08/08/2026
💜 Let’s Dare to Care! 💜
The Nationwide Organization of Visually-Impaired Empowered Ladies (NOVEL) invites everyone to explore and share the Dare to Care: Wellbeing, Self- and Collective Care for Those Working in the Gender-Based Violence Prevention Field online course.
The course was developed through collaboration between the Southeast Asia GBV Prevention Platform and a CSO Reference Group composed of women’s rights organizations and constituency-led civil society groups from across Southeast Asia. Together, they helped shape the course so that it reflects the realities, experiences, and contexts of people working on gender-based violence prevention in the region.
A warm shout-out and thank you to the Southeast Asia GBV Prevention Platform for bringing organizations together and creating space for co-learning and co-creation across the region.
We’re proud that NOVEL’s Gina Rose Balanlay, Minnie Aveline Posadas Juan-Serrano, and Shiela May Inmenzo Aggarao took part in this process in several ways:
🌱 CSO Reference Group
They shared insights, lived experiences, and disability rights and feminist perspectives to help adapt the course to the Southeast Asian context. They also reviewed the modules, case studies, visuals, and learning approaches to help make the course more intersectional, inclusive, accessible, and relevant.
🎥 Community Voices Videos
They shared personal reflections on self-care, collective care, managing resistance, and staying inspired in advocacy work. These stories help connect the course to the real experiences of practitioners and communities in the region.
💻 Rapid Accessibility Review
NOVEL also conducted a rapid accessibility review of the course, looking at its navigation, usability, structure, and overall learning experience. Recommendations were shared to help make the course more accessible for diverse learners, including persons with disabilities.
The process was also a valuable learning experience for NOVEL. It deepened our understanding of self- and collective care, strengthened our practice of feminist accessibility, and reminded us of the value of working alongside women’s rights groups, constituency-led organizations, and other movements. It reinforced that gender equality, disability inclusion, and social inclusion should not sit in separate spaces, but should be woven into how we design learning, build partnerships, support advocates, and sustain movements together.
✨ Let’s dare to care—for ourselves, for each other, and for the communities and movements we are part of.
📚 Happy learning! We encourage everyone to take the course and share it within your networks.
Novel Phils
cannot be sustained without caring for the people behind this work.
Those working in the gender-based violence (GBV) prevention and response field may face high levels of stress, burnout, and vicarious trauma. Without adequate support, these challenges can affect both individual wellbeing and the long-term impact of this work.
To support the wellbeing of practitioners and organisations across the region, the Southeast Asia Gender-based Violence Prevention Platform (the Platform) is pleased to launch Dare to Care: A self-paced online course on wellbeing, self- and collective care for those working in the GBV prevention field.
Through four modules, you will:
🌿Explore what wellbeing, self-care, and collective care mean in your context
🌿Understand key concepts such as stress, burnout and vicarious trauma, and why they are common in this field
🌿Reflect on your own practices and identify ways to strengthen care not only individually, but within teams, organisations, and communities
🔗 Start the course: https://tinyurl.com/D2C-Register
And feel free to share this with someone who might benefit from it. 💛
***
The Platform gratefully acknowledges the Sexual Violence Research Initiative for supporting the adaptation of its original Dare to Care course. We also acknowledge the rigorous, inclusive and thoughtful approach taken to develop such a comprehensive learning experience, which provided the foundation for this regional adaptation.
