FFJ does Manila

48 hours of jetlag, pitch competitions, farm visits, and (of course) mango

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What makes a story? How do you tell it? Who do you want to tell it to?

There are endless ways to tell a story, to spin words into worlds that you hope will stay with those who read them long after you’ve left them behind. So of course there are so many different stories we could tell you about working on the 10th U.S.-ASEAN Women’s Leadership Academy for the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI), a forum that brings together women leaders from Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. This year’s theme was food security, and we were brought on as a partner to help participants produce a digital zine about rice.

One version starts in July 2023, with an email that piqued our interest and a call that seemed too good to be true: did we want to take on a paid opportunity to work with women food security leaders on storytelling skills? Another began far longer ago: Two Vancouverites, strangers to each other, one trained in food systems and the other in journalism, both dabbling in global development work. After starting to work together at the same consulting firm, they quickly realized their shared passions for gender equity, community engagement, good food, and storytelling ran deep. FFJ was born. Several years later, through more serendipitous connections, they found themselves working on another dream project straddling these themes.

Whichever version of the story — opened with any of the ledes in the gif above — you choose, you’ll inevitably find us, jetlagged and downing free buffet coffees, in a bright hotel conference room in Manila. Having flown in from Berlin just half a day prior, we were jittery from a combination of caffeine, imposter syndrome, and the excitement of it all — after all, we were about to start a pitch competition for 64 (extremely impressive) women.

The women were familiar to us, as much as people can be from Zoom quadrants. We’d hosted three monthly online sessions since February, starting with the basics and guiding the WLA participants through the process of producing eventual story drafts for the zine.

• Ideation and formats: How to come up with story ideas and how to translate ideas into different formats (reported piece, personal essay, op-ed, etc.)

• Research & interviewing: How to determine credible sources, keep track of research, and conduct solid interviews

• Storytelling skills: How to use ledes, character, conflict, and place to make your story sing (and tailor it to your audience)

Because we were both at home in Vancouver at the start of this year, all three workshops ran from 3-5 am Pacific Time. It was a slot that, though painful, quickly morphed into an unexpectedly cherished ritual: we’d text each other “U up?” at 2:35 am and comment on how cold our extremities were in our respective living rooms, dark and ironically devoid of life. We genuinely enjoyed ourselves in all three workshops — and we hope we managed to look alive despite the hour — but crawling back into bed afterwards, only to wake later for a second time, made them feel like a dream.

It was similarly surreal to be in Manila. We ran into participants in the hotel elevator who recognized us right away, even though of course we couldn’t identify them yet since the webinars had been so packed. At first it was a tad uncomfortable, perhaps due to the aforementioned imposter syndrome and our profound awareness of global power dynamics. But after a few minutes of face-to-face time, all awkwardness melted away. This was a group of highly capable, highly engaged women, and they’d already had the first day of the conference to bond: all we needed to do was channel that energy into a structure worthy of their attention.

In the 36 hours before the workshop, as we flew across the globe, we’d been frantically reviewing participants’ story drafts. We had 16 pieces — and would be hearing 16 pitches — prepared by teams of four people, each focusing on a different part of the food systems cycle. Some teams were assigned climate change, others advertising, some food security and others on farming. Drafts touched on everything from new carbon sequestering technologies to using rice water as a baby formula in the wake of rising food prices to the Filipino practice of pagpag, foraging for discarded or expired food and reselling it into hygiene-poor meals for low-income communities.

We’re used to receiving pitches by email (as is standard practice in journalism), but for this workshop, we asked that pitches be given orally, both so that the women could practice their public-speaking skills and be able to hear about each other’s stories. After pitching, we held a vote and asked women to imagine: if they were the editors of this rice zine and could only commission three stories, which would they choose? We encouraged them to consider the same criteria we use at FFJ — the diversity of writers and their identities, a spread of topics that still offer productive resonances, and of course, the perceived quality of the stories on offer.

It was a rambunctious, buzzing 2.5 hours. So many pitches were impeccably delivered, with mesmerizing hooks and strong finishes that came in just as we called “TIME!”. Two stories emerged as clear crowd favourites, with stickers clustered on their sign, but participants also complimented and commented on many others. Afterwards, everyone conversed enthusiastically, took group photos, and exchanged contact information. We came away feeling like the workshop had been a success.

The workshop was the reason we came but in actuality, it ended up being just a small part of a meaningful trip. We had dinner with the amazing host organization Wedu, and other partner, AGREA; we visited Duran Farm a few hours outside of Manila, and even found a spare hour to dash just us two to Binondo, the world’s oldest Chinatown. Founded in 1594, Binondo has a complex colonial history that we could only briefly absorb through succulent Shanghai-fried siopao and juicy, juicy mango from a street vendor that left us stereotypically sighing with delight.

If you didn’t realize how big our height difference is…

Sleep deprivation was the theme of the week: since we’re usually spread between Barcelona and Berlin, being together was a treat on par with the Binondo snacks. Each evening, as it came time to wind down amid bold claims of deathly fatigue, we stayed up gabbing late into the night. We even did the same into the wee hours of Friday morning, as our twilight goodbye loomed. Isabela’s alarm went off at 4:45 am for a flight to Seoul and Zoë graciously raised her head to offer parting words. It was a fever dream from start to finish and we’re so grateful to Wedu for bringing us on.

So there you have it: our Manila story. But, of course, this is just one perspective, centering, as stories tend to, what we saw from behind our own dazed and dry eyeballs. Each of the 64 women in attendance will have their own version of the story, which encapsulates far more than just FFJ. We hope they came away from the week as bursting with joy, inspiration, and energy as we did.

Our work on the zine continues. We will now start editing participants’ drafts and selecting stories for the final zine, to be hosted by Wedu with some tidbits shared here, too. Some participants will continue to work with us as volunteers on the final product, and we’re looking forward to getting to know them more deeply. What we love most about working on FFJ is being able to help writers — mostly women, and often from underrepresented communities — find their voice and effectively tell their story. It’s exciting to do this with a new pool of writers, for a different audience.

And just to put it out there: we’d love to take on more projects like this. If you have ideas of people, corporations, or organizations that might be interested in learning more about or getting support with, feminist storytelling, please send them our way. Beyond FFJ, we’re both experienced facilitators and independent consultants, and we want to further merge these skills with our editorial work in the future.

Sunset over Manila Bay from the rooftop of our hotel.

If you’d like to find out more about the YSEALI project, our inboxes are always open at hello@feministfoodjournal.com. Otherwise, we’ll be back with MEAT in our usual slot, two Tuesdays from now.