This is the second year of support for Project Hajra, a Queens-based grassroots mobilization of Muslim women organizing in the face of multiple forms of domestic, community, and state-sponsored violence. Their main project is the Community Safety Initiative, based on peer organizing meetings that foster trust, safety through mutual support, and a deepening understanding of how interpersonal violence and gender injustice are linked to the marginal status of Muslim communities in the wider society.

Last year’s grant from the Martín-Baró Fund provided travel reimbursements, meeting supplies and refreshments, child-care support, and small stipends for 206 peer organizing meetings. As a result of their success, membership in Hajra increased from approximately 150 in 2014 to 200 in 2015, with a growing awareness among members and volunteers of their common struggles and capacity to support one another.

The group reports: “A woman came to our CSI meeting for her own needs around gender justice, but then recognized that her economic struggles were similar to those of many women in the community. She is now taking the lead to form a female-led giving circle popular in South and Central Asian communities, a small way to gain some economic dignity.” Project Hajra also launched Pressured Diamonds: Chai and Conversations, a youth-named and -led safe space to discuss and organize around gender rights, LGBT issues, and state-sponsored violence.

Funding for 2016 will be used to expand Community Safety Initiative meetings, deepen discussion of the roots of gender, economic, and state violence, and sponsor several community-wide events. Project Hajra also intends to build on their internal successes by establishing ties to other Queens-based and national organizations working on the intersection of family and state violence.