世 光 · 微 光 研 讨 会
SEESALT ALCHEMILLA · EMBER SEMINARS
The leaf that holds the water
Alchemilla mollis — lady's mantle
A pathway toward gender justice in the Asia-Pacific through community action. Alchemilla builds community-led seminars on gender-based and sexual violence, read through a post-colonial lens — designed with the people they concern rather than delivered to them.
Why this name
Alchemilla
Lady's mantle holds rainwater at the centre of its leaf. Alchemists collected that water and called it celestial dew — the name Alchemilla comes from that practice. The plant does not produce the water. It gives it somewhere to gather.
That is the working image for this programme, and it is a claim about method rather than a decoration. The knowledge, the analysis and the authority to speak already exist in the communities this work concerns. What is usually missing is a shape that holds them long enough to be seen.
The plant has also been associated with women's health for centuries across several traditions — which is part of why the name fits, and also why we are careful with it. Healing metaphors can slide into implying that violence is a wound to be soothed rather than a system to be changed. It is both, and the seminars are built for the second.
What Alchemilla does
The programme
Alchemilla is a specialised initiative within Ember Seminars, SEESALT's development research and capacity programme. It addresses gender-based and sexual violence through a post-colonial lens, building culturally responsive interventions that centre the voices and experience of marginalised communities.
The post-colonial framing is not ornamental either. Gender-justice programming in the Asia-Pacific has a long record of arriving with categories developed elsewhere, and then finding that local women do not describe their own lives in those terms. Alchemilla starts from the assumption that the categories are part of what has to be negotiated, not settled in advance by whoever is funding the work.
What the seminars are for
- To make space where experience across different identities and positions can be spoken about without being translated into someone else's framework first.
- To connect individual experience to the systems that produce it — the analytical move that turns private harm into a shared problem.
- To leave behind capacity that does not depend on us: local facilitators, materials, and a format that can be run again without the programme.
What this is not
Alchemilla runs seminars. They are educational and dialogic. They are not therapy, not clinical treatment, and not a crisis service. Anyone who needs clinical or crisis support should be able to reach it locally, and connecting a seminar to those local services is part of the design work for any site — not an afterthought.
Mission
Stated plainly
To challenge and transform systems of gender-based violence and inequality by developing community-led seminars that acknowledge historical power dynamics, honour local knowledge, and build sustainable pathways toward gender justice.
Three words in that sentence carry the weight. Community-led means the community sets the agenda, not that it is consulted about ours. Historical means the power dynamics did not begin with this programme and will not end with it. Sustainable means the measure of success is whether the work continues after we stop.
Who leads it
Programme leadership
Wanyue Hong 洪婉悦
Alchemilla Programme Director, since October 2025
SEESALT Senior Consultant
MSW candidate, Department of Social Welfare
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Wanyue is studying for a Master of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and comes to this work from philosophy and from counselling practice. Before Luskin she put in more than 2,500 hours of supervised practice: a year-long practicum at a counselling centre in Shanghai, clinical observation in the psychology department of Wenzhou People’s Hospital, two summers at a counselling centre in Wenzhou, and a year of online peer support. That combination matters here: she has seen both what distress does to a person and what the systems around that person keep producing.
- Co-created and facilitated a reading group on gender diversity for practising therapists, with its curriculum revised week by week under supervision.
- Designed and led a weekly psychoeducation book club for parents, and small-group workshops that connect mental-health concepts to everyday life, drawing on Foucault and Lacan.
- Training in the cognitive techniques of CBT (76 hours, a programme approved by the Chinese Psychological Society) and in the evidence-based treatment of OCD (40 hours, with Gregory S. Chasson).
- Coursework in psychoanalysis, the philosophy of gender and sexuality, and cultural and clinical psychology.
Her approach puts supervised practice alongside cultural humility, theoretical depth alongside plain speech, and individual care alongside collective change — which is the combination this programme needs and the reason it exists in this form.
Where this is
Stage, stated honestly
Alchemilla is early. The framing, the leadership and the method are in place; the seminar series is being built. We are not going to describe a programme that has not run yet as though it had.
What we are looking for at this stage:
- Local partner organisations in the Asia-Pacific already working on gender justice, who would co-design a seminar series rather than host a delivered one.
- Facilitators with community practice in this field, particularly those who can work in languages other than English and Mandarin.
- Critique of the framing. If the post-colonial approach we describe reproduces something it claims to avoid, we would rather hear it before the first seminar than after.
Alchemilla · 微光研讨会
Programme Director: Wanyue Hong · Contact through SEESALT: zhijun1933@gmail.com
Part of Ember Seminars · SEESALT
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