The “Who Is Asking?” Campaign

(Adrienne, Julia, Kathrin)

Bring the Campaign to the People!

Change begins with questioning the status quo.

It has been a whirlwind week with the Who Is Asking campaign. In six days we designed, printed, and pasted 90 anti-homophobia posters all over Warsaw; spray painted a No Hate Speech Footpath in Pole Mokotowskie (Warsaw’s major public park); got nearly 900 visitors on our website; and reached over 2,000 people throughsocial media.

In choosing to implement our campaign primarilyin public spaces, our team tookthe difficult task of creating a “mini online social media campaign”and made it even more difficult.Wedid this because we believed the best way to make an impact given our short time limit was to bring our campaign to the people instead of asking them to come to us online.

Part one of our project was a poster campaign. Because most Poles do not even know what the term LGBTQ means, we had to somehow personalize the issue and make it understandable in common terms. Our posters posed simple but provocative questions like “Can love be disgusting?” “What makes you a woman/man?” and “When did you CHOOSE to be heterosexual?” The goal was to encourage people to question the dominant narrative about gender and sexuality. This could be the first step towards understanding and acceptance of LGBTQ people. We spent almost six hours one day running around Warsaw, wheat pasting our posters everywhere. It felt good to do some guerrilla activism for the first time.

Part two of our campaign was the No Hate Speech Footpath in Pole Mokotowskie. After a few setbacks with rainy weather, we finally put our plan into action on Sunday. Luckily for us it was a beautiful day and many people were there. We attracted a lot of attention in the process of writing and spray painting, and people’s reactions were surprisingly positive. Not one person said something negative to us, even though our message was explicitly about hate speech against non-heterosexual people. We even recruited some real life fans who stayed with us through the afternoon and told passers by to visit our website. The most heartwarming thing was to see parents encouraging their children to read each message aloud as they walked through the path together.

All the elements of our campaign came together on our website (WhoIsAsking.pl), where we provided explanations about each poster and statistics on discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in Poland. We have a slideshow page with photos of our actions around the city, and all our campaign content is copyright free so that people everywhere can share them through social media and even implement their own public campaign.

Over all, Julia, Kathrin and I are really happy with how our campaign turned out. We did the most with our week as a team.Despite our ambitious plans and long days, we never lost steam and managed to laugh even during the low points. Now,whenever we pass by one of our postersor otherHiA fellows tell us they spotted one, it feels like a small achievement.

While our website and Facebook statistics are fun to keep track of, the real achievement for the Who Is Asking team is knowing that hundreds of Warsaw residents will see our posters and our footpath over the coming days and weeks. We’ve left our mark on this city. Our hope is that this campaign will inspire other activiststo implement the samein their own cities around the world.