Grant Application Excerpt - Narrative on Organizational Cultural Responsiveness
Commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) survivors can be difficult to reach and have complex needs due to stigma, lack of understanding, and the number of co-occurring violences experienced by people who have survived prostitution.[1] We bridge this gap by providing a space for survivors to connect with other survivors to have their needs met holistically, and in ways that promote anti-racism, LGBQT+ support, accessibility, and women’s empowerment. For those with immediate safety or security concerns, connections to OPS services can include case management, developing a safety plan, direct financial support and assistance in accessing necessary housing or services, chemical dependency and recovery support, and accompaniment while seeking safety through institutional legal or criminal processes. When someone’s immediate safety needs are met, they have more space to heal emotionally, psychologically, and comprehensively; this is facilitated through holistic and culturally relevant services that encourage survivors to strengthen their sense of self, belief in their self-efficacy, and imagine a future for themselves that is free of violence and exploitation. At OPS, these services include in-house therapy, integrated movement therapy groups, art therapy groups, community meals, and specific support groups including a chemical dependency group and an affinity group for Black women survivors. For participants who are seeking to exit prostitution, OPS services are designed to encourage and support survivors through that process at the pace they need. We have several partnerships with organizations that can either support housing searches or reduce housing barriers for survivors. Addressing professional and skill-based advancement needs of participants also provides avenues for seeking stability and finding a sense of purpose and belonging. Support groups where survivors can speak to and encourage each other, and see themselves reflected not just in the other attendees but also in the group facilitators, offer social support and a sense of community.
OPS services have always carried elements of mobile flexible advocacy. The unique needs, barriers, and environments present in the lives of survivors can make meeting at an office or community center difficult. Street outreach is also an important aspect of this work. Meeting survivors on their terms has often meant literally meeting in places like coffee shops, shelters, off the ‘track’, hospitals, or court. The strengths of these services are augmented when delivered alongside knowledgeable, holistic therapeutic care to address the mental health needs of CSE survivors across the spectrum of healing. In 2016 OPS started a formalized partnership with other Seattle organizations offering services to adult survivors of CSE. The XXXXX partnership consists of the XXXX, XXXX, XXXX, and OPS. This partnership created outreach opportunities, low-barrier drop-in services, easier referrals, direct client financial assistance, and opportunities for pre-arrest diversion. Each point of entry provides clients with survivor-driven, trauma-informed mobile assistance, meeting them at variable safe locations and offering community-based wraparound services grounded in emerging best practices and the institutional knowledge of the collaborating agencies.
OPS was founded by CSE survivors and prioritizes hiring and elevating survivors in all we do. Both the Executive Director of OPS and the XXXX are survivors, and XX% of staff are survivors. Many are also former participants of OPS services. About XX% of OPS staff are BIPOC women. OPS staff hold many other intersecting identities that reflect the populations we serve, including LGBTQ+ identities, having physical and mental disabilities, and histories of incarceration, resource scarcity, substance use disorder, domestic violence, and sexual assault. Advocates are familiar with cultural norms and etiquette of the Aurora Avenue ‘track,’ use their lived experiences to inform safety and risk when interacting with participants, and are identified as community members by participants. Many of us have prior experiences navigating social services and economic support resources due to our histories; this is helpful when supporting participants in navigating these systems, but has also given us lived experience with what does not work at social service agencies to better design services that will work for our communities.
Services for CSE survivors must be comprehensive, survivor-centered, culturally relevant, and free of stigma and judgment.[2] They must also be trauma-informed with an awareness of the multiple, complex traumas most CSE survivors have experienced. OPS practices include trauma-informed, victim-centered approaches that acknowledge survivors as the experts of their own experiences. Survivor-to-survivor methods of advocacy and support are particularly important in this context and a major strength of OPS. While CSE survivors can be difficult to engage in services or to continue to retain supportive care, services designed by and facilitated by other survivors can create a bridge to reach these populations. While other institutions throughout Seattle, and within our XXXX partnership, provide assistance to CSE survivors or address other social disparities that disproportionately impact this population, OPS is unique in that services are designed and provided by other CSE survivors, in an organization led by survivors. These organizations understand the limitations of the support they provide, and frequently refer clients that want to connect with someone who intimately understands their experiences. Besides the trauma they have experienced, intersecting marginalizations and vulnerabilities that contribute to CSE mean that many of our participants are underserved and face discrimination when attempting to seek support. Staff members reflect the communities we serve in the identities we hold and experiences we’ve had. We understand the importance of specialized services, culturally responsive care, and the need to acknowledge and celebrate identities and points of resilience when working with CSE survivors.
As a survivor-run and -centered organization, OPS employs community-based participatory practices throughout its programming. We regularly engage with participants and community leaders to improve our decision-making and operations to reflect the needs of our community. Because CSE is heavily defined as the confluence of oppressions, particularly racism and misogyny, the majority of people impacted by CSE are Black, Indigenous, Latine, and other Women of Color. This is represented in our participants, staff, services, and approach. While all our services are designed to be anti-racist and accessible, we also have specific programming to meet these needs including direct client assistance funds set aside expressly for BIPOC participants and a support group that is run by and for Black women to discuss the intersections of racism with misogyny and the violence they experienced through commercial sexual exploitation. This support group, XXXXXXXX, is one of our most well-loved and supported groups despite also being our newest.
We are also intentional in our community partnerships and strengthen the support we provide through close ties with culturally-specific and BIPOC-led organizations. A partnership that has been particularly successful in outreach and mobile flexible advocacy has been our connection with XXXX XXXX. This coffee shop and meeting space focused on Black culture and community is located on Aurora Avenue. We partner to conduct street outreach that incorporates concurrent events at XXXX including monthly survivor poetry readings and a clothing swap. This has provided a much-needed space for survivors who are seeking connection around multiple identities and that addresses the ways that race and gender, or racism and trauma histories with gender-based violence, inform each other.
We recognize that no one organization can meet the needs of all survivors, so lean on our partnerships and referral networks to ensure participants are appropriately served. Examples of this include a formal partnership with XXX XXXXX to provide both LGBTQ+- and recovery-specific support to survivors, referrals to organizations like XXXX or XXXX that meet the cultural and linguistic needs of participants, and establishing processes for referrals to XXXX for participants who do not self-identify as women. Given over XX% of OPS participants have physical, mental, and developmental disabilities, OPS staff remain engaged with disability-focused resources throughout the region, and support participants in connecting with appropriate programs and supports. Childhood or adult trauma from domestic and sexual violence can influence the ways one enters or is forced into the sex trade. [3] At OPS, nearly all clients report experiencing domestic violence at the time of their intake. Sexual violence is also inherent to the sex trade. Whether survivors view every one of these exchanges as an act of rape and critique the concept of consent when alternative options do not exist, or only label specific assaults in that way, all women seeking services at OPS report experiencing sexual violence while in ‘the life’. Despite this, most sexual assault or domestic violence-specific services do not focus on CSE survivors and are often unfamiliar with CSE dynamics. We partner with need-specific organizations that provide legal, medical, or other domestic violence and sexual assault-specific services, and offer technical assistance to strengthen the ways our partners approach CSE and CSE survivors.
OPS embeds anti-racist, anti-sexist, and gender-affirming approaches in every aspect of our work. Our services are trauma-informed and attuned to the needs of survivors and the intersecting identities and marginalizations they hold. We engage in practices with an awareness that while all survivors have faced hardship, our struggles are not the same. The result of this consciousness has been programming and practices that look into the ways structural factors impact trauma and resilience. In our goal of modeling services by and for priority populations we recognize dynamics of power, oppression, and identities that occur within our communities and that impact our experiences. We know encouraging equity can be a tool for CSE/C prevention, and prioritize this perspective in policy advocacy and consultations. OPS also regularly works on improving racial equity within the organization, including a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, ongoing trainings on meeting survivor needs and strengthening allyship in the workplace, and assessing staff operations to ensure they are just.
Our recruitment and hiring practices are designed to continue our mission to be a predominantly survivor-staffed organization and to ensure that those providing services intimately understand the needs of those we serve. We believe that retaining and supporting employees who have experienced various co-occurring traumas must look different from mainstream workplace culture. Some ways we are different from other organizations include low-barrier hiring practices, a 36-hour work week with flexible scheduling, unlimited sick leave, self-care days, ongoing professional development opportunities including opportunities for staff to share expertise with others, individual professional development funding, including employees on every level of the organization in decision-making and strategic planning, and restorative HR practices and improvement plans. OPS has also contracted with an anti-racism consultant experienced in gender-based violence organizations who are providing an assessment of the organization, training for staff, leadership guidance, and facilitation of problem-solving discussions.
OPS onboards and provides continuous training to staff with an anti-oppression lens. This includes ongoing content-based trainings on different identities or experiences, lessons in empathy and aligning with others across identities around a shared goal of liberation, and trauma-informed practices within and external to our organization. OPS provides training and technical assistance focused on trauma-informed and survivor-centered workplaces and the best practices for recruiting and retaining survivors as employees.
OPS is focused on building and strengthening relationships with other organizations and community partners to center groups that provide culturally-responsive services or support around issues that disproportionately impact BIPOC community members. In practice, this looks like tapping into individual networks and facilitating connections throughout the organization, participating in programming from partner organizations to listen and do the groundwork that supports the mission of these groups, and ensuring that OPS continues to challenge disparities in resources or platforms for our survivor staff and participants dependent on the different identities they hold. We are also expanding our relationships with other organizations beyond those that explicitly support CSE or trafficking survivors to meet the many diverse needs of these communities. This involves connections with domestic violence and sexual assault agencies, immigration assistance, legal aid, racial justice organizers, systems that provide housing and other necessary resources, LGBTQ+ empowerment programs, healthcare providers, and other groups that offer assistance to people throughout the region.
CSE survivors connect to OPS for many reasons. Many OPS participants are seeking support around emergency or safety needs, or need assistance in harm reduction practices while still in the sex trade. Others are seeking support in their healing process, whether that is mental health support, addiction and recovery-based services, economic empowerment or professional development, and gaining a stronger sense of self. Some participants remain connected with OPS to find and form community and seek social support related to their identities as survivors. Because of these diverse needs, we measure success from survivors identifying and then working towards their self-defined goals. OPS has used this view to structure our performance commitments for prior XXXX grant reporting requirements. We look at the number of survivors served, how many have created a ‘service plan’ or identified their goals and a count of those who have made progress towards their individual goals. Other metrics we track include calls to our helpline, the number of those contacted during outreach events, the development of a personalized economic empowerment plan, and engagement in specific services like integrated movement therapy, counseling, and substance use disorder support.
While the focus of our services is to provide successful support and healing assistance to survivors, we believe that these activities also move us closer to equity and liberation because they shift our social landscape. Services that come from within a community, exist to raise up survivors so that they may in turn encourage and support other survivors, and push against the traditional nonprofit model. Survivors taking a role as leaders in the movement, or using their skills and experiences to excel in the workplace, in their art, or other forms of expression shifts the ways survivors are seen and responded to by the dominant culture. Survivors as decision-makers in social services and policy can increase equity and anti-oppressive practices across regions.
[1] Robitz, R., Ulloa, E. C., Salazar, M., & Ulibarri, M. D. (2020). Mental health service needs of commercially sexually exploited youth: voices of survivors and stakeholders. Violence and Victims, 35(3), 354-362.
[2] Decker, M., Rouhani, S., Park, J. N., Galai, N., Footer, K., White, R. & Sherman, S. (2021). Incidence and predictors of violence from clients, intimate partners and police in a prospective US-based cohort of women in sex work. Occupational and environmental medicine, 78(3), 160-166.
[3] Jiwatram-Negrón, T., & El-Bassel, N. (2019). Overlapping intimate partner violence and sex trading among high-risk women: Implications for practice. Women & health, 59(6), 672-686; Puigvert, L., Duque, E., Merodio, G., & Melgar, P. (2021). A systematic review of family and social relationships: implications for sex trafficking recruitment and victimisation. Families, Relationships and Societies, 1-17.
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