KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07)
Plenary: Welcome to the Survivors’ Agenda!
What is needed to create a world free from sexual violence? This Survivors’ Agenda begins to answer that question. We listened to thousands of survivors across the country, and worked closely with partner organizations who have been combating gender-based violence for decades, to co-create a platform of our demands. We are calling for recognition of the power and wisdom of survivors. Join us to hear about the details of the platform, the importance of building a movement of survivors of sexual violence, and how you can utilize the Agenda to bring about change in your own communities.
Speakers:
Fatima Goss Graves, President & CEO, National Women’s Law Center
Mónica Ramírez, Founder & President, Justice for Migrant Women
Anita Hill, Brandeis Professor and Chair, Hollywood Commission
Breana Brave Heart, Youth Indigenous activist
Prentis Hemphill, Founder, Black Embodiment Initiative
Plenary: Bringing the Survivors’ Agenda to Your Community: a Rallying Cry for 2020 and Beyond
After two days of great discussions, trainings, and conversations, now is the time to bring all of that energy out into the world. What does it look like to embrace your leadership as a survivor? How can we utilize the Survivors’ Agenda in our everyday lives? On the brink of a crucial election, we each have a role to play to ensure that survivors are the ones shaping the national conversation on sexual violence. Join us!
Speakers:
Tarana Burke, Founder & Executive Director, me too. International
Ai-jen Poo, Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance
Tina Tchen, President & Chief Executive Officer, TIME’S UP Foundation
Yolo Akili Robinson, Founder/Chief Executive Officer, Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective
Trauma-Sensitive Holistic Yoga Session with Marsha D. Harold-Banks
This session will empower survivors to start dismantling the interlocking systems that continue to impede survivors’ ability to thrive at work (e.g., deeply embedded structural racism, sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking, and other long-standing systems of oppression have been strengthened by the COVID-19 pandemic). This workshop will discuss what survivor-centered, trauma-informed systems look like and how to reach those who despite good works still cause harm.
Speakers:
Paula Brantner, President and Principal of PB Work Solutions
Aaron Polkey, Staff Attorney for Outreach and Engagement, Futures Without Violence
Ana Avendaño, Co-Founder, Co-Director, Survivors Know
Building Powerful Movements of Survivors
What is survivor justice? What is our vision for a world free from sexual violence? Most importantly, how are we going to get there together? These are big and bold questions. Our speakers call on their decades of experience organizing survivors to help find big and bold answers.
Speakers:
Nikita Mitchell, Program Director, me too. International
Sheerine Alemzadeh, Co-Director and Co-Founder, Healing to Action
Raya Steier, Electoral Organizer and founder of the MeToo Movement in India
Where Do We Go From Here?: Race, Sexual Violence, and the Future of Restorative Justice Movement
Speakers:
Salamishah Tillet, Co-Founder, A Long Walk Home
Kyra Jones, Assistant Director of Sexual Violence Responce Services at Northwestern University
Kel O’Hara, Equal Justice Works Fellow, Equal Rights Advocates
#MeToo At School: Advocating for Survivor-Supportive Policies Despite the Harmful New Title IX Rule
This session will educate participants about recent harmful changes to the Title IX rule and strategies they can take to ensure schools respond appropriately, effectively, and in a trauma-informed way to sexual harassment in all schools. Students, parents, community members, lawmakers, and advocates will learn how to engage with schools and policymakers to ensure there are strong protections for student survivors.
Speakers:
Elizabeth Tang, Counsel, National Women’s Law Center
Faith Ferber, Student Engagement Organizer, Know Your IX
Maha Ibrahim, Counsel, Equal Rights Advocates
Naina Agrawal-Hardin, Policy and Advocacy Organizer, Know Your IX
Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse
In this session, the African-American panelists, all of whom are survivors and one is a former bystander to her child’s CSA, Love WITH Accountability editor, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, and two of the anthology contributors, Mel Anthony Phillips and Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, will each highlight the need to prioritize compassionately disrupting and ending child sexual abuse. These are forms of radical racial, gender, and healing justice outside of policing and prisons.
Speakers:
Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Cultural Worker, #LoveWITHAccountability® & NO! The Rape Documentary
Mel Anthony Phillips, Artist in Residence,OAASIS: Oregon Abuse Advocates & Survivors in Service
Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Professor Emerita,University of Florida
Making the Discussion of Survivors Inclusive of People with Disabilities
This session will focus on how to make approaches to sexual violence inclusive of people with disabilities. People with disabilities are statistically more likely to be victims of sexual assault, and disabilities (including mental and physical trauma) can often be a result of an assault. Stigma around disability is still so pervasive that a majority of survivors with disabilities are not believed when telling their stories in any space. There remains an opportunity to build an explicit disability justice lens in survivor spaces to the benefit of all. Our speakers will discuss their work in this space, and how organizations shaping dialogue on sexual violence can benefit from having disabled people at the table from day one.
Speakers:
Rebecca Cokley, Director, Disability Justice Initiative, Center for American Progress
Vilissa Thompson, LMSW – Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; Social Worker, Activist
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Writer, Teacher, Disability and Transformative Justice Worker
Leslie Templeton, Board of Directors and Disability Caucus Coordinator, Women’s March
Virtual Q&A on Behalf of ATHLETE A
Currently Streaming on Netflix [Click to watch the trailer]
ATHLETE A follows a team of reporters from The Indianapolis Star as they investigate claims of abuse at USA Gymnastics, one of the nation’s most prominent Olympic organizations. Two years later, an Olympic doctor is behind bars, the US Congress is demanding answers and hundreds of survivors are speaking out. Equal parts devastating and inspiring, the film reveals the culture of cruelty that was allowed to thrive within elite-level gymnastics, the attorney fighting the institutions, and most importantly, the brave athletes who refuse to be silenced, fought the system and triumphed.
Speakers:
Featuring Co-Director Bonni Cohen and Gymnast/ Film Subject Maggie Nichols
Moderated by Yasmeen Hassan, Global Executive Director of Equality Now
The Power of Storytelling: Your Story as an Organizing Tool with Jaden Fields and Ducky Jones
This session will support survivors in telling their stories, by providing trauma-informed and healing-centered tools for sharing their stories, and ways to shape their stories to be a powerful instrument to advocate for themselves and other survivors.
Speakers:
Jaden Fields, Co-Director, Mirror Memoirs
Ducky Jones, Organizer, Educator, & Storyteller
Manifest: Working with Elements of Nature for Sexual Healing with Ignacio Rivera and Aredvi Azad
Working through sexual trauma is deep, continuous work. A powerful tool for healing is manifestation; and when combined with ritual, crystals, or other elements of nature, manifestation can amplify positivity. Working with the natural beauty around us not only grounds us, but aids in raising our vibration, allowing healing to occur.
Speakers:
Aredvi Azad, Director of Education & Programs, The HEAL Project
Ignacio Rivera, Founder and Director, The HEAL Project
Queer/Trans Perspectives on Surviving Violence & Abuse
Join a panel of seasoned activists for an in-depth heart-felt analysis of uniqueness of queer and trans survivorship. The HEAL Project is a BIPOC/trans/survivor-led initiative working to prevent and end Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) and the cycle of sexual violence, and The Network/La Red is a survivor-led organization working to end partner abuse in LGBTQ communities.
Speakers:
Erica Perez, Community Awareness Associate, The Network/La Red
Aredvi Azad, Director of Education & Programs, The HEAL Project
Ignacio Rivera, Founder and Director, The HEAL Project
Youth Track: Black Girl Safekeeping, Healing, & Liberation
In this presentation, Justice for Black Girls Ambassadors situate the works of Robin Boylorn exploring Black girl autoethnography, notions of disrespectability and Nikki Giovanni’s Revolutionary Dreams. We open with meditation, community agreements and pledges to Black girl liberation. This presentation pushes participants to actively disrespect the systems that disrespect Black girls, consider the ways in which we can create spaces rooted in healing & safety, and ultimately become better safekeepers of Black girls everywhere.
This panel features a cross-generational dialogue about the importance of centering youth experiences in movements and organizing. Speakers will highlight the ways they engage across age to amplify the voices and dreams of youth survivors. Panelists include Najma Douglas and Julia Arroyo from Young Women’s Freedom Center, Tara Scott-Miller, The Firecracker Foundation, and Vivian Anderson of EveryBlackGirl, Inc. Moderated by Michelle Grier, Girls for Gender Equity. This panel is open to young people and their adult co-conspirators (parents, caregivers, mentors, aunties/uncles, etc.).
Beyond 9 to 5: Promoting Financial Security and Stability for Survivors
It is incredibly expensive to experience domestic and intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. The financial impact is often long-lasting. When you are in the position to leave your harm-doer, you are often met with the very real awareness that you cannot financially afford to stay safe. Whether by intentional sabotage of economic opportunities, credit, and financial solvency by harm-doers, or inflexible workplace policies that fail to understand that you bring your whole self to work or properly remedy discrimination in the workplace, a path to achieving financial security and stability is essential for all survivors. This session will lift up resources, strategies, and tools for you to achieve greater economic security.
Speakers:
Deborah J. Vagins, President & CEO, National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV)
Linda A. Seabrook, General Counsel and Director of Workplace Safety & Equity, Futures Without Violence
Em Jackson, Director of Peer Engagement & Support, FreeFrom
Kiesha Preston, Activist
Military Sexual Violence: Transforming Justice and Healing
When our service members take an oath to protect our country, our country should also protect them. However, sexual violence in the US military is a growing epidemic that has been ignored for far too long. This panel will discuss how we can support our service members who are struggling with visible and invisible wounds. We will also look at the leadership approach of women of color, active duty and retired, who are leading military sexual violence reform, and identify how can others be supportive of them.
Speakers:
Adelaide Kahn, Director of Programs and Policy, Protect Our Defenders
Lucy Del Gaudio, Grassroots Veterans Efforts and MSV survivor
Melissa Bryant, Grassroots Veterans Efforts and MSV survivor
Youth Track: Liberatory Love Letters: Art-Making as Resilience, Resistance, and Healing Magic
Thousands of survivors around the world are rewriting their stories of darkness through radical self-love and healing. In this workshop, we honor and uplift the survivors, organizers, and communities that insist on emotional wellness and healing in the wake of sexual assault. We will feature a reading by grassroots cultural art movement Survivor Love Letter and Girls for Gender Equity performances by Solange Aguilar, Ashley Newenle, Ana Corona, Sen Morimoto, Leena Luv and a panel discussion on healing and dismantling rape culture.
Youth Track: Online Risks, Resources, and Allyship Among Youth
SafeBAE’s #KnowB4Unude campaign takes a direct and honest approach to talking about youth sending nudes. This is still an incredibly taboo topic with little-to-no resources for students to be able to make educated decisions about sharing intimate photos of themselves or others. This campaign challenges young people to be more informed and responsible sharers and receivers of nudes, including consent, sharing or sending images without permission, etc. The panel will integrate details about the SafeBAE APP for youth activists which includes all the ways in which survivors and allies can support one another, access resources, and join activists in changing their school cultures, policies, and lessons.