Taraki have been awarded a grant to co-develop the Cha in the City peer support spaces for Punjabi men. This blog is part of a series where our project team reflects on the process of this project, key learnings, and important milestones.
Last week we started a new cycle in our men's peer support facilitation training program. Since August 2022, we expect to have 60+ men graduate from our program. I know I sound like a broken record, but as someone who's been here since the start, it is something I never imagined for our work—not from a place of pessimism, rather from a place of deep imposter syndrome. In the past 2 cycles, we have taken our curriculum to international shores in Canada and Australia, while expanding the program to be inclusive of South Asian men. The work continues, beautifully.
As the program has developed, so have I. At its base, this work has been embedded into my life and growth over the past 4 years. This is why I wanted to focus, again, on the importance of faith and culture in our work, especially as we expand the program internationally and to wider South Asian communities.
Historically, in the mainstream view of mental health, faith has been divorced from the support provided to people, especially people of color. While that speaks to the lack of cultural competency in mainstream support, for us, faith is a central part of our work. It is embedded into how we work and provide peer support.
More importantly, faith is a central pillar that serves to function as a connective gel to bind people from all walks of faith in our spaces, whether it be Islam, Hinduism or Sikhism. Rather than serving as a barrier, it connects people together. A great example of this is my own experience—I am from a Muslim family with a base in Sufism who delivers peer support education to a broadly Sikh demographic in our program. Such a space only speaks to the connective ties between such communities and how faith, for us, provides safe spaces to connect.
Culture has an equal impact and stands as one of our central pillars. Culture, for many, can be a hard concept to pin down. In our work, culture speaks specifically to the shared parts of us that allow us to gel with one another.
This includes our experiences as people of colour growing up in various cities across the UK, sharing lived experiences as populations that have migrated. Our cultural connections manifest in shared understanding of family dynamics, navigating identity between countries of origin and the UK, and collective experiences of building community resilience.
Combining both faith and culture is a process that we actively refine as we work with new cohorts. However, none of that takes away from the fact that we recognise how important it is to blend both as part of culturally competent peer support services to historically under-served communities.
As we look towards more growth for the program, I am really excited to continue using both of these pillars as core components in our work. We plan to develop more culturally-specific resources, expand our facilitator training to include deeper understanding of diverse faith practices, and create frameworks that other organisations can adapt for their communities. Through these efforts, our program will continue to serve as a vehicle for community-based collective care.
