Survivors Society

Survivors Society is a U.S based Black and survivor-led incubator. The mission is to interrupt the culture of silence, inconvenience, enablement, and discomfort that interferes with progressive and radical organizations ability to adopt ending sexual violence as a core political tenet and survivor justice embodied as a cultural practice. 

We do this by cultivating the leadership, well-being, political development, radical experiments, and the relationships between those most impacted by sexual violence. 

Our primary audience is Black people within progressive and radical organizations. Participants can be organizers, communicators, narrators, artists, thought leaders, facilitators, direct service providers, resource mobilizers, volunteers, and more. The aspect that connects us is that participants self-identify as people who have experienced sexual violence. Our secondary audience is people who self-identify as Black and are a part of the Black freedom movement but do not identify as an experiencer of sexual violence. 

We affirm that people can and should make meaning of their own experiences and opt-in based on how they self-identify.We know that identities are not fixed, nor does identifying as a part of one community (experiencer of sexual violence) exempt you from being a part of another community (enabler or abuser of sexual violence). 

Finally, we strive to create programming that normalizes and invites the vastness of identities Black people hold. Getting to a world free from sexual violence requires the centering the leadership of Black gender non-conforming people, transgender, and cis-gender women, femmes, migrants, people without documentation, people living with disabilities across the spectrum, cash poor and low-income Black people, and more people living at the margins of what this society deems fully human. It is impossible otherwise. 

Survivors Society is one organization within the broader Survivor Justice, Gender Justice, and Racial Justice movements. It aligns with the ultimate goal of eradicating sexual violence and transforming the cultural, environmental, economic, and healing realities of people who have experienced sexual violence and their communities.