The following is a speech read by AWARE member and Associate Professor at NTU, Teo You Yenn, at the Volunteers Appreciation Party on 10 March 2018. 

Every time I walk into the AWARE Centre, I feel a sense of pride and joy. This is because I can remember the pre-renovated AWARE Centre—with its meeting room where the temperature was never right, where there was space but nowhere to sit except for a lumpy sofa, and with its slightly creepy toilets.

And it’s not just about the physical environment.I feel a sense of pride every day when I receive emails from AWARE staff about the news they are paying attention to and I see that it is not just news about women, but news about inequality and injustices that cut across different lines, and news about political structures and their limitations. I am full of admiration and gratitude when I see AWARE’s Facebook posts—where there is disciplined, principled, thoughtful critique; critiques that are backed up by evidence, polite but firm, nuanced but hard-hitting. And I am so grateful when I interact withAWARE’s staff and volunteers, and I see people debating important issues, arguing, planning, and doing.

I am very lucky to have witnessed AWARE’s transformation over the past 8 years, after the AWARE saga. When I first became a member and volunteer in the early 2000s, AWARE was formed by an amazing group of people. When I first joined the board in 2010, it was made up of smart and passionate women. But it was not this strong, systematic, impactful organization that is getting stuff done on an everyday basis that it is today.

The transformation was not easy. Board members during that time, and particularly Winifred Loh, the President during those years, will know that it was painful—full of conflict, so much confusion, some hurt feelings, quite a number of missteps, backtracking, starts, stops and restarts.

Looking at where AWARE is today, there are three things I learnt: first, diversity really matters. This is diversity in terms of age, of disciplinary training and occupational origins, ethnicity, sexual orientation, family form, etc. What does diversity do? Diversity forces people to finish their sentences in order to be understood by others who don’t share their frameworks and vocabularies, and it thus surfaces all kinds of hidden biases and presumptions. But diversity in representation alone will not do the job. It is also about creating spaces where diverse people can quarrel. Every time I come to an AWARE meeting, I am amazed by the quality of conversations I have here. At AWARE, people are not afraid to quarrel. Quarreling cordially, without getting personal, is such a valuable trait that AWARE has, and which I hope will continue to be in its organizational culture going forward. This community we have built, where we can quarrel safely and productively, is so incredibly rare and so incredibly precious.

The second thing I have learnt is this: showing up matters. Showing up day after day, month after month, year after year. The fight for equality and justice is a long fight that none of us will see the end of. What AWARE has is people who are patient, who are not easily discouraged, who go to bed angry and then show up again the next day to fight another day. I know this is a volunteer party, but I want to point out that AWARE has an amazing staff that is showing up, doing the hard work that needs to be done, day after day after day. One of the big tensions during the transformation after the AWARE saga was around whether AWARE would still be AWARE if it were staff-run rather than volunteer-run. I think we can now say that this AWARE, the AWARE that has a strong staff team doing the everyday work, it is stronger. But its continued strength probably depends on staying in that sweet spot, that place of tension where it is professional but not too respectable. As long as we have gender inequality, we should try to stay a little unruly, a little disrespectable.

Finally, related to the point about showing up, the biggest thing I have learnt from watching the transformation of AWARE is that being a feminist is about getting shit done. It is not just about feminist belief, it is not just about knowing how to talk about feminist theory, it is very much about doing the work. Theoretical knowledge and understanding and reflection are very important, and I hope AWARE continues to be the kind of organization that thinks big and thinks far and reflects a lot. But showing up, and getting things done, and doing things in ways that embraces imperfections and compromises, this is what feminist action is about. That sweet spot between theory and practice, reflection and action—I think this is one of AWARE’s greatest strengths.

So this volunteer appreciation day, let’s celebrate how awesome AWARE’s volunteers are, and then tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, let’s show up, continue quarreling, and let’s do the work because, what are feminists? Feminists are people who get shit done.