2023 Asian Diaspora Jam
“This jam is necessary. It made home and family for all of us “weird Asians” who may not have felt home in our own families or communities. I felt called to be here. Your invitation answered a need deep inside me, to be deeply immersed in the lives and stories of a diverse group of API community. This space has been precious.” ~ MT, 37, Japanese and Irish American woman
Friends, Family, Community and Collaborators!
We invite you to join us in the 3rd Asian Diaspora Jam, which brings together 25-30 changemakers from the diverse Asian community landscape. Together, we create a supportive space to explore our connection to ancestry, our roles in and relationships to social justice movements, and what it takes to heal our relationships with one another as peoples of Asian descent who have some intersection with North America.
THIS JAM IS FOR YOU BECAUSE…
This Jam is for anyone who has considered their place in North America as a person of Asian descent. We welcome anyone who has grappled with, proudly embraced, or questioned an Asian identity.
This Jam will explore questions such as…
- What’s alive for me with my Asian American / Asian Diasporic identity?
- How do I relate to the paradox, complexity, and liberatory possibility of being Asian in North America?
- How am I healing with and from the complexities of family and community in my life? How am I navigating the many life experiences I have had?
- What is the difference between appropriation and honoring Asian Diaspora ancestral wisdom and practices and how do I participate or distance myself from them?
- How can our connections form the foundation for powerful, collective movement toward healing and transformative justice?
- How does my Asian identity relate to my contributions in the world?
Have you grappled with these or other questions? If so, you’re not alone!
What are your questions? Bring them to the JAM.
We invite you to be with us. Join us at the Asian Diaspora Jam, where we will co-create a space of support, mystery, and revelation.
28 participants of the 2018 Asian Pacific Islander Community Jam gather outside on the grass. There are 3 rows of people, some standing, some kneeling, all smiling, and many with their arms around each other.
WHAT IS A JAM?
For over 23 years, more than 180+ YES! Jams have happened all over the world, on six continents. Modeled in the spirit of a musicians’ jam, they are co-created spaces of visionaries and changemakers, bringing together many voices, stories, energies, purposes, skills and inspirations to become something more than the sum of our parts.
Jams work on three levels of change & transformation:
- The Internal. A place for each one of us to explore our own journeys and histories, to heal our individual wounds and to come into our most authentic selves so that we can better fulfill our unique purpose.
- The Interpersonal. We are harmed in relationships, so we must heal in relationships. We come together to share our collective journeys, our cultures, our ways of grieving and our ways of healing, our histories of struggle and our stories of resilience.
- The Systemic. Our individual identities and our collective stories are molded in a larger context. By becoming clearer about how these systems influence our lives, we can have a larger impact in the broader world around us.
A NOTE ON THE USE OF Asian Diaspora
We are using the broad term Asian Diaspora as a complex identity and organizing framework. Our intention to co-create a welcoming and meaningful space is combined with our intention to include as many as possible who want to be here. However, we recognize that identity can have deep personal, interpersonal, and systemic significance and it is very easy to flatten and essentialize the very complex, unresolved, and conflicting histories within our communities.
With Asian Diaspora, we welcome (and are not limited to) anyone who identifies as East / South / Southeast / West / Central Asian; Filipinx; indigenous to these areas; stateless; and/or part of a diasporic community with multiple migrations. We welcome adoptees, refugees, people with mixed and multiracial ancestries, and individuals with any or no immigration status in North America. We have deliberately chosen to make this an Asian Diaspora Jam, rather than an Asian Pacific Islander Jam as it was named in the past. We are taking the lead from Pacific Islander (also known as Pasifika) community leaders, who want PI to be disaggregated from Asian Americans in order to speak truth to the reality of the Pacific Islander experience. For more information on this important distinction, please check this out.
We, too, know the heartbreak of feeling invisible in spaces where our hearts wanted so much to be seen. So we are sincere about imagining this space as one in which both ease and challenges regarding “Asian Diaspora” identity can be explored and engaged with gentleness and curiosity, if those questions are present for you. And we are still exploring whether “Asian Diaspora” is the right framing for this Jam. So we hope you will join us with wonder and openness to consider what this Jam could be in the future!
I STILL DON’T GET IT. WHAT ARE WE GONNA BE DOING?
A Jam is a co-creative container. It’s going to be built and shaped by all of us with the support of a facilitant team (facilitators who are also participants). A Jam is not a conference, it is not a training, and it is not a typical gathering.
Our community will not have a rigid agenda. Instead, the team of organizers and facilitators will draw from all of your applications and from what’s alive in them, put all of it in a big pot, stir them around and come up with a draft flow of experiential activities and see what comes out! None of us come with all of the answers. Instead, we will co-create the space together — using circles, conversations, spiritual practice, artistic expression, silence, and play — to explore our questions, bring more of our whole selves, and live into our answers, and new questions (!), using the depth and power of the experiences and knowledge in the room and beyond.
“No words can express how much gratitude and love I feel. This experience happened at the right time for me and brought me out of a dark place I felt like I couldn’t get out of. Everything about this experience was spot on. We dug deep and this was just what I needed.” — SC, Cambodian woman, 20 years old
DATES, LOCATION, TIMING & COSTS
The Jam will begin at 2PM Pacific Time on Sunday, April 16th, and end with clean-up on Friday, April 21st wrapping up before noon. There will be a lot of asynchronous opportunities to connect through one-on-ones, participant-led open optional sessions, and fun community games that we will play together throughout the week. We recommend leaving as much space and time as possible this week to fully sync in and fully JAM! We promise, the more space and time you give yourself this week, the more you will bring to and receive from the Jam.
The Asian Diaspora Jam will take place at the Ben Lomond Quaker Center, near Santa Cruz, CA. Participants will share rooms in doubles and triples
Tuition for the Jam is offered on a sliding scale of $300-$1200, with the at-cost price being $950. Broken down, $475 covers food, lodging and supplies, and $475 covers honoraria for the organizers and facilitants. We invite you to give what you can, and to give generously. Any amount above the at-cost amount of $950 helps us provide scholarships to support the broad spectrum of participation on which this event thrives (and is tax-deductible).
We never want money to be a barrier in participating: We will do everything we can to make it work for you to attend. Partial scholarships are available on a limited and first-come, first-serve basis. For those who are able, payment above the at-cost tuition helps us provide scholarships to support the broad spectrum of participation on which this event thrives. We are also happy to work with you on a payment plan.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to write to us at asiandiasporajam[at]gmail.com.
I’M IN! WHAT’S NEXT?
APPLY TODAY!
WHO IS PUTTING THIS JAM ON?
We can’t wait to Jam with you!
Amadeo, BK, Kazu, LiZhen, Minna, and Shilpa
Organizer
LiZhen Wang is an astrologer, facilitator, and food-grower based in Huchiun (Oakland) and Taipei. They have been a counseling astrologer since 2014, and they recently started the Astrology for Social Movements project to bring astrology into conversation with abolition. In addition to research and 1-1 counseling, LiZhen also teaches a 3-month program called ON PURPOSE: An Astrological Discovery of What You’re Here For. It is their life’s delight to listen to the planets — Earth, Moon, and beyond — and to help others tune in as well.
Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Ahimsa Collective and the Fierce Vulnerability Network and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm. He works with incarcerated people, youth, and activists from around the country. He has over 20 years of experience in nonviolence and social change work, and has been an active trainer since 2000. He resides in Lisjan Ohlone land, a.k.a Oakland, CA.
Karen B.K. Chan (she/they) is a sex and emotional literacy educator in Toronto, Canada. She is an immigrant from Hong Kong, an only child, and a recovering overworker. BK came out as queer at 15, as an aspiring radical at 23, and as pretty happily basic at 42. In the last few years, she shifted personal priorities from being “good” to being warm, from being right to being more forgiving, and the Jam has played a big part in both. BK works full-time speaking and training, and all the time on taking better care of herself. She is also bringing up a couple of jammy babies with her jam love.
Hyoyoung Minna Kim has recently digested herself to succumb to the goopiness of the chrysalis phase after having transitioned out of eleven years of teaching in elementary public schools. She is slowly regenerating on native land of the Tulalip and Snohomish people, colonially known as Everett, Washington. Minna is currently nurturing her curiosities around storytelling via crafting children’s books and consultation via facilitating spaces that center our beautifully messy humanity. She is a big believer of radical & loving honesty, body-wisdom, community-driven initiatives, and children’s literature. Finally, nature is her favorite teacher and playmate in the whole wide universe.
Amadeo Cruz Guiao is an organizational healer/consultant, facilitator, and spiritual teacher. Born in Brooklyn and raised mostly in Coast Salish/Duwamish territories colonially known as Seattle, Amadeo is a queer, gender nonbinary, decolonizing child of Filipinx immigrants. Their spiritual path guides everything they do, and they have been so blessed to learn from their own mystical Filipinx traditions, and have also studied with and been trained by esteemed teachers from the Brazilian Amazon and Coast Salish territories. They are deeply passionate about their work supporting community-led organizations and visionary leaders from the most resilient and marginalized communities to effect transformative social change. Coming from a healing justice lens, they provide culturally appropriate organizational development strategies in contexts as vastly different as remote upland indigenous communities in war-stricken Mindanao, Philippines, to rural Native reservations in the Pacific Northwest, to their queer and trans communities of color in progressive Seattle.
Shilpa Jain is currently rooting herself in Oakland/Berkeley, CA. For 11+ years, she served as the Executive Director of YES!, working with social changemakers at the meeting point of internal, interpersonal and systemic change, and aiming to co-create thriving, just and balanced ways of life for all. Prior to taking on this role, Shilpa spent two years as the Education and Outreach Coordinator of Other Worlds and ten years as a learning activist with Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, based in Udaipur, India, where she served as coordinator of the Swapathgami (Walkouts-Walkons) Network. She has facilitated dozens of transformative leadership gatherings with hundreds of young leaders from over 50 countries. She is passionate about dance and music, organic and natural farming, upcycling and zero waste living, asking appreciative questions and being in community. A focus on healing, forgiveness, compassion, love and wholeness permeates all of her work and life.
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