Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation

My ultimate goal is to put myself out of a job via eradicating sexual violence. The funding from the Elevate Prize will advance both my work and the work of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation with survivors of sexual harm by ensuring that we can continue to design, resource and amplify our community engagement department. As a senior leader at CAASE whose central focus is community engagement, my work is to deeply and authentically connect with survivors of sexual harm and those who advocate for and support them. Many organizations do “outreach” and typically have a coordinator or manager for that kind of role. Where outreach or audience development goes wide, community engagement goes deep. Our work is about sustaining and enriching relationships with survivors over the long term, building trust organically and holding brave spaces where we can co-learn how to best amplify the narratives and lived experiences of survivors. I envision those narratives serving as critical insight and information that can impact the legislative process on community, state and federal levels by illustrating the lived experiences of survivors. In this way, we refine and implement laws that can affect how people can access justice and healing.

I’m a multidisciplinary artist and educator, focusing on writing and performance, a solo parent to a wonderful child on the autism spectrum, a survivor of sexual and domestic violence and an advocate for other survivors of trauma. My vision is to continue to build a community of survivors who can speak to and express their lived experiences as a way to build connections and shift our current culture of violence and trauma to a culture of empathy and bravery. At work, I’m the Community Engagement Director for the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, which envisions a community free from all forms of sexual exploitation, including sexual assault and the commercial sex trade. 

My goals are to: 1) Center communities most impacted by sexual harm by committing time, space, and financial resources to listen to survivors so their experiences and expertise can provide critical insights to our organization, legislators and the general public; 

2) Facilitate and provide education to survivors on how to write, present and produce their lived experiences in the most dynamic and powerful ways; and 

3) Provide platforms for survivors to create a roadmap for change that can bridge critical gaps between legislation and implementation.

Sexual violence affects more people in more places than almost any other form of harm. In the U.S., 60% of Black women experience rape before age 18. Sexual violence is the second highest form of police brutality. One in four women, one in six men and uncalculated numbers of transgender people will experience sexual harm. Sexual violence thrives in silence and misinformation. The work that my team does to deeply and authentically engage communities obliterates that silence. Our work shifts rape culture into a healing culture, balancing the scales of human degradation with the power of human dignity. 

 We produce a bi-weekly writing workshop, a monthly performance/interview series which highlights the lived experiences of survivors, and an annual event that elevates performances by survivors of sexual harm. We also hold a monthly gathering space for survivors supporting survivors in the rape crisis field to support each other, and create deep relationships with other survivor-serving, community-based organizations in Chicago. All of our programming is developed and led by survivors of sexual harm. 

My work provides myriad opportunities for survivors to gather and share their lived experiences, clarifying the gaps between legislation and implementation and lifting the needs of survivors in dialogue.

CAASE’s community engagement work uses an innovative approach that focuses on repeated engagements with survivors over time. Many organizations that do community engagement work focus on broad outreach, whereas CAASE pursues deep, intentional relationships with survivors and community partners. 

We uniquely center equity in our work via specific policies and practices, with recognition that those who are disproportionately impacted by sexual harm have least access to resources, a truth that is rarely highlighted. To this end, we prioritize service to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ survivors, as well as survivors navigating disabilities and incarceration. The public programming we produce actively disrupts stereotypes about who survivors of sexual harm are, as well as highlights inequities that prevent survivors who are de-centered from accessing justice via the criminal legal system. 

I am committed to paying survivors for their contributions to CAASE; it is common for organizations to seek survivor insights, but uncommon for this labor to be paid. CAASE listens deeply to survivors, co-learns with them and pays them for their insights about their lived experiences. These paid efforts inform our organization’s policy work, which, in the last decade, has changed six Illinois laws to improve outcomes for survivors of sexual harm.

Since 2006, CAASE has impacted humanity by seeking to end sexual harm via the following programs: 

1. Policy engagement in criminal justice reform and implementation, which is accomplished by advocating for new laws and creating data reports that critique existing systems. A key aspect of this work is paying survivors as the experts they are for their consultations/advice/engagement in legislative advocacy. 

2. Prevention education work to educate youths as allies against future sexual harm.

3. Free legal representation for survivors of sexual violation

4. The community engagement work I lead, which is dedicated to deep and sustained engagement with survivor communities. This work includes economically resourcing survivors of sexual harm for sharing their lived experiences via both the arts and their analyses of CAASE’s policies and data reports, training interested survivors to tell their stories dynamically and powerfully, running weekly arts-based virtual programming for survivors, and gathering local and national digital resources to assist survivors. In 2020, we paid survivors over $20,000 to share their stories publicly. Going forward, my goal is to pay survivors to engage in a training program that will prepare them to present their stories for a wide range of audiences, including legislators and their own communities.