution:
When citing the ideas and/or when quoting material from this podcast, please attribute the ideas to the speaker(s) and, whenever possible, note the timestamp or the line where the words quoted can be found. We recommend that you draw on the style conventions typically used for “secondary sources,” such as “quoted in” (Chicago Style) or “as cited in” (APA), and that you cite the source as listed above.
Host: Welcome to The WhyPAR podcast, a project of the Youth Research Lab at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Music
Host: In the WhyPAR podcast, youth participatory action research practitioners discuss the ethical dimensions of conducting YPAR. In our podcast, we explore issues of co-leading YPAR projects, building relationships, power dynamics, and sharing our work together. The Youth Research Lab is located in Toronto on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
Kamilah: Community-based intervention is accessibility. It’s liberation. It’s movements. It’s shifting conversations. It’s pushing discourse without having to go through all of the red tape like, of like an academically approved research project.
Host: Welcome everyone! My name is Naima, and I’m the co-host of the WhyPAR podcast. I am a YPAR practitioner and a graduate assistant at the Youth Research Lab.
Today’s episode is with a youth-based group. We are featuring Lil Sis, a grassroots, youth-led, youth-focused artist resource centre. Lil Sis is made up of youth who are queer, not queer, racialized, living in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area, artists, and many other things. Our conversation today is between myself, and Lil Sis team members - Alma Ahmed, Suzanna Maharaj, Rayan Saied, Belul Kidane, and Kamilah Apong.
During COVID-19, Lil Sis has been providing a lot of online programming. So in this conversation, we are going to be discussing, what does it mean to be a queer, racialized youth artist organization based in Regent Park? What is the importance of community-based research? How does Lil Sis branding challenge heteronormativity and masculinity in the Toronto arts scene?
This conversation was recorded online on Zoom. And with that, let’s jump in!
Alma: My name is Alma, I use she/her pronouns and I’m the social media lead for Lil Sis.
Rayan: My name is Ryan, I use she/her pronouns, and I am the workshop and open mic lead for Lil Sis.
Suzanna: My name is Suzanna. I use she/her pronouns and I’m the admin and resources lead for Lil Sis.
Belul: Hi, my name is Belul, I use she/pronouns and I also am open mic and workshop lead for Lil Sis.
Kamilah: hi my name is Kamilah, I use she/her pronouns and I’m the coordinator of Lil Sis.
Naima: So I’m so excited to chat with you all today. I would love, if you could, if we could get started, by telling me what Lil Sis is all about.
Rayan: All right, I got us, let me go ahead. (laughs). So we’re Lil Sis, our little tagline is that we are Lil Sis, we are a grassroots nonprofit organization. We're based in Regent Park, and we provide performance opportunities and workshops for BIPOC and LGBTQI plus youth in Toronto, and the GTA in general, hoping to expand in the future. But yeah that's what we do. Due to COVID, we initially started out as an open mic again based out of Regent Park and hummingbird way back in want to say, 2016, 2015, 2016.
Kamilah: 2015.
Rayan: or 2015, there we go. In 2015, so we were doing monthly open mics, at some point that's turned into us leading research on experiences of BIPOC and LGBTQ plus artists in Toronto, and the GTA to understand like. What barriers were there, how to tackle those, and so we came up with our research and shortly after we got a grant and so we we're able to morph into Lil Sis. And we started, we, that also coincided with COVID so unfortunately we had to let go of the open mic component, so far, but. At the moment, we're going hard with the workshops, and we had three so far, and so the workshops are very much focused on kind of like. Not so much on like developing your art craft, but kind of all the skills outside of that that is especially relevant for BIPOC and LGBTQ plus artists related to essentially like. How do you set up for yourself as an artist, how do you make sure that you're getting respected, that you're getting paid appropriately. You know, how to clap back, etc, how to build a portfolio, all of those things, so kind of those skills that are just all around being an artist and that help you succeed in your work in that way, and that is us so far.
Naima: Awesome. And so is your work, so are all of you from Regent Park and is your working mainly concentrated in Regent Park, or are all of you from the GTA and your work is, spreads across the GTA.
Rayan: So we are actually. All from Regent Park, well we're all initially from Regent Park, I will say that so. So, unless for, like personally I’ve moved out of Regent Park, you know Kami no longer is in Regent Park, some of us are outside based for school like, for schooling, like Alma lives in Regent Park but she's just, she goes to Queen’s so she is not there right now.
Rayan: Suzanna, you’re in Regent Park, though?
Suzanna: I’m actually, like down the street, I'm like from Bleecker but.
Alma: What!
Suzanna: I went to school at Jarvis and everything which is right there.
Alma: I didn’t know that! (inaudible)
Rayan: Oh, my God! So yeah, but we're all like very, we all like originated from there, or we live, very close to there so have very close ties to there through school and whatever. So yes.
Naima: Awesome, awesome and so your work must have been pretty involved in the community right? What did that, what does that mean for you? To be able to do community-based work? I love how your work also has that lens where it is community-centered and it takes into account. What is going on the community, what the needs of the community are, and you're able to deeply engage.
Alma: I think one need that we learned in our community and just like because we're a youth arts platform and we target normally ages between like 14 to 29 or whatever somebody thinks. A youth is if you're 50 and you believe you are youthful go for it, I believe you, and so, because our stuff is youth-led, we noticed with our open mic beforehand that there was a lack of performing arts spaces for people that wanted to start off their arts in the first place. And so we were like there are so many people that are like I want to be a singer, I want to be a spoken word artist, I just want to play my guitar in front of people and show them what I can do. And also within Regent Park, there's so many other resources that foster art in the first place, there's Art Heart, there's Regent Park School of Music, there's so many other resources so, and so we were like. We have all the resources, but no one knows how to, like mostly, I’m not gonna speak on behalf of everybody, but like we don't have a space that people can perform in. Or, just like an. Just like just the space, like a safer space and so. By creating Hummingbird open mic in the first place, we were like, we're going to get that out of the way. It was literally like with a live band, you had a backup singer, like backup singer ability, if you needed it. Like if you wanted to show off your own song you could, if you just want to speak like a poem about or like a spoken word piece about like your art or any issues you're facing, about your mental health, about racism around the world, oppression, any like any topic was open and the audience was just such a, like it was just a great vibe, the audience was welcoming every single type of art, so I think one of them was just encouraging and having a space for youth artists, especially beginners. To come in and just start to perform and learn how to perform and then with the grant money that we have now, or like, how can we use that and how can. And like with the grant money and the research report, we were finding, we found other issues that like. Youth artists were facing so we're like ‘Okay, we have all these resources within Lil Sis, how can we give back to youth artists, to LGBTQI plus artists, to racialized artists, how can we give that back’, so I think that is like the main motivational aspect of Lil Sis I would say, yeah.
Naima: I love that. I think there's such a lack of youth spaces within a lot of communities And I think it's so important and it's so wonderful that you created that, like you, created a space for community, for young people to come together. And also, in a way that centers the arts when we live in a society and an educational system where you know we can’t foster our true creative potential. And we can’t engage in that type of skill and intelligence and creativity.
Kamilah: Alma really highlighted that well, especially the piece around like the lack of youth art spaces. If you are younger than 19, you're not perform you're not practice, the way, where people cut their teeth, I've been in the industry for 12 years now, where you cut your teeth are on open mind stages, but open mic stages are in bars, or if you're performing, like it's in a venue that's a licensed liquor venue. And so, if you are under the age of majority you don't have that spot to really like test out your stuff and there's only RISE is the our other long-standing like youth open mic which is in Scarborough. And then there's kind of like pockets of stuff and, like, performance festivals and stages, but there's not consistent youth art spaces, where, which is where this you know comes from, as well as the fact that there were no, there were no art spaces that focused on live music and provided the opportunities to perform with live music. That was in only again and, like open, they had like live open mic bands, but again, you have to be 19 plus, you had to go to Kensington Market on like a Sunday night, I used to drive, I used to get on the go bus from Brampton and travel two and a half hours, just to go to the open mic when I was 16-17, just so I could start practicing. So when I came of age, and was in Regent, we were like that’s unreasonable. We need spaces, where young people can go, you know and practice, but the other piece, I wanted to really bring in. And I think it's very unique about having this in Regent is that without like advertising as such, the open mic became a spot, that was a mix of queer and trans people, as well as people who are straight and like or not read, not visibly out, who about largely racialized, so largely Black, brown, Asian youth and largely youth are also queer, but it wasn't never labelled as such, and I think it just organically happened because the band, when we first started and organizing like I myself identified publicly as queer. And so, and other folks in the bands did as well, and so people would. We would kind of attract this mélange of people, which in Toronto period you don't get a lot of, but in Regent as far as I know, by that point, there was no formal programming for queer or trans youth and the misconception is that there are no queer tor rans youth in Regent. Very large misconception, I would have other community leaders tell me when I was trying to like support queer programming in Regent, they’d be like they're not here, this is a community of like, you know we're largely people of colour there's no and religious and there's no, there's no queer here and I’d be like that's a lie. (laughs) Cause I know for a fact that there are, they're just not being reached, and so that is another really unique aspect of, of Lil Sis, I think, in that, like it's not explicitly a like queer program, but we get a lot of queer youth, who are coming to access programs.
Naima: So one of the things I know about Lil Sis is that y'all had actually completed a research project close to the beginning of your formation, I believe, so I would love to hear more about what that project was about, how you went about doing it, what you found.
Kamilah: Totally, so yeah. We did a community based research report, meaning that it was not a research project that was like based out of a school or out of like an institution, it was myself, members and like partners of the Lil Sis team, so that's including members who like aren't necessarily people who are not necessarily member like staff members, but were allied with the project, and we just wanted to get an understanding or not even understanding, because most of us were queer artists of color, nearly everyone on the project. We really wanted to have something documented, like experiences documented, and even though we weren't like a big institution, it was just a group of us who are artists, we wanted to have some kind of like “hey like, we just want to have this written and out in the universe, that these experiences are happening, and that we have recommendations to make the, to make things better for queer artists of color”. And so what we did was do a call out for young queer artists, queer and trans artists, mostly performing arts, but some also like textile artists and stuff like that and to get together and so we ate food together. And we recorded conversations on our experiences in the art scene in Toronto, and so we did two groups, an hour conversation each over like rice and chicken, and we recorded it on our phones and we had some questions, but most of it was just free flowing conversation. And then, a smaller group of us got together and transcribed all the conversations and we went together through all those transcriptions and themed common experiences, as well as outliers, like stuff that weren't caught, like was not common or things that kind of stood out, so once we did that we analyzed it we put it into a document where a couple people wrote, kind of put it put the transcription into like actual text and, like copy.
Naima: Awesome and what would you say were the main findings of the research?
Kamilah: So there’s several that had come up one of them, that was. One of the most ones that we like saw first and we're like yeah this is definitely thing was, the artists feeling like they couldn't be their whole selves. When they enter performing arts spaces. So like I feel like if I’m in a space that's like say an arts project or program dedicated to like, artists of colour I can be an artist of colour, but I can be like a gay artists of colour like I gotta tone that down kind of deal. And then another finding that had come up. Was the grant experience that was one that I definitely resonated with too, because for a lot of us, we felt like we had to really fetishize and like, exploit our trauma to get money, like we know that's what these funders want to see, we know that, like funders really get off on like trauma. And like pain porn was a term that came up a few times, and so that was something we discussed of like how we felt like we had to like essentially shuck and jive sometimes for money but we would do it because, at least, we would know we get the money and we can do what we needed to do, and so that was something that had come up.
Naima: Yeah, of course. And what was so you mentioned that this was community based research, you know, it was not done by an institution. And, given that you are a grassroots community organization, what was your motivation for doing research in the first place, because when we think about research we associate it with you know, a university, an academic institution.
Kamilah: Yeah, there’s a couple things one, I think that, as I saying earlier ,there's no from what I could find there is no research on this population. And why I found that I guess provocative, it didn't exist, was that, like, for a industry and and city and like country really that really loves to say that they're diverse and like multicultural and for the music industry cause that's my kind of positioning as a musician you really love to like hype up marginalized artists for like cool points and like social points and like because it's like sexy, but we don't actually have structured support systems, in many cases, to actually support them to have sustainable and like safe livelihoods as artists. And so that was one thing, like I want something document as well, at least it exists and it can be pointed to in reference to someone ever needs to like make a case of why, having you know spaces for artists of colour is important, for why, having grant applications that are accessible and not just like text essay only, application based style. To have, to make a case for why we need better spaces amongst like venues, and like for, for venue promoters to agree to understand to study and like sit with anti-oppression education and like implement that into their practice, into their venues type of deal, so really just wanted that to exist period because it didn't exist. Yeah, yeah.
Naima: Amazing. And why do you think community based research is important.
Kamilah: it's accessible, it's I mean. It's not like an easy thing to just wake up and be like I’m going to get research done by University of Toronto and I’m going to walk in there and say they need to do some research on this because I said so. Like that's not going to happen, you need to be in there and like whatever, getting a PhD or have someone who's going to vouch for you and, partner with them in some case. Whereas this was literally like okay let's get together and then let’s document it and, like do it ourselves and yeah it's not academically like. Whatever vouched but it's still a conversation that's documented. There’s still truth in it. There's still experiences that are really important in it. So let's do it, and now. Now it exists and, just like in the fact that it exists alone, makes a shift. And so yeah, like community based intervention is accessibility. It's liberation. It’s movements. It's shifting conversations. It’s pushing discourse without having to go through all the red tape of like an academically approved research project.
Naima: I am also, I’m also interested to hear about your relationships with the people who experience, who come to your programming. So I'd love to hear the relationships you have formed or the culture you have formed or yeah with with people who attend your workshops, come to your programming or even you know engage with you on social media.
Kamilah: that's a really interesting question, I think, is especially starting to come out now since we've been like kind of on hiatus for a bit, and just started coming back to workshops over the last few months. But there's been some really interesting conversations around our branding. I'm going to start it from that that point and other people can jump on, I know Alma you we've had quite a few conversations around this and, but one thing that was like. Something that I think people have, we've come into is like an assumption of who we are, and what we do, and who comes because of our branding. And I think our branding is very different from most arts groups, especially in Toronto. And I, I’m, I won't say any names, but something that people have literally emailed us about, have been people being like we love how colourful and how like boldly, like vibrance, and some people have described this as femme or like it's like boldly femme in a space in Toronto that's very, very much centers masculinity, very much centers like neutral tones, that like, black and brown as like their colour layout or like black and white and, like other neutrals, stays away from a lot of like bright vibrant things and like. That's been the thing that we have come up and I won't go into all the stories because I’m sure Alma has some tales to tell, but that has been very interesting and like who comes out just based off of the type of colours that we use on our website or on our, Alma’s Instagram posters that she makes for our workshops, like just that alone says so much about how people see and categorize and judge things so yeah.
Alma: To add on to what Kami said about our branding I like noticed it firsthand within like our participants as well, so for our “Show me what you're working with” workshop we had one participant who saw, who registered and he identified, as like male, and he was one of the only participants there, and he was like ‘Oh’, and he saw that the rest of the participants were either female-identifying or just non-gender identifying people, and so you mentioned, he messages me privately on the Zoom and he's like ‘Oh, is this just like a female only event?’ like is this like, like ‘Am I invited here? Like am I like allowed to be here? Am I taking up the space of somebody else?” And I was like ‘No, like you're not, like don't worry about it, like this was open to everybody’ and I brought it up during our meeting afterwards, and I was like this is just so funny to me. And then me and Kami had a conversation afterwards, we’re like, like and one of my concern is like, do you think it's bad that we're targeting, like our bright and bold colours or our colours that are more feminine or whatever are targeting like not a male audience. And I realized, I, like the Toronto scene, the Toronto art scene in general, prioritizes masculinity in the first place and prioritizes minimalism in the first place. So our Lil Sis page, is always going to be maximalist, it is always going to follow maximalist trends yeah, like how you said hypebeast ass, cloud waste man scene, like it is fully like that in the Toronto arts scene right now, and so we're gonna we're gonna keep the colour always, always gonna keep the colour.
Belul: No I was just gonna say, like that that whole story Alma said, about that one guy that felt, you know. Lil Sis, just by the colors in itself, is challenging the status quo. Like who said that certain colours belong to certain types of people? No. The colours is just a way to emphasize our vibrance and our boldness and what we stand for as Lil Sis. So yeah I believe that the the colors in itself, besides our messaging, is challenging the status quo and I love that for us.
Naima: That's so important in a society that centers masculinity, you know yeah, like in, I love what you said about you know even minimalism, like I heard someone explain how minimalism actually, they were giving an analysis of minimalism, that showed how minimalism is tied to like capitalism, and I was like that is so on point you know. It's tied to capitalist value like, efficiency, you know and I love, how you are disrupting space to say you know, no, these femme colours ,that's actually normal and it's okay for everyone to participate in that, it's not just you know, a female only, you know women only space just because we're using femme colors, but we're we're kind of interrupting the status quo dominant behavior, tendency within the space.
Kamilah: Another story that happened is, when we were first running our open mic. A peer of mine in the music industry came, came out and towards the end of the night he asked me, it's like okay so like this is open mic for like, for queers, there's mostly queers here. And I was like. No like we never labelled it as such, we never, we don't shy, I don't know, I don't check, ask as people come in, just people who come who feel welcome in this space come. And so like there are certainly a an air of like, Lil Sis is like this, or it's not it's not, it's something different, and literally that's because we use the colours like yellow, pink, blue, and green. Like that's, like that's, the only thing that we do, we say BIPOC, we have queer, trans people on our like our larger team, myself and like we have many, who come, but we also have just have a large racialized population, but literally the only thing that we like do is, use yellow green pink and blue, and people are like, like ‘What does it mean? Can I come? Like there's flowers on this?’. I’m like, ‘Are you scared of flowers?’ like, “It’s fine, just come through it's. It's very interesting, it's very interesting to have this sort of, I guess physical or like visibility with these colors within the Toronto landscape, because yeah a lot of a lot of people are just very hypebeast stuff, again very masculine centered.
Naima: Yeah, and who who responds this way? I’m curious, is the response from, you know the professionals, the professional artists, who are like maybe non-racialized, is the response from them different than the response you get from people in community, racialized queer people, or are responses over the place, because you know, sometimes we can internalize that stuff ourselves.
Kamilah: Anyone who wants to come in and like add to this, I’d say that's a good question, especially because we're only ending our first. We started as Lil Sis in July, so hasn't even been a full 12 months and we only started offering public programming as of March, so like we're still very much young in our existence as Lil Sis providing these providing workshops, the open mic ran for a lot longer, and we, the response to that, I think. That was just really a mix. We had like, five year olds, we had 60 year olds, we had like, remember the cowboy, the white cowboy from.
Alma: America he came from America. Like, it’s for an open mic.
Kamilah: That's the really funny part, is there's like we've had such a huge amount of people come, and the response to it is so strong. And strong in a way that like, people are coming, that person who came, my peer who was like this is a queer event, he was like still down to come, but he was like, this is my my observation and this person was a cis-man, and a straight cis man, and so I was like yeah I think, I’m like. And anything that was like off of that, you're like this is queer like. Whatever, so I think the response to the open mic has just been like, the quality was so strong and it was so unique because we, at that time when we started, we're the only youth-centred space, that was offering professional live musicians to play your music, no one else was doing that, at that time and that like people were coming just from all over the place, so the response was just like. Both. There was peer members who were saying things like this is this is queer, this is different and then. Some, we do get some emails sometimes, like I got an email from like Sick Kids hospital like a month ago, and I was like, we see that you have you know reached into you know queer and trans youth, and wants to study them for a medical study we're doing and I was like. Not at all our, what we do. So, this is really weird and considering the like medicalization and like whatever has been done to queer and trans youth, like I'm like this is that's fucking weird. So like there's like a you can always tell when it's real and you can tell when it’s like fetishizing, but again, it hasn't even been a full year yet. So there's lots left to kind of learn for us of like who, how people see us, I guess, but I’ll leave it open as well for us to the team to come in, because that's a good question I’m not really sure. If that was the best answer like how people respond and the different kinds of people but yeah.
Alma: I think, for the most part, branding-wise like our audience likes the content, like there's like there's a reason why I, like the people that we follow, our engagement like I’m talking about like not just like likes and comments on what like, the shares and talking about the saves on an Instagram post, like I can, when I like check the analytics and stuff, like I can always see that and there's a reason why our branding works, because people are using it, like our followers, like are sharing our content. I would, but like nobody on Instagram has ever like questioned why our content is the way it is, I feel like most of the experiences have ever like have been oralistically from men like, ‘My masculinity is too fragile for this content’ like you know what I mean, not to say that, like all men have fragile masculinity but I’m just saying, it was mainly people with fragile masculinity who were like uh is this, for me, yes it's for you, you can use, you can come to a workshop with. You can go to a workshop with flowers on it and it's absolutely okay, but yeah.
Rayan: On a similar note, so that, like, I feel like the aesthetic of it all too because again like Lil Sis is about creating like safer spaces for folks, and so we do have our main audience, and I feel like, if anything, our aesthetic like works to. Keep it, not geeky but like, the people that respond to it are the people that we want in general. You know what I mean? So the people that respond to it, like the people who are like, “um I don't know if I can like it's. And then. Like it’s so, fam. Da da da da, is this for me?’ Like you know what, you’re probably homophobic and transphobic, x y z, we never wanted you anyways so. It like it works in that way to just keep em out. Like they don't, it wasn't, it wasn't for you, like you know what, it's the minimalism and the dark colours and whatever that speaks to you and that's for you, your community is, your community is everywhere actually. This is a small niche, unfortunately but it's a small niche, and so the people that it attracts are the people that we want, and I feel like that's also the beauty behind that aesthetic that we have is like. It does the outreach for us almost and it like filters through people for us. In terms of people that attend and people that we want as an audience.
Suzanna: I was actually just gonna say that. And just our branding everything, like the colours all of that stuff, it's different. Like it's it's completely different than I’ve seen other organizations or whatever do. And so I feel like the way that we're creating something that hasn't been out there. There's been people out there, like looking for something like this and they haven't been able to find it so that's why we do attract, like literally, a specific, kind of like exactly who we want to attract like you know, because they're looking for these resources that they weren’t able to find elsewhere, so it just kind of works itself out in that way.
Naima: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The WhyPAR podcast. I learned so much from Lil Sis. Some things I’m reflecting upon include on the power of creating spaces that are so desired and needed but not present for queer & racialized youth, include how community-based research means accessibility and liberation, and how Lil Sis challenges capitalism through its maximalist aesthetics and culture of care.