Come Support Helem's Emergency Response Team! 

We are going to dine, drink, dance, and drag to raise money for Helem's emergency response team! Tarek Zeidan, Helem's Executive Director will be in attendance to celebrate everyone's generosity and describe the direct and impactful ways his group deploys these resources to keep members of the community out of jail, clothed and fed, and sheltered from abusive environments. 

EVENT DETAILS:

Our MC for the night will be Roddy Bottum!

Performances by:

Crickets

Christeene

Ana Masreya the producer and host for NEFERTITTIES a Middle Eastern and north African Cabaret- you can follow her on instagram @anamasreyaxo

Emma Gration, the name says it all. She mixes comedy and drag to bring you one hell of a weird act. 

Bashar Makhay is a queer Chaldean-Iraqi American Catholic leftist community organizer, performer, DJ, activist and strategist. He is the founder and a Board Member of Tarab NYC. As a DJ, Bashar becomes Fursa, as they mix dabke, shami, chobi, redh, chaabi, bandari, and other MENA beats mixed with pop, dance and global booty beats. As a Drag Queen, Bashar becomes Farfasha, everyone's auntie, grandmother and dominatrix, in one hot mess of a package. Follow @FursaFarfasha on SoundCloud and Instagram.

Please also check out our silent auction items!

$150 dinner ticket (Prix Fix sit down dinner prepared by the award winning Llama Inn team, led by Chef Erik Ramirez, Natural wine pairings..) This level of contribution funds one month of operating expenses for Helem's emergency hotline. This hotline is a literal lifeline for members of the community that find themselves in crisis.  

$25 post dinner party ticket (Drinks!, Dancing!, Drag!, all night:) This level contribution provides food and an emergency health kit for a community member that has been detained by the police in Beirut.

Share the event with your friends and if you can't make it please consider donating anyway, every dollar counts!

*All ticket purchases, dinner, drinks, and silent auction items will be donated directly to support Helem's emergency response team. 

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A huge thanks to our fiscal sponsor Tarab NYC! Tarab is a non-profit, that fosters an inclusive and safe community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and/or gender non-conforming Arab, Middle Eastern, and/or North African people in the greater New York City area.

 

 

 

 

 

MORE ABOUT HELEM:

 

Helem (or “Dream” in Arabic), is the first LGBTQI rights organization in the Arab world, established in Beirut, Lebanon in 2004. Its mission is to lead a peaceful struggle for the liberation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Intersex, Transgendered, Queer (LGBTIQ) and other persons with non-conforming sexualities and/or gender identities in Lebanon and the MENA region from all sorts of violations of their individual and collective civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights.

Helem is fueled by its mission to empower young LGBTQI leaders to advocate for their own liberation. It seeks to create a community that leverages its diversity as strength, not weakness, and create a holding environment where that diversity can germinate and thrive. In order to do this, we protect queer individuals by resisting their arrests and reducing the harm caused by discrimination, we empower them through education and communal bonding, and we mobilizethem to change the policies and practices denying their full equality and reducing their quality of life.

In order to accomplish this, Helem focuses on three strategic pillars:

Our SERVICES protect and support the community by providing diversified emergency aid and by gathering reliable data. We accomplish this through making sure queer individuals in distress or facing discrimination through legal, social, or health-related means find access to information and aid 24/7 through our hotline which allows for direct intervention or referral. We also insure that all cases Helem managed, which amount to almost 500 per year, are documented as evidence of abuse both for advocacy efforts at the national and international level as well as evidence for more strategic programming. Helem also provides legal aid and representation for cases that we deem strategically important to create new jurisprudence within the judiciary – a strategy that has won us 6 cases so far in Lebanon since we began the process in 2009.

Our COMMUNITY department focuses on providing a safe and brave space for the entire LGBTQI community in Lebanon and is a place dedicated for healing, bonding, movement building and personal /collective empowerment. We accomplish this through a series of activities and workshops that provide specific information and skill gaps in the community and include learning health basics, nonviolent resistance, myth- busting techniques, community organizing, and self- care. The center is a locus where building community is synonymous with building power.

Finally, our ADVOCACY focuses on programming aimed directly at reducing stigma and discrimination on multiple societal levels where interventions are strategic, timely, and impactful. Helem engages in a large and flexible variety of programs in order to optimize its impact. Our activities include policy and legal research, government engagement, ally building, family support, public awareness raising, judicial reform, private sector outreach, and educational reform.

Helem’s approach is to establish roots for long terms solutions through direct work aimed at the grassroots.