“Building Power: Hope Is a Verb”
with Zrinka Bralo
Featuring Zinka Bralo, the Chief Executive Officer for Migrants Organise, London. A refugee, a journalist who worked with leading war correspondents during the siege of Sarajevo in the 90s, founder of ‘Women on the Move Awards’, and winner of the 2011 Voices of Courage Award by the Women’s Refugee Commission in New York. As the commissioner of the Independent Asylum Commission, Zrinka successfully negotiated the end of immigration detention of children in the UK in 2010.
In this episode, we talk about Zrinka’s innovative model of combining organizing and campaigning for systemic change with community-based, grassroots access to justice in form of support for people affected by the U.K.’s hostile environment immigration policy.
“There is a lot of talk of lived experience. I absolutely hate that expression.”
“Tell me why”
“So, first of all, everybody has got lived experience, whoever is alive has lived experience…but there is also something about reducing people just to that experience, which sort of takes away their agency. They’re framed in a way where they just testify about the oppression that they’re experiencing. And that’s a very reductionist approach. And then they’re sort of trotted around, they share their story, they retraumatize themselves, it’s very exploitative. Even if you prepare people for that, it’s still very exploitative. We tend to say: I don’t want you just to speak from your experience, I want you to speak from the movement. So when you’re wrapping up, what is your one message that you want people to do? What is the legitimacy for the action you’re calling for? And that needs to come from us together, from the community, from the movement.
