Mindful community organizing

About Insan Larasati
Insan Larasati (they/them) is a community organizer, DJ, designer and inclusivity officer. Their research-driven and collaborative centered practice is based around community organizing and queer diasporic identities and influenced by their life as a queer person of colour, their history as a child of immigrants and political activists, and their experience working in EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity) at the WDKA Office for Inclusivity.

About Nusaqueer Diaspora
Nusaqueer Diaspora, or Indo*queer Diaspora is an open-structured collective for the queer diasporic community of the Southeast Asian Archipelago (with a focus on Indonesia), bringing together the diverse diasporic queer community of the SEAA in the Netherlands with community events that have previously involved club nights, workshops, art performances, movie nights, discussions, and food.

Mindful community organizing
‘Mindful community organizing’ aims to teach how to organise with and for marginalised communities in a critical, sensitive and intentional way. It’s aimed at community organizers, curators and anyone wishing to take up organizing for (marginalised) communities.

The project is an accumulation of gained knowledge in the 6 years I’ve been a community organiser, especially during my ongoing project ‘Nusaqueer Diaspora‘ or Indo*queer Diaspora’; which aims to build an Indonesian queer community in the Netherlands.

Think. Ask. Listen. Do.
Situate and contextualise the work you do. Make it public; reach out to your community. Have an alert, intentional and open attitude. Make things happen. Not necessary in this order.

These are the pillars that make up my method of mindful community organising. In the last 6 months I’ve experimented with different ways of gathering, connecting and collaborating by making online community channels on Whatsapp and Discord and by creating a series of collaborative community nongkrongs.

Analysing the way I work resulted in a series of mappings of systems I build when I organise, which I have displayed on a poster as one part of my installation. Another part of my installation is the exercise for ‘Collaborating mindfully’, an exercise that needs to be done by 2 people and aims to untangle different identities and the different privileges that come with that, and how this impacts a collaboration. The exercise is based on experiments I’ve done with other community organisers. ‘The reading corner’, features my research document ‘Identifying the queer Indonesian diasporic community’, as well as books about community organising and collaboration borrowed from other community organisers.