Women creatives, entrepreneurs and innovators play a vital role in driving innovation and supporting social cohesion, yet continue to face many structural barriers.
Since 2015, Designing Entangled Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific (DESIAP) has been listening to women’s stories about the positive contributions they make to their communities. Alongside stories of success and resilience, we hear about the challenges women face in their personal and professional lives, such as the limited opportunities for personal and professional development that are available to them.
In response, DESIAP and our partners piloted a four-month mentoring programme in 2021. The programme offered transcultural peer mentoring with19 women across countries, sectors and cultures in Asia-Pacific, to form a network of support. The pilot programme taught us that prioritising relationships and connections fosters a kind and generous atmosphere that can support critical reflection, self-awareness and mutual learning over distance through online engagements.
In 2022-23, the pilot evolved into a longer 18-month programme and increased its scale by involving 39 participants, and partnered with Kogei-Net. 21 women were grouped into six mentoring clusters. We’re still reflecting on the rich learning from this experience and the many stories, experiences and collaborations created throughout it. This short post shares a few details. Please also view our video summary, which shares how participants experienced the programme.
Celebrating cultural diversity and inclusion
Many leadership programmes focus on skills building. Our approach is to support women to mentor each other through regular peer and communal dialogues over distance and online, growing together in confidence and self-knowledge. In the 2022-23 project, clusters of three to five women with one mentor worked together in each group (see the yellow and pink clusters). Meeting online allowed the groups to bridge distances and barriers to travel. Mentors also came together for peer learning, reflection and support. All the clusters supported each other, for further learning. As the project team, we worked with our Advisory Board members and guest mentors (in green) to provide further support, responding to needs and interests as they emerged.
The 39 participants, including 36 that identify as women in the 2022-23 programme come from diverse backgrounds, locations, professions and cultures. We are multilingual and transcultural by birth, migration, family lineages, upbringing, education and lived experience, with ties to Australia, Canada, Japan, Kenya, Hong Kong SAR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand, the US and the UK. We work in art, craft, curating, design, research, teaching, start-ups and social innovation. Building relationships across languages and cultures requires patience and careful listening. The strength of our collective transcultural experience is that we can build on everyone’s assets.
Elevate relationships, not skills or content
Leadership development tends to emphasise skills acquisition. The nature of competency training easily predetermines how an individual should perform. This can come at the cost of ignoring cultural dimensions and trusting relationships. In contrast, our mentoring programmes explore how leadership and mentoring can be culturally inclusive. An emphasis on cultural inclusion can support women to connect and nurture their own priority areas of personal and professional growth. Rather than telling women what we think they need, we create an environment and structure in which they can define and learn, in their own ways and at a pace that suits them.
Building trust and relationships lies at the core of the approach. We started the 18-month mentoring programme by sending gifts to everyone. This common cultural ritual across Asia-Pacific is a thoughtful act of introduction, and signalled our intentions to build an auspicious relationship. Another common ritual found in many places is to get to know one another over tea or coffee. The initial gifts we sent were a variety of teas and snacks that reflected our many backgrounds and locations. We met online to enjoy tea and snacks and to get to know each other, convivially. After this first gift exchange, mentors and mentees began sharing gifts. The gifts reflected the mentor and mentees’ creative practices, community commitments and burgeoning relationships.
The mentoring groups devised rhythms and ways of meeting and connecting online that suited their own work and life situations. Some mentoring groups began collaborating artistically, as a way of learning and sharing. Our role as the project team was to support these group-led engagements. We met for impromptu coffees and picnics whenever some of us were in the same city. In response to common topics emerging from the groups, we invited guest speakers to share their own experiences around work/life balance and starting their own business. When COVID-19 risk lowered and travel restrictions eased, we met in Bangkok for a face-to-face event. After nearly a year of meeting online, this reunion became an important milestone for celebrating, crystalising and reflecting on what we have learnt and achieved together.
What we have achieved together
Here are key things we’ve learned and achieved through the DESIAP approach to women’s transcultural mentoring:
- ‘It takes time’ – Our approach brought mentees into relationships of trust already in place between the mentors and project team. This foundation enabled the mentoring groups to extend and build their own relationships so they could grow and thrive over a longer period of time.
- ‘I feel looked after’ – Care and thought went into building trusting relationships and convivial atmospheres. We tried to centre participants’ experiences towards building good relationships, starting with the experience of joining and the practice of giving gifts. We wanted to help them feel care and generosity in their mentoring experience. We tried to listen to their feelings, and made collective decisions with openness and accountability.
- ‘I feel seen’ – Recognizing where each person is at, helps us respect and respond to their everyday realities. By taking away pre-set content, expectations or timelines, we can help women identify their pathways for growth at their own pace, and in their own way. This enabled meaningful experiences to arise from the mentoring relationship.
- ‘I am not alone’ – Feeling safe and supported allows participants to connect with others who share their values. Participants can then see their difference in cultures, experiences, and work in various fields as a strength that helps to expand their understanding and networks.
- ‘She is my senpai’ – We recognise the western tendency to want to flatten hierarchy. But hierarchies are cultural dimensions, and can come with age, experience and knowledge. Respecting participants’ own comfort with hierarchy means to work with power dynamics, to ensure everyone feels safe and enabled, and not burdened.
Acknowledgements
This programme was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Australia-Japan Foundation and led by Northumbria University (UK), RMIT University (Australia), Bangkok University (Thailand) and Kanazawa College of Art (Japan), drawing on the experience and relationships of DESIAP and Kogei-net members to support women in their various roles in the Asia-Pacific region. We are also supported by the British Council Thailandand the AWSEN network.