Queens Women's Safety Festival

As you may or may not know, October is Domestic Violence Awareness month. This year on Saturday, Oct 1st at 3pm in Astoria Park (Ditmas Blvd side), a group of women from Queens are kicking off the inaugural Queens Women’s Safety Festival.

You can find out more about the event and register HERE.

Executive Director and Founder of Malikah, Rana Abdelhamid

As community organizer, activist, former City Council candidate Rana Abdelhamid describes the event:

This festival is part of our effort to envision a model for community safety that is rooted in strong relationships, communal well being and joy. As the Founder / ED of Malikah – an Astoria based non-profit committed to building safety and power for our communities – this year we’re also focused on securing our first physical space which will serve as a wraparound service and training center for women and girls.

If you are unable to attend, you should check out Malikah anyway. It has been around for over 10 years and boasts both a global reach and vibrant local organizing, all centered around empowering women. Rana herself ran for City Council in the primary in Queens this past cycle, until her district was redrawn, breaking up the community base that she was depending on. It’s a disorienting thing to have your familiar ground suddenly disappear from under your feet.

Nevertheless, Rana continues to build and continues to organize, and this promises to be an exciting and meaningful event, the first of many.

Since we’re discussing names and naming, it’s worthwhile reading Malikah’s manifesto, where they describe the meaning of the word “Malikah” as follows:

What does Malikah mean?

The word Malikah captures women’s power in seven distinct global language traditions. Our logo is an image of an inverse crown, indicating our efforts to disrupt entrenched, stereotypical notions of who represents and has access to power. Malikah women believe that every single woman should have full power over her body, choices, socio-political and cultural institutions and economic agency.