A fundraiser, which will help provide insight into the plight of single women in Nepal, will be held Thursday evening at the Beatty house to raise funds for families in that earthquake torn country.
The May 14 fundraiser will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Dessert and coffee will be served and a film screening of amazing women and youth from Canada and Nepal who have shared their stories of courage in the face of adversity will be shown.
The fundraiser is being sponsored by Rimbey Community Wellness and Crossing Community Art Project.
Edith Regier, the founder and artistic director of Crossing Community Art Project, a non-profit organization founded in 2002, said single mothers in Nepal are among the most marginal population in that country and are desperately in need of help.
Crossing Communities Art Project is an organization that engages in transdisciplinary collaborations with remotely located women and youth and stages audience interactive conversations locally and internationally.
“We use what’s called transmedia story telling which is collaboratively telling stories through a collection of visual media such as videos, drawings, performance, photography and dance,” she said.
The soft-spoken founder of the art project who recently moved to the Buck Lake area is looking forward to the evening and an opportunity to share her insight into the lives of families in need in Nepal.
Her project, which began in the mid-90s in a Manitoba prison for women as the Portage Art Project has a wonderful history of creating a better understanding and providing the potential for social transformation between women of diverse backgrounds.
At its inception, the project involved a series of visual workshops and included Passing Pictures with Prisoners, an ex- change of letters and pictures between imprisoned women and their artist collaborators.
The art project expanded in 2007 and videos of participants from Canada describing personal histories of self-harm were exchanged with Nepali women and youth who then made their own videos which were exchanged.
The process of making lookingInspeakingout.com took place over more than four years in Thailand, Nepal and Canada.
The participatory video Empty, was collectively created in CCAPs Winnipeg studio. In February, 2009 several Crossing Communities artists including Regier traveled to Nepal, staying in a rural hotel for a month.
A widow from Nepal, after seeing the videos brought from Canada, shared stories of her life, telling how her husband had isolated and abused her and how she was forced to wear a white sari when he died.
Her video, White To Red was screened in the lookinginspeakingout.com forum event in Kathmandu.
Developing a sense of self-worth is inextricably linked to issues around inclusion in society and community, Regier said.
“Awareness of self and community is the first step towards happiness.”