South Queens Women's March

MISSION: Inspired by global and national women’s rights movements, the South Queens Women’s March amplifies the voices of South Queens’ diverse women. We are an all-volunteer multi-generational, intersectional platform working to foster women’s empowerment through dismantling norms, practices, and institutions that support patriarchy and gender injustice. We are taking our sisterhood to the streets to unify women and gender non-conforming individuals in our community and connect them to the tools and resources necessary to empower their own lives and thrive. 

VISION: We want to create a world free of violence, injustice, and oppression; a world where all people are on equitable footing, in the home, the workplace, in houses of worship, and in our larger community spaces.

OUR STORY: In 2017, Rajwantie Baldeo died in a violent attack, carried out by her husband, on a street near Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill. That’s when leaders said “Never again.” Yet NYC’s first murder in 2018 was that of Stacy Singh, a young mother also killed at the hands of her husband, also in Richmond Hill. And in November 2019, New York was again rattled when 27-year-old Donna (Rehanna) Dojoy was fatally stabbed by her husband in Ozone Park. These tragedies are just a few of many in the last several years that point to one of the deadliest phases of gender-based violence in New York’s South Queens community. Like clockwork after every murder, vigils, panels and town halls are organized to remember the lives of fallen sisters. Yet those who attend the events are, by and large, local community advocates, and not primarily those in need of resources and support. Moreover, a surveying of community members via street outreach conducted by the current leaders of South Queens Women’s March (SQWM) demonstrated that South Queens residents, primarily immigrants, are conditioned to experiencing or perpetrating abuse in the home, the violence is wholly normalized. Many of us questioned: How can we intervene in gender-based violence? How do we get to the root cause? How do we work to end the cycle? SQWM Founder Aminta Kilawan-Narine, supported by founding board members of SQWM, identified that one solution goes even beyond bringing resources to the community: building a movement of the masses to shift culture. We wanted to provide a platform for women, girls and gender non-conforming people to celebrate who they are; to build sisterhood. Few such platforms exist for women, many who are working class and struggling to make ends meet. While called to action due to the murders of the aforementioned fallen sisters, SQWM was thus created to be a proactive mechanism for women in our community to amplify their voices, and foster sisterhood. Believing that “our voice is our power,” we aimed to build conversations and curate spaces that can help reduce the stigma and victim blaming dialogue around gender-based violence. We also want to empower women by celebrating their contributions to the fabric of our neighborhoods and to connect women to resources in a discreet manner – not expecting them to come to us, but instead, to go to them. While we were unable to hold a physical march due to the pandemic, our work throughout our existence fulelled the dream we had when we were birthed: to uplift the voices of women from all South Queens' neighborhoods, including the large Indo-Caribbean, Punjabi, Bangladeshi, Latinx and African American populations.