Movement Makers at 2016 National Sexual Assault Conference

At the beginning of September, in Washington, DC, over one thousand activists gathered for the annual National Sexual Assault Conference. Movement Makers and were there to explore movement building with fellow advocates.

‍Building a Movement: Huge Pivots and Leaps

‍Movement Makers have been working with coalitions and mainstream organizations across the country to sharpen the picture of the U.S. movement to end violence against girls and women. In this workshop, Building a Movement: Huge Pivots and Leaps, Movement Makers Nan Stoops, Kelly Miller along with Sandra Henriques provided a brief overview of the collective vision and needed pivots, and led the participants in a Building Movement Conversation, exploring where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how we need to be as leaders to get there as a movement. Hear about the learning to date, and contribute your own perspectives on the current movement and the most strategic pivots we need to make to move towards a world without any kind of violence against girls and women.

Building An Intersectional Movement

‍Audre Lorde stated, “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Movement Makers Alexis Flanagan, Archi Pyati, and Scheherazade Tillet joined together to share a Liberation & Equity frame, laying the ground for a much-needed movement building conversation on the intersections of race and gender equity. In the second part of this workshop, participants engaged in a strategy session to discuss what we all can do to strengthen the violence against women movement’s intersectional approach and lens. Collectively, participants explored creative and effective multi-issue strategies that include the experiences of girls, women, trans-people, and gender non-conforming people of color.

‍Building a Movement Stance

‍Forward Stance is a mind-body approach to movement building that uses our bodies to enhance and shift the ways the mind can understand, absorb, learn, and imagine. We over-extend ourselves and react defensively when we don’t adopt a forward stance. In this interactive workshop, Movement Makers Nan Stoops and Beckie Masaki helped participants understand how stance, energy, awareness, and rhythm play a role in growing our movement’s power to end violence against girls and women.

‍Building  a Movement: Inspired to Action

‍Movement Makers Lynn Rosenthal, Vivian Huelgo, and David Lee led workshop participants in a discussion about what inspires people to action. The questions around inspiration to action/activism moved from personal, organizational, to movement: Tell the story of what inspired you to come to the work, how does your organization do activism, what’s on the horizon for activism in the movement? What can we do to inspire action? What are things we can move on and what do we need from each other to help support us to leave the conference and do activism?