Skip to content

Knowledge Article: Community Building in Corona Times

Article

Laura Kok (2019 Amsterdam Fellowship) originally planned to organize the Transcreen Film Festival as her Action Project. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic this event had to be cancelled in 2020. This inspired Laura to instead focus on how the pandemic shut down public life and therefore made LGBT safe spaces inaccessible. For her Action Project she wanted to share the work of her TranScreen team in informing and inspiring others and in finding inventive ways to move their work online.  

For her Action Project, Laura Kok shares how at TranScreen they worked to create an alternative space online and took new digital approaches to accomodate for this. Laura did so by taking record of TranScreen’s activities and conversations since the start of the pandemic about a year ago. She then bundled these experiences and wrote a knowledge article about them. 

Next to being the instigator for her Action Project, the Covid-19 pandemic was simultaneously Laura’s biggest obstacle. At first, her focus was on organizing TranScreen, which ultimately got cancelled. Laura then hoped to focus on the TranScreen podcast, but this also ended up not being possible due to travel and visiting restrictions. In the end however she used all these struggles and shared the lessons learned in the knowledge article for others to read.

“I would advice others to roll with the punches and learn how to work with them.” – Laura Kok (2019 Amsterdam Fellowship).

In May this year, TranScreen returned with an online film festival. TranScreen also organizes screenings, workshops and panels throughout the rest of the year, and will continue with their yearly film festival for the foreseeable future. Laura encourages everyone to follow TranScreen online or to subscribe to the newsletter, and to keep an eye out for volunteer calls if you want to get involved.