Notable Stories
Here I have included two notable stories from my time as Feminist Forum facilitator. This page may be updated with new stories as time goes on!
The Oversharer
We never had too many problems with members—we sometimes had people who would talk too much without leaving room for others to share ideas, and we sometimes had people who would make unwarranted comments. But no person shared too many ideas or made unwarranted comments more than a particular member we had in the past. Every meeting everyone thought please stop talking or not another irrelevant comment.It detracted from the discussion as a whole every. single. time. I believe this person needed a space to grow and mature, but I think a forum based on social justice was not the ideal place for this growth given the importance of hearing everyone’sopinions (when they are willing to share of course) in a forum. It made other participants resentful. We tried to deal with it in the moment by bringing in the supervisor of student forums, but it didn’t help much. We had to continue to deal with it the best we could. It sure was a learning experience for us.
The Tension
In a forum based on social justice, people tend to have different ideas and ways to delegate tasks. It is especially hard to work together at points when each person is incredibly passionate about the cause of the forum, because this passion gets in the way of collaboration. Over my three semesters as a forum facilitator, it has been me and two other facilitators leading Feminist Forum. We all felt immense pressure to uphold the social justice movement in the bubble of the RC with the atrocities of the Trump Administration. With this, and with fault on everyone’s part including mine, we forgot to check in about our personal lives. This led to tension between us that needed to be resolved. We let the tension get to be too much, instead of dealing with it in the moment, which ripped the forum apart and made us have to make serious changes. Although we came out on the other side, it would have been better if it never happened in the first place. So, for future facilitators, I urge you to continue to care about co-facilitators and members of the forum outside of the forum, and remember we are all humans already under a great deal of pressure as students, and we also deal with other pressures as well in our personal lives.
