Course Description:
Community Advocacy Project is a reflective and open space that centers on why we advocate, how to advocate for ourselves and how to advocate for a community with a power, privilege, oppression and intersectionality lens. We will look at the different ways power is experienced in society and how power ebbs and flows situationally and across lifespans. This will allow us to learn more about our own power and how our power is practiced in relation to the power of others.
We will have deep and reflective discussions and activities about our experiences in relationship to social class, ability, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other systems of privilege and oppression. This course seeks to deepen our understanding of the ways identities are deeply intersectional and can both oppress us and give us privilege that oppresses others. In understanding oppression on individual and systematic levels, we will explore why we need to advocate for oppressed and vulnerable identities and how to advocate. We will study why intersectionality is the key for being an advocate and being an ally.
We will study contemporary social issues such as mass incarceration, police brutality and violence against women of color, to learn the strategies, tactics and activities of community organizing. In analyzing these issues through an anti-oppressive lens, we will deepen our understanding of social justice movements and how communities expand and strengthen their power through organizing. We will also have guest speaker(s) who play crucial roles in social justice community organizing movements to present and share their experience with community organizing.

Objectives:
1. We will explore how power & inequities are produced, reproduced, and maintained on individual and systematic level.
2. We will learn about the power of our identities and also examine our implicit biases that contribute to isms in the society.
3. We will explore the concepts and definitions of oppression, identity, power, privilege, prejudice, ally and social justice.
4. We will learn what it means to be an advocate and how to be an advocate to empower ourselves and others.
5. We will analyze contemporary social issues with the knowledge we gained in the classroom and learn strategies of community organizing.

Facilitator bio:
Yehui Zhao (she/her) is a social justice activist, facilitator and artist who's passionate about community organizing and self-empowering for grassroots with a power, privilege, oppression and intersectionality lens. She runs Community Advocacy Series in Lower East Side, a workshop that serves as a means for families to learn the tools and history of advocacy in the community, their rights, and strategies for organizing.

Yehui is also a filmmaker who advocates through art and storytelling of invisible identities caused by systematic oppression. She holds a Master in Social Work from Columbia University and has been practicing activism in various communities across New York City.