Chayn Italia

CHAYN ITALIA ONLUS is an open-source project that leverages technology to empower women against violence and oppression. Through our resources and programs, any woman who is experiencing abuse can find useful information to start taking back the control of her life. Resources are co-created with survivors of abuse, experts and women's aid workers using innovative and user-centered design methods. Chayn Italia Onlus provides women who live abusive relationships with resources and information to empower themselves and choose their path out of abuse. Chayn Italia Onlus is not a replacement of offline women's aid centers but rather creates a safe(r) bridge for women to start their own journey of awareness. By accessing information at their own pace and in their own safe space, women can further understand their circumstances and get information on how to reach for help. Starting from the understanding that only women themselves can take the decision to exit an abusive relationship, Chayn aims at filling the information gap harnessing accessible and non judgmental materials. Born out of a strong sisterhood-oriented standpoint, Chayn Italia Onlus is feminist social innovation from women to women, which is (to our knowledge) an unprecedented approach in the Italian context. We support women online for them to take their newly found power offline in everyday life. The resources available on our platform aim at multiple audiences: women currently living an abusive relationship, survivors of abuse that are looking to make sense of their lived experiences; friends and family supporting a person living an abusive relationship; young women that can identify unhealthy relationship patterns before entering a new relationship. Chayn Italia also works with women's aid centers and networks, providing them with easy-to-use resources they can pass onto the women they support. We also train women's aid centers and refuges on the possibilities offered by technology against abuse but also on the threats tech can pose. In the COVID-19 context, we are developing a set of training modules and capsules to support women's aid networks in supporting survivors through digital means. In such an emergency scenario where face-to-face contacts are heavily reduced, tech becomes often the only way Anti-Violence centers can support the women they work with. Given that the women's aid sector in Italy is very underfunded and is, on average, run by older women, our support in closing this digital divide is now more crucial than even. Chayn Italia is a project run by a community of talented women whose experiences and skills span across a number of fields and areas. The motor unit behind our last 5 years has comprised women's aid and frontline workers, project managers, psychologists, designers, web developers, teachers, researchers, group facilitators and much more. The Chayn way to project development has always been powered by in-team contamination, skill-sharing and collaborative approaches. So far, more than 200 volunteers have been part of the Chayn Italia community, a result that allowed us to develop creative models of remote team management, internal communication and workflow coordination. The project has a global volunteer network: the Italian chapter is part of a broader family with roots in Pakistan, India and the United Kingdom. We organize through a carefully crafted and tested balance of agile communication, project management tools and methodologies for online/offline participation. Chayn Italia Onlus represents an innovative model due to its hybrid nature: a meeting point between territory-based women's aid centers and professionals from different fields (from social work, to web development, to graphic and UX design, project management, illustration, research, social media& communication, translation, psychology, service design and so forth).