UPDATE: The 25th Anniversary V-Day event was originally planned as an outdoor event, but it has been moved indoors to the City Council Chambers/Public Meeting Room.
The City of West Hollywood will commemorate the 25th anniversary of V-Day with an activist and survivor led gathering of special guest speakers. Local leaders, activists, survivors, artists and changemakers will unite in solidarity on February 26, 2023, from 2pm-4pm at West Hollywood Council Chambers located at 625 N. San Vicente Blvd . This is a call to action to demand freedom from gender-based violence.
V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against ALL women (cisgender, transgender, and those who hold fluid identities that are subject to gender-based violence), girls and the planet. The event will also mark the 10th Anniversary of V-Day’s One Billion Rising Campaign, a call to action based on the staggering statistic that 1 in 3 women on the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime.
V-Day believes that when art and activism come together, they have the power to transform systems and change culture. Founded by V (formerly Eve Ensler), activist and author of the The Vagina Monologues, V-Day has inspired women all over the world and raised collective consciousness about how violence and gender intersect. V-Day is a movement and an example of how the power of art can be used as a liberating tool for transformational holistic education and social justice.
The Vagina Monologues and other works curated by V-Day have been performed across the world by local activists, survivors and artists, raising over $120 million dollars for grassroots anti-violence groups, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and safe houses, shattering taboos and changing the way activists make change in their communities.
The program will feature the launch of a Silent Witness Display, based upon the Silent Witness Initiative, it is a community-based display of silhouettes symbolizing people killed by domestic violence and intimate partner violence. Silent Witness Silhouettes and anti-violence messaging will be displayed at various locations in West Hollywood thru the month of March.
V-Day supports and launched the City of Joy, a revolutionary center for women survivors of gender violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has graduated over 1472 women leaders. V-World Farm, also in Congo, is a sustainable and collective farm that acts as living classroom for the students at the City of Joy and the surrounding community.
Activists look at the intersection of class, race, gender, environmental destruction, imperialism, militarism, patriarchy, poverty, and war, as women face abuse and exploitation across layers of systematic and societal oppression, with the most marginalized and excluded often facing increased levels of violence.
In 2013, V-Day gave birth to One Billion Rising – the largest mass action to demand an end to violence against women in history. V-Day and One Billion Rising are a crucial part of the global fight to stop gender-based violence through attacking the silence — public and private — that allows violence against women to continue.
With ingenuity and determination, V-Day activists around the world are tirelessly working to end harassment, rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and sex slavery.
TO LEARN MORE:
www.vday.org
www.silentwitness.net
www.onebillionrising.org
