Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Ep. 6: Yes, There *Is* Room For More Than One Brown Girl At The Table
Arti Patel is now a successful executive producer at CBC who previously worked at Global News and Huffpost Canada, but once upon a time, she was a recent university grad trying to figure out how to make it in media as South Asian young woman. She wasn’t alone—two friends, Nikkjit Gill and Roohi Sahajpal, were also at the beginning of their careers and struggling to find support, resources, or even just other South Asian women to connect with. The trio had an idea for a community that could provide those things young women like themselves—but it took eight years to finally make it happen.
“For years and years, [we’d] toyed around with different ideas. Then, about six years ago, I went to a talk about entrepreneurship and women and it just clicked for me: it doesn't matter what it is right now, let's just launch it,” she says.
The result was Didihood, a collective of South Asian women in Canada that now spans many creative fields, including journalism, music, film, visual arts and beyond. The group provides its membership with networking and mentorship opportunities in Toronto and Vancouver, hosts workshops for university and college students and spotlights inspirational South Asian women, all with the goal of building community among South Asian creatives—and encouraging them to see themselves in creative spaces.
So, in this week’s episode of Friday Talks, we’re chatting about barriers to entry for brown women (which could be anything from family expectations to the way these industries are actually structured), why we belong in these spaces and what it feels like to provide today’s young women with this type of support and encouragement.
Hosted by Friday Things founder and editor Stacy Lee Kong, Not Bad For Some Immigrants is a six-part video series about the stories we tell about immigrants in pop culture, media and real life. It rejects the focus on striving—to succeed, to assimilate, to be judged worthy of belonging in, and to, our new homes—that so often infiltrate stories about our experiences, and instead makes space for complicated, nuanced and joyful conversations about what it actually costs to build a new life, the stories we learn to tell about ourselves and what it really means to belong.