Advocates to the Front! 2024 WSCADV Conference

This workshop will focus on building narrative power in rural Washington to address gender-based violence and intersecting issues of economic justice, racial justice, and reproductive justice. Participants will learn to weave narrative strategies into campaign and initiative work, integrating community organizing and strategic communications. The session will include interactive exercises to help programs develop, distribute, and organize narrative change across key issues. Participants will also build connections across programs to use narrative change as a shared project.

Primary prevention initiatives are a critical component in the movement to end gender-based violence, but it can be challenging to juggle with many competing priorities and other contract requirements. This workshop will explore options for how and why to allocate resources towards prevention work, communication strategies to share the beneficial impacts of prevention initiatives with funders, donors, and community partners, and encouragement for managers, directors, and other leaders to "take the leap" in supporting prevention work to greater heights.

This workshop will consider how our movement requires leaders to hold the complexities of trauma-based work alongside our role responsibilities for grant compliance, laws, and HR.  With a lens of grace and compassion for the weight of that charge, participants will learn topics such as: 1) how nice is not always kind, 2) how positions of power require an ongoing commitment to earning trust 3) FEAST principles 4) how leaders are (good) people too, and 5) how to ensure our own needs are tended to so that we can sustain.  There will be time for Q&A for specific leadership/management questions during the final half hour of the session.

Historically remote and rural communities have had limited access to reproductive health care and as a result survivors experience lifelong impacts that can undermine their health and choices. Rural Resources Victim Services created strategic messaging about Reproductive Justice and health care options while making sure neither survivors nor staff had a target on their backs.