Tani Ikeda and imMEDIAte Justice

In 2004, I sat down to write a college admissions essay about my experience growing up in the Los Angeles area as a mixed race Jewish Korean Russian American, but I had no words. I remember a deep frustration, and more than a little self-reproach, that I was unable to articulate what I felt was central to my being.

So when I met Tani Ikeda, Co-Founder and Executive Director of imMEDIAte Justice (IMJ) I was inspired by both her work as a filmmaker and her commitment to provide a safe space and framework for young women of color and gender queer youth to explore their truths. IMJ is a Los Angeles based nonprofit organization that teaches high school girls about sex ed and reproductive justice through hands-on filmmaking and storytelling. Founded in 2008 by Ikeda, along with Sylvia Raskin and Laney Rupp, the organization has run an interactive summer intensive program and now an afterschool program in the Los Angeles area.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?”

This is a line from a Muriel Rukeyser poem, posed as question by Ikeda in a storytelling workshop.¹ IMJ facilitates the journey for their participants to explore their own truths and provides them with the tools to articulate them. As mentioned in my own personal example, as a teenager I felt that I had something to say but I did not yet know where to start or how to say it.

Before you have influence, you have to find your own voice. Ikeda and IMJ have created a unique program that empowers young women and gender queer youth to do so, oftentimes transforming their own lives and impacting the lives of those around them.

This interview has been shortened and edited by the interviewer. All videos available on Tani Ikeda’s imMEDIAte Justice YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/taniappleseed/videos).

Alex Margolin. Can you introduce imMEDIAte Justice in your own words? How was the organization started?

Tani Ikeda. imMEDIAte Justice is a nonprofit that teaches high school girls filmmaking with a feminist lens. It was cofounded by myself and two friends of mine from college: Sylvia Raskin and Laney Rupp. The three of us already had a passion for organizing in women’s circles, reproductive justice and storytelling as a modality of healing. The idea of young people being able to tell their story through a medium like filmmaking to amplify their stories felt exciting to us.

We were all part of a collective in college called Women’s Creative Collective for Change. It would meet every Friday night, and initially it was women sharing their personal stories and doing art workshops. For many of us, this was a safe community of women. Some of us were just coming to terms with our sexuality, with instances of sexual assault or abuse throughout our childhood and teen years that always felt like very isolated experiences, that we weren’t able to share with anyone. The questions we were asking ourselves at Women’s Creative Collective were What would it be like if we had found each other when we are fifteen, sixteen? How would that have helped change things for us as individuals and as a movement?

imMEDIAte Justice organically came out of women coming together, eating, sharing, building. It came out of our deep, deep friendship for each other.

At the time Pepsi was doing an online voting contest, called the Pepsi Refresh Project. They were giving away grants to projects that were able to accrue the most votes via Twitter and Facebook. We got our friends and families members to vote for us and were able to get $15,000 to buy all of our own equipment, pay ourselves and our friends who came to be a part of the program a small stipend. That really financially launched our program.

AM. Speaking of that first summer, initially what kind of programming did imMEDIAte Justice run?

TI. Initially, the idea was to train high school-aged young and gender queer youth in film production to create comprehensive sex ed videos. The youth involved in our program thought the current sex ed videos at their high schools were from, like, from the ‘80s, superoutdated. Especially for young women, they represented periods and sex and all of these things as icky or kind of unfortunate. There was nothing empowering about being a young woman and being strong.

Video 1. Not Your Mama’s Sex Ed (https://youtu.be/YWSpq0GsiRg)

So, the youth wanted to address this. Another issue was for folks who were queer and part of the program. There was never any conversation about queer safe sex or queer sex ed. That was just not even a part of the equation. The young people created the sex ed video they wished existed in their high schools. This included talking about the gender spectrum; it included talking about female masturbation and desires, pleasures.

Video 2. Where Does My Desire Take Me (https://youtu.be/4jPegGiyrOk)

AM. How did you recruit these students? What was that process like?

TI. Sylvia, one of the cofounders, worked with the peer advocates from Planned Parenthood. These were high school students who were already the experts about sex ed among their peers. They would go to high schools and teach sex ed. They were the ideal youth to work with when creating our own sex ed videos, because they were bombarded everyday in the hallways with questions. We felt they were really on the pulse of knowing what peers wanted to know.

AM. What has changed and what has stayed the same since that first year?

TI. We are no longer a summer program. We are a year-round after-school program. This means that we are actually situated at the high school. It also means that the population that we work with are high school girls who are not necessarily trained in comprehensive sex ed and don’t have any previous interest in filmmaking or feminist ideology. They’re coming in with a general curiosity about storytelling. It has changed the type of content we have been developing because the youth we work with now have different talents, different expertise, different wisdoms they want to share.

Video 3. Catcall for What?! feat. Hollis (https://youtu.be/RjotIl4_Qqw)

AM. How did you choose to focus on film? Why story in particular?

TI. Story is one of our most valuable agents of change. I think story has the capacity to shift cultural conversation and shift status quo. Storytelling has evolved from people sitting around a fire and telling stories, to people creating plays that can be watched physically, to the digital age where stories exist as media online. That felt like our modern-day storytelling forum. Being a filmmaker myself, that was the expertise that I could bring to the table.

AM. You have been working for a few years now with young girls in making these projects. Are there particular ones that stand out?

TI. Espie Hernandez was a young woman who joined the program and initially said, “I don’t have anything to say, so I don’t know what I would make a film about.” The more we talked, we found there were a lot of things going on. She was preparing for her quinceañera, and she was also planning to come out of her family and try to bring her partner. She started to get really excited about creating a short documentary about her quinceañera and also defining what it meant for her to become a young Latina woman who is also queer and embraces her sexuality.

Video 4. Mariposa (https://youtu.be/c9gHIfXXbEY)

The film was accepted to the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York. She was interviewed by CNN, Univision, NBC. At the film festival in New York there were other queer young people who came up to her afterwards and just thought that the film she made was incredibly brave. To go from the point where she felt like she had nothing to say, nothing to share, to becoming an LGBTQ advocate and a filmmaker who is speaking on CNN and travelling the world, was a huge transformation. Her parents became incredibly proud that she was travelling with her film and was being interviewed on Univision. They told their friends about it and that it was about her coming out. All in all, the storytelling and filmmaking process is a huge process of transformation, and that is an arc that I see working every year with different young people.

AM. That is a powerful example and raises another question for me. On one side you have young girls who can participate in the program—they make their own films, they make their own stories—but on the other side these videos are also posted online. How do you hope these videos impact girls who may be watching them but not engaged in your program?

TI. As a teenage girl there are so many things that you want to express, and there is a limited way of doing that. You don’t necessarily have all the tools at your disposal to express those feelings, to experiment and explore. I know that some of our videos have expanded the way young women, who are watching the videos and commenting, are choosing to tell their stories. This isn’t a program that is out of reach. This is a free program that is mostly focused on young women of color and young queer youth of color. I think it feels tangible.

Video 5. What Would Happen If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life (https://youtu.be/iZK5y41PQYg)

AM. Let’s say you have a girl who has gone to the program and completed a film. What knowledge and skills do you want her to walk away with? Is there a next step that you envision participants take after imMEDIAte Justice?

TI. Some of the girls who participated in our program have gone on to study cinematography at universities. That’s great, but the end goal is not necessarily to turn all of these young women into filmmakers. The type of confidence they gain in their own storytelling is valuable and can be applied across the board. This past year, one of the seniors in the program was giving her final presentation, something that all of her teachers and the principal and family and other students attend. She integrated her own personal story about some of the really painful things that were road blocks for her in focusing in high school work, not as an excuse but just to really illustrate what the past four years had been and why it was such an accomplishment that she was graduating.

It gave me shivers. There was applause. The principal came up to me and said this was the most powerful presentation. After spending a year together and journaling and doing exercises around personal story, all those things came through in her presentation in such a powerful way. I think there are a lot of ways in which we can tap into our storytelling, as we carry ourselves through our lives.

AM. Now shifting a little bit from the medium to the topics that you are addressing. You’re talking about sex, you’re talking about gender, you’re talking about potentially sensitive topics. How do you negotiate relationships between participants and their parents?

TI. Every year it is really different because the stories of the young people who are participating are different and specific to their own personal journeys. But, I think it has opened up an additional channel of communication between myself and the young person, myself and their parents or caregivers. I remember a parent called me and told me her daughter just told her that she may be interested in girls. The daughter had been really nervous about telling her mother, so her mother just called me. I felt very, very lucky to be somebody that their mother reached out to about her own feelings about it and to think about how to talk to their daughter about it.

What I’ve hoped for is that the parents or the caregivers in these young women’s’ lives feel that now there is this secondary person who they can talk to, to work out conversations about gender and sexuality that may feel complicated. What does support look like? You don’t have to have all that information or even know how you feel about it. You can just start from being able to open up a space for listening.

One of the projects that we did was an opportunity for youth to invite their parents or their caregivers to sit on a couch with them and have discussions about gender and sexuality. That was incredible, not only for the youths who participated in front of the camera, but there are also many young people who were operating the camera or the boom mike who were absorbing the stories and the kind of brave and loving exchanges that were happening on the couch.

AM. It is a lot of work to take an idea and actually have it manifest as a program on the ground. How does imMEDIAte Justice do that? How do you put on these programs? Do you have staff, is it volunteers, how does that work?

TI. We tried doing it a couple different ways. There has been the summer program, which has been all volunteer-based along with grants to supplement for snacks, equipment, and supplies. There is the after-school program, which means that there is already a facility where we meet regularly. There are teachers that help out, and we have additional mentors who are interested in volunteering. And then of course we’re paid as an after-school program which covers the supplies and instructor.

We also operate as consultants. A non-profit like the organization Forward Together in Oakland may have an interest in adding a film component. We’ll do a six-week intensive filmmaking workshop that relates to conversations they are having around gender.

AM. How do you balance your work with imMEDIAte Justice with also working as a filmmaker?

TI. That’s the evergreen question. I’m glad that both imMEDIAte Justice and filmmaking are a little bit like freelance gigs where I have the flexibility. I can say, “Okay. In these months we are going to do intensive consulting workshops for imMEDIAte Justice with Planned Parenthood, and then the following month I’ll be in Japan shooting a documentary.” For the year-round program, we’ve had many generous volunteers who run workshops. The most important thing for me has been learning not to push things to the point of burning. On a personal level, I think about what I can do to continue to refill the well and make sure that I’m fueled and healthy, mentally, physically and spiritually.

AM. What is your biggest hope for imMEDIAte Justice going forward?

TI. Well, I think its two things. One, I really hope that the young people who are engaged in this work and who participate in imMEDIAte Justice really feel a strong sense of self and community. That this is an existing council of sisters that they can call upon whenever they need somebody. Maybe they go off the college, and they’re on the other side of the country, and they feel alone—they feel isolated—but just knowing that they have been safe and knowing how we see them as a young woman who is incredible and is a mover and shaker. Just knowing that that is who they are, they can call upon themselves. They can call upon their council of sisters and draw from that strength.

Organizationally for us, the hope is that the nonprofit will continue to grow and flourish. One of the conversations that I’ve had over the years is it has always been more important to me that I spend more time solving the problem that imMEDIAte Justice was created to help solve rather than spending a lot of energy making sure that imMEDIAte Justice becomes a living breathing thing that is sustainable. As long as women need a space to create and tell their stories, imMEDIAte Justice can exist as a community for that.

AM. What advice would you give to someone interested in starting a similar project or program?

TI. Well, I think it’s a little bit like falling in love. There has to be something inside of you that has such a deep love and a deep yearning to see something that doesn’t currently exist in the world exist. So if your deep yearning is meeting a need in the world that doesn’t exist, then that’s where it seems like things click into place and an organization becomes valuable, necessary, and important. For me that’s been my experience. I think people who create from that place, that sense of urgency, that sense of passion end up doing incredible work.