the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not reflect those of that b m c or the town of belmont b m c welcome comments call us as six one seven four eight four two four four three or email us at access media dot org hello everyone welcome to community conversations on the b staff people or a limpy doctors but we have an organization here in belmont that's the ideal example of thinking globally but working locally and we have with us today jackie neil with that organization v day belmont welcome in thanks for coming over jacki thank you jacki i've given you somewhat of a  with me coming to the social action committee of the you you church at first church by bringing an idea to the committee and asking if there was anyone there that wanted to work with me around violence  abuse against women and link up with the national organization of the day and there were quite a few women who were very interested and that was in two thousand and fourteen that we first began to gather and then it became really a town why organization and so even though we do use the first church for many of our activities it really is a town wide organization at this point there are people from all over town that are part of the planning what we're doing and men and women both for so many women it's primarily women but for some of there are to play that the organization allows us to perform and one of them is a memory monologue rance in a prayer and men are allowed to be part of that and the other is the vagina monologues and men are not allowed to be part of that so yes men are part of that memory monologue ranting and prayer now it's a local organization but as you said it's part of a started should i go back as far as that it started about twenty years ago nine hundred eighty eight you know but i believe even for who is an author an artist a playwright and an activist and it began with her her play the vagina monologues and she performed it solely and there was such an incredible response from  from that play she heard from thousands of women and she then decided to take that play across the country and from that she built an organization essentially and decided to use that as an activist movement to speak about violence against women and girls since then it has become i think it's huge number of countries i'm sorry i don't know that you know but it is it's truly an international organization and it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars i mean it's just you know it's everywhere and you know it's the month of february is considered the month and i think what do we say that we're over five thousand performances fifty eight hundred i believe and you know arlington v day cambridge yes yes there are different groups around the area there's a regional coordinator that we are linked with there is a regional blog an organization that we connect with there are lots of resources for us when we first decided to do the initial play i connected with someone that i knew in cambridge who had been performing and she introduced me to the director that she had worked with in cambridge and when you thought you know we would just get up on stage and say a few things or read a few of the monologues no this is a real production it's very professional and we said to and with the director in cambridge and we're like our mouths were open you know we just did not realize really the amount of work that it would take it was wonderful though attacking the silence and it states the truth is shocking according to the united nations one of every three women on the planet will be physically or sexually abused in her lifetime yes v day was born of the belief then intel this is addressed these violations named in taken up by the whole communities as an unacceptable desecration of human dignity the violence will continue our obviously you agree with it yes and that hearing that was one of the things that motivated me to come back to the social action committee at the u church and ask women to work with me i had gone to see the performance of the vagina monologues in cambridge and in between the monologues they gave statistics such as that and i sat in the audience and said i have to do something about this i can't sit i think i was stunned one of every three remain on the planet literally physically or sexually abused in her lifetime that's right and so that's what we're talking about it that's right and we're talking about a community event to try to strike the word try a community event to address the underlying social issues that lend themselves to this yes and to bring more awareness to this and to give a voice to those women who are who have been silent when we see first started to do the performances and i would be  someplace talking about it or you know putting up posters people would approach me and tell me about their own experiences people that i did not know and every one of our performances that's what happens at the end of the performance the cast i'll go out into you know the audience and people will come up and thank us for what we've done and then they tell us their stories because it's very healing for people to be able to do that we also have people that are there at our performances from the boston area rape crisis center in case somebody needs someone to speak to or follow up support  you know this is this is happening everywhere it's not you know it's right here in our own backyard and it is that that's one of the things that moved eve to allow local organizations to perform right her i don't know if you call it a play if she did the play ok to perform her play because she talked about how after  hundred women and excuse me for this she went around the country for two hundred women and asked them if your vagina could talk what would it say and that's how the monologues got written she then took what they said and wrote these monologues either exactly what a woman said or she compiled several of the stories together that were similar and then she performed it from that over with fallows and no more than thousands of women then wrote to her and said these are the things that i you know i need my vagina would say or wanted her to know that's when she started to take it around the country and more and more women then spoke to her about it and that's when it became an activist movement i'd like to go through some of the core principles of the broader organization and you and i haven't talked about this i have a time but i'd like to g your reaction one is i'm fascinated by this art there are four of these art has the power to transform thinking inspire people to act that that's what this is all about right that yes eve is you yes she is an artist she's an author a playwright an artist she's just opened a new play actually in new york speaks about her  own experience with cancer and how that his related to the work that she's doing in the congo she's started something called the city of joy and the women there and what they have gone through and what her cancer and her experience has been like the second core principle is i actually firmly believe this lasting social and cultural change is spread by ordinary people doing extraordinary things that you continue to do you consider yourself to be an ordinary person doing extraordinary things i do consider myself an ordinary person i don't know if i'm doing  but yes i am doing things that bring me great pleasure and what of course underlies the work of hearing damage in other local organizations like v day bell and local women what their communities need and can become unstoppable leaders yes i do believe that i do believe that and finally one must look at the intersection of race class and gender to understand violence against women what is  what is racing class have to do with violence against women i think it's everywhere i don't i think there's it's across every race and class there is no distinction i don't think we worked with members of the roxbury community and we produced both the vagina monologues we performed in august and we did memory monologue granting a prayer in  of our members said well let's go to let's go to hell house there and a place that would welcome us and they did and it was a wonderful wonderful experience and i feel that that was a very strong learning experience for us and for me particularly and also an opportunity to make some some real close connections with personal can i curse in all connections but also a community connection oh of course and belmont people came and to the roxbury performance and in fact this friday night there's another performance no one from the mont performing but many of us are going to the performance so there's a link now well it's interesting because v day is ve day activities  that's that's a range that's right if you perform either memory monologue granted a prayer or vagina monologues during the month you do not have to pay the rights for the play if you perform any other time of the year unless you get a waiver you have to pay for the right oh interesting now is ve day and the question here is shouldn't isn't intended to imply an answer but is v day associated with the the movement a billion rising that is part of the day oh it's part of yes it is part of the day it's a new initiative i think it started in two thousand  thirteen and it is on valentine's day that eve has called people to dance and people to come to the streets or gather together that's right and bringing people together and if you go on the website you will see people from all over the world you know dancing and pulling together it's just beautiful it's beautiful really is the case where men would say this is not for us and well so it's not only men are not only allowed to participate but it is important yes men to participate yes known writers and journalists essays on violence and abuse and she thought she would get just a few from people well she was overwhelmed with with i say this and many of them were from men she i mean she asked all kinds of people that she respected and knew and from that she put together a book she in a woman named molly doyle put together a book and then they did a play they picked you know they allow certain monologues to be part of the play so since many of the monologues are written by men yes men are invited to be part of the performances so it's appropriate for a man to be reading the the ones that are written by met and it seems self evident that in order to address this society all conditions that allow violence against women to continue right that's not a gender specific exact thing exactly and it's that is society but right she has also written something called the main prayer and in our last performance which we just did  february second and third at the you church we ended our our performance with the man's prayer we asked all the men to stand and we had a man from our cast from our former cast member monologue ran between men and women and the harassment in the issues and we felt this was a way to try to do some healing and it was really fun it was very  powerful men came up to me afterwards and thanked me for that well it's interesting because that that emphasizes the notion which i think even i get lost at thanksgiving time to feed the hungry in the last line of the song is this is all wonderful but what are we going to do next week for the hungry people and  how do you react to that notion from the perspective of violence against women because one doesn't want to i'm sort of preaching here i bu but yeah when doesn't want folks to say just it's it's a v day activity let's go talk about it let's go think about it let's let's be moved and be inspired and you want people in july or september exactly you know thinking about it i think you know i can't i don't have a real answer to you know off the top of my head to say to you about that i think it's something that we do need to continue to to remind people about and to be conscious of at all times and i think it's just part of the the fabric of what we do  when we're you know in any initiative that we send that message in some way and it will it differs in however you know whatever we're  doing so there's not one particular way to do it sure you know it's so i can't really give you a particular formula i think it's just how we carry ourselves yet how we and how we  you know shape and frame things and it's a given i think is the way we approach it and that you know it's unacceptable any other way yes well i would like to remind our listeners that today we're talking with jackie neal who is one of the organizers of the v day belmont organization and we're talking about how a community can respond to violence against women i would like to change directions for just a minute because there is a price organization new beginnings reentry services correct yes the v day organization requires that you have a beneficiary is selected for every performance that is children and has some connection to violence and abuse to preventing violence and abuse and there are many many organizations in the area that one can pick from we have become familiar with a new organization that is just being launched called new beginnings re entry services and we were successful in getting v day to knowledge it as a beneficiary so it is now on the official list and other video organizations can also selected as beneficiary it is an organization that will provide support services health support give them support in training job training help them with their education if they haven't finished their high school diploma or college or  wherever they are in their in their training it will be a comprehensive support system to help women become independent citizens so that has the  benefit to the the women themselves yes but there's an additional benefit there's going to be a question mark at the end yes sentence yeah there is an additional benefit by reducing receipt of is a yes and yes yes yes the re is a tremendous amount every citizen for women i have heard lots of different statistics as high as ninety seven percent as low as thirty percent but it is i its very large for women and there is no there are no comprehensive services for women and the woman in the founder of new beginnings is a woman named stacey borden and stacey spent thirty years in and out of incarceration and the last time she was incarcerated she was sitting in her cell she tells us and one day she said what am i doing here what you know i need to do something and so when she was released she went to came out and went to college got to be a then she got her master's degree and then she got her license in counseling and then she wrote this business plan for new beginnings reentry services and several of us have just said we are with you stacy and this is something that we want to see happen and stacy has basically said to us and i seem so right to me that the reason many women are in prison is that they have experienced trauma in the first place and that is what caused them to do whatever they did many of them experience violence and abuse and then when they're in prison it's traumatic and so and that trauma was never healed before they got to prison it was never healed when they were in prison so stacey sees her job and the job of new beginnings is to heal their trauma and then help them build their skills and resources so that they can be successful meet their greatness is really but i'm sure excuse we're actually out of time ok i guess it's a good time to be out of time it's been great fun today we get it here for for a lot on this and i appreciate you taking the time to come over here to the b m c studios we've been talking today with jackie neal jack is one of the organizers of the v day activities with the social action committee at the first church here  and you've been listening to community conversations podcast network i'd like to thank jackie again for coming over thank you i think i'd like to thank the listeners for tuning in i mean your community conversations host roger colton i will talk to you again in two weeks