0:00:00.3 Moe: Well, coming to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding responding to and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I'm Moe. And in this two-part series, I'll be talking with Sid and Dian about the mapping prevention project, what we did and what we learned.

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0:00:38.6 Moe: I'm here with Sid and Diane from the Mapping Prevention Project, and we're gonna start this podcast episode the way we would start all of our mapping prevention meetings, which is with a moment of grounding.

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0:06:56.6 Moe: The chant that we were just listening to is a chant from a group that I'm a part of with my brother, who was also a part of the Mapping Prevention group, and it's really like an invitation to the ancestors to be a part of... To be a part of what we're doing and to welcome them and also to be remembering our ancestors from where we're from, and also the ancestors like a welcoming to all ancestors everywhere, and we try to always start our meetings with something like that. I like that we're starting off the podcast the same way, it feels really nice. I'm wondering if we can start with what is Mapping Prevention? How did this whole project even get started? 

0:07:44.0 Sid: So mapping prevention is a project that started in late 2019 in King County, Washington. It was rooted in the coalition ending gender-based violence, which is a membership organization of domestic and sexual violence service provider organizations in King County. But it was really drawing on the work of a number of advocates, organizers and activists in King County who are interested in thinking about violence prevention, domestic and sexual violence prevention in new and different ways, and exploring what we know from doing the work, and also we were in the position to apply for some funding that the County had available, which was set aside for a planning process, a community planning process to set the structure for a pilot project that the County was going to find on those pilot... And the pilot project was new work in gender-based violence prevention, and that was sort of how it was set up from the beginning.

0:08:54.5 Sid: So we were able to use those funds to start a participatory action research project that would explore gender-based violence work in our area. And I think I'll pass to Dee to let Dee talk about how that sort of built on the longer term work, both of the coalition and in or out.

0:09:16.2 Diane: We were excited about getting a chance to have some funding to lift up a lot of the BIPOC and queer and trans programming that had been existing and around for a long time, and not just programming within mainstream, non-profits and domestic and sexual violence organizations, but also just some of the really amazing cultural work that was being done by BIPOC communities for a long, long time in Seattle and King County, and I think I was interested in both highlighting and all of the programs that weren't necessarily doing an explicitly prevention work, but we're doing cultural work, and then ended up kind of engaged in anti-violence work, there were just a lot of experiences around racism and also homophobia in the mainstream movement.

0:10:11.9 Diane: And so I ended up spending just so much of my time at the coalition as the prevention and transformative justice coordinator, talking with people about those experiences and wanting to talk about just a really strong work people were producing even in light of the oppression they were experiencing.

0:10:32.5 Moe: And I love that you were able to bring this into this project, like this project became something, I think, different than what was originally intended. [chuckle]

0:10:45.5 Diane: Yeah, I don't think we could have imagined what we were doing before we were doing it, sometimes people say about transformative justice. It's like, you're building the plane while you're flying it, and I 1000% feel like that about this project just because it was the beginning of the pandemic, and now it's hard to imagine our lives without Zoom, but at the time it was hard to imagine our lives indefinitely this project inside of Zoom, we imagine that people were gonna be like people that have been doing long-standing cultural work, getting together, people that have been advocates for 20 years, and getting to talk to each other in person and share a meal and become friends and you know that ended up being different than what we did, exactly.

0:11:30.4 Moe: Yeah, that's a good point. I think it would be interesting to talk about how you all came together and who was involved, and I feel like I should also say that I was part of this project, so not only Mo from NSVRC but Moe who lives in Tacoma and has worked with you both for many years in different capacities.

0:12:00.3 Diane: I knew Sid from working on a project many, many years ago at the Northwest Network of Bisexual Trans Lesbians and Gays survivors of abuse and I just really saw... You said to bring together mostly BIPOC queer trans people to talk about resources for trans people in King County. And it felt really scary. So was like there weren't a lot of resources. And it was sad, and I think that you actually did it, you brought us together was really hopeful and exciting and also just nice to be together with people.

0:12:36.6 Diane: Yeah, and I was excited about a project about prevention and resistance to the criminal legal system, and as a response to domestic and sexual violence being a project that could have research and could have things that we could share afterwards with people beyond our geographical area.

0:12:56.3 Sid: Yeah. We were colleagues there until we came together to work on this project, but I think one of the things that sort of brought us together in a way is that we both were recognizing the work that we were involved with outside of the traditional domestic and sexual violence advocacy groups we were trying to work with. When we were working on that trans guide, I remember us saying, "Okay, well, we've been working so hard to try to make these existing organizations safe places for trans people to go." And we couldn't, as a group, even agreed to put most of those organizations and to this guide, because we did not feel confident enough that we could direct people there, but what we did see is all these arts and cultural spaces and groups people were building and ways of connecting that we're really led by trans and queer people and BIPOC, trans and queer people, and so the resource guide, sort of was full of actual resources, but they weren't the kinds of resources that I think in our field, people think of as resources or think of as violence prevention, and I think in many ways, the project we were doing is trying to make transparent and filled and direct funds to these kinds of resources that are... People have always been building outside of sort of those that are typically sponsored by the state or county or a local funder even, so.

0:14:31.5 Moe: I love hearing the story of how people know each other and how groups come together, 'cause we have such a shared history. So I know the project started with a think tank. Can you say more about what that think tank was and why you did it that way? 

0:14:47.1 Diane: We were directing King County what kind of program should they be funding with new prevention dollars, and we knew that people couldn't really be a part of our group that was gonna be conducting the research if or their group was gonna be applying for the money. So we were thoughtful about that and we were able to have some of those people be a part of our think tank, and it was really just an opportunity to ask some questions, kind of like get people talking to each other and sort of share some of our ideas for what we thought we might... What we might do, and some of the things that came out of that were just how tired people were sort of like telling the county, telling the government what is it that they want, and then definitely not seeing those things happen, but also just not seeing a lot of change happen in what the government always wanting to do, [chuckle] but just like to have a checked a box, an opportunity to have heard from community and then not really active move on that.

0:15:53.0 Diane: So that was something really over sounding. I think the other thing that felt really clear to me was just how in April of 2020 already people were exhausted and overwhelmed by the grief and loss that we had already experienced from COVID at that point, and then simultaneously real mass uprising and resistance to the carceral system to the criminal legal system. And I think this really big piece around... We had always said, "We can never re-imagine courts, we can never re-imagine schools." And there was a literal active building schools while we were in Zoom. Everything online, all of a sudden. So I think that that it was just a very particular moment, a lot of those pieces, I mean, not that we weren't thinking about those things, but I think just trying to develop that and we were wanting to create a group for mapping prevention that was majority BIPOC, majority queer trans. Good representation from people in their twenties and under.

0:17:07.6 Moe: And why did you want to use a participatory action research approach? 

0:17:12.3 Sid: There's a long-term pattern in King County, and I imagine this in many other places, the different state agencies or approaching community groups and saying, "Let's just ask you what you need?" And taking the information that people give and then saying, "Okay, we're gonna use that for our planning purposes." And sort of never the community seeing back sort of the results of that or feeling sort of dissatisfied with what was done and feeling like they maybe were exploited for their time, taking advantage of, but also just not heard. Essentially, I think that that is the pattern of relations that we heard about when we first thought even actually before we applied, I think Dee and I were starting to ask people, "What would be a good version of this project?" Because in a way, what's happening there is the county is trying to get an outside group to go do that work for them, all the outreach, and that is... It was kind of an amazing thing that happened that there was funding available for that process. Before, there was just decisions made about where the program money should go. So in many ways, it was extremely exciting and new to have dedicated funding set aside for a group, an outside group to go and do this work.

0:18:30.0 Sid: And at the same time there was a lot of skepticism about what was being asked then and whether what people said would be listened to. So I think what participatory action research and why I sort of pitched it to Dee and was like maybe we can do it in this other way where I came to it by setting it up in a way that we are actually creating a team to say, "We wanna go ask questions." And sure, county will give you some feedback from what we learned. But the center of the project is not about you and what you want. The center of the project is about questions that this group wants to answer ourselves and we have a lot of learning to do ourselves. We want to grow as people who care about prevention and this is an opportunity for us to go out and build relationships and networks and learn together. So as a person who does research sort of as a job I think about participatory action research as like an attitude towards research. So I'm thinking you know not about how I can become the expert of the thing but how can we set up a process that makes more and more people have knowledge about a thing. So I think it's also like about more and more expertise like who can be in charge or who can know things.

0:19:44.4 Sid: So we knew coming in that a lot of people had a lot of knowledge in our community about prevention and that a lot of the knowledge that was being produced by Black and Indigenous people and people of color and queer and trans people was being sort of erased or not seen as violence prevention about... And nor funded, which was essential to our project which was like moving resources. We knew that coming in, we knew there was so much knowledge and we were balancing that I think at the same time as being people in those organizations who knew that we were also knowledgeable but also learners and continuing to be learners. And being humble and being confident. Blending those things as we go forward to learn.

0:20:28.9 S22: And so I think at its best participatory action research is about getting people involved. We're all a part of it. We are doing sort of a systematic look at something, we're like inquisitive and trying to learn something new and then of course action in the middle that we aren't going to just take that information and move it away from those people who participated but we're going to try to give it back and we're going to try to actually make some social change based on what we learn and do together. So we're responsible and accountable to those people who we asked to help us build our knowledge together.

0:21:06.7 Moe: I'm really glad that you shared about participatory action research. It was really a great thing to be involved in. What else can you tell me about the Mapping Prevention group and what actions the group did together? 

0:21:18.8 Diane: I don't know that I can talk about what Mapping Prevention is without talking about this really amazing like fierce phenomenal, super unique group that we came together where we had you know reproductive justice activists, we had youth worker like artists, and a lot of folks that have been in the anti-violence movement for a long time. So the art that we produced together, conversations that we had really led us to getting to come up with like what the action items were going to be for the project. And so we did 46 long in-depth interviews with cultural workers and anti-violence activists advocates. We really wanted the interviews to be meaningful and connecting and to make sure that what the things that people were asking us about we got back to them with. So I would end an interview and have just like a page of notes and then I would like come back to the interviewee with, what are all the resources around these things. But everybody on the team conducted at least one interview. Out of those interviews came, yeah, a lot of podcasts and other projects which is pretty exciting. And then we also conducted a survey of over 600 people.

0:22:38.2 Diane: And we we'd really tried to have a focus of people under the age of 25. I know we had a lot of people in the field that filled out the survey and a lot of those half about half of those people I think were BIPOC folks. So those were some of the action items and then I mean also we did a really fun event at the kind of the end of that a block party and where we had like prizes and music and just like getting to share a couple of breakout rooms on participatory action research and people getting to hear more in-depthly from some of the programs that got funding.

0:23:15.2 Diane: And then we wrote a really beautiful paper that also looks really beautiful which to me felt special. But process was just as important as like what the outcome was and that was intentional. We would even say like we want these meetings we want these events to be something that you come to and you feel better for having come as opposed to like drained and sad that you wasted your time.

0:23:45.5 Sid: Yeah, as you're providing all those examples, Dee, and I was just sort of remembering. I feel like part of the action was having a community conversation and really promoting a community conversation about what violence prevention looks like outside of criminal justice solutions. And one of the reasons... I mean, that's obviously something that all of us cared about and were deeply in conversation about already but we started this project at the beginning of 2020 and it was that spring when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed and in Seattle there was a huge conversation about divesting from police and at the same time the very familiar sort of go-tos for people in opposition to those ideas, "What about domestic and sexual violence?" So we really had an opportunity to be, as people who've been wronged, interested in preventing domestic and sexual violence and knowing that policing and prisons are not the way to do that. To really use a survey, for example, as a way to get people sort of engaged with the ideas of transformative justice, the preventative side of that. What would it take for us to have the kind of world in which we were free of violence? What do people need to be able to feel safe? 

0:25:02.8 Sid: Those were the kinds of questions on there. So even the survey was about collecting the data but it was actually much more I think about sort of raising the questions and engaging people in those questions and then we were able to use what people provided back that in the interviews to drive the next level of conversation, get the block party. So I think a big action was that social media as Dee was saying but I think also I don't want to lose that one of the pieces, we had the opportunity to shape where the county funds were gonna go for these violence prevention pilot projects as they were calling them and we could have done a lot of things in terms of taking what we learned and advising the county and one of the things we decided as a group which I think was really useful and it wound up being successful though I think we didn't know if it would be was instead of writing a report to them we literally wrote a request for proposals.

0:25:58.4 Sid: We wrote it in the way that they typically write requests for proposals. We told them this is what we think for RFP should look like when it goes out to communities, these are the kinds of projects these are the kinds of things that we heard people say should be funded and they wound up essentially using our exact language when it went out and I... We had great partners at the county. But if we had just given a report it would have been up to them to interpret how that should go into that request and so that was I think an action piece that our group decided was really important.

0:26:33.9 Sid: And then our report that that we wrote was also sort of geared towards other kinds of funders in order to elevate sort of the work that we did, this is not just about this one source of funds that's going to potentially come and go but that we wrote something that other other funders could use to think about where they put resources for gender-based violence prevention and we already know it's been taken up by some other funders which is great.

0:27:00.4 Moe: Just hearing you both share these examples brings back so many memories. I feel like we're all saying that like, "Oh, this is... " I remember being at these meetings and being able to hear the story back about kind of how everything was shaped and how this project and this group was able to be impacted by everything else that was going on around us in the world is really... I think it's just a really great example of how a group can come together and be really flexible and and still have this goal but kind of build as we are meeting and as we are doing things, yeah. One of the other things that I really loved about this project and being able to be a part of it and being a part of these conversations is that the idea of prevention, like we were talking about before, was filled with nuance. We weren't having just that limited definition of prevention as this idea of stopping violence before it ever has a chance to happen. And so I'm wondering if you could say more about how you're thinking about prevention like both shaped the project and maybe changed throughout the project? 

0:28:21.8 Diane: I mean, I think this is an opportunity to talk about something that I kind of been thinking about of just like I'm a survivor of multiple forms of violence. I grew up and... I grew up and experienced sexual violence, domestic violence, and I think that I never really saw this field. As a young person as a field that was a place that I could work or like experience healing. I think I just really thought that that was for like other people that hadn't had those experiences. And when I started working at a shelter I was like, "Oh, actually my experiences are really helpful," right, for doing this work. And I think at every level as an advocate doing more prevention outreach and education work I sort of...

0:29:06.0 Diane: I was trying to figure out how to make a path for myself and my people and my community and the people that I grew up with. "How do we make this movement?" If a third to a fourth of women and... I mean, just the category there's... It's so massive. There's no way that like the current responses we have could really respond. And so I think that I have really been interested in like figuring out how everybody has to be a part of this movement to end violence and to end oppression and we can't actually parse out just ending domestic and sexual violence without ending racism and classism and homophobia and all other forms of oppression.

0:29:45.6 Diane: I did not believe that we could use the master's tools to solve this problem. I did not think that we could use really structured like mainstream approaches to to fix these issues or to like address them. And, I think, even when I hear a word like outcomes I get very nervous that we're trying to put really amazing responsive and like fluid responses, I guess, into like a box, right? And so I similarly like having heard PAR or like research was like very nervous about what that could mean? And then, for me, like the transformation was really around like just seeing how this really was a way to validate and prop up the programs that I saw doing like the most amazing work, right, and the people and the groups that...

0:30:40.9 Diane: People really need advocates to to try to write a mock RFP, right? To tell the government, to tell funders this is how you could write a proposal for funds in a way that speaks to the most people, right? And I think that that was something I got really interested in. And I'm starting to understand slowly it could happen, right? But I do think that it really was a process. And for me it was a process that happened while I was doing it that I was like interviewing people and realizing "Oh, we're gonna be able to frame what people are actually saying they need to funders before the funding applications even go out," right? And that was a really just different process than I had been a part of before having been more on the like program side for most of my now 20 years in the field.

0:31:40.8 Sid: I think in many ways this is a non-profit wide problem but in domestic and sexual violence advocacy we and in King County at least which I'm most familiar with there. We've been in a trap, like an inclusion trap, right? The idea being that we know a lot of the organizations are sort of founded on principles that are reflective of white supremacy and the gender binary and these are sort of underneath our organizations and we're trying to sort of fix them or repair them or make them better, put more people of color and put more diversity into them, right, as a way to sort of change them and transform them and of course organizations have also tried to learn from mistakes and adapt and that's sort of been like the hamster wheel a little bit. And I just saw Dee doing like so much care work for people who are in these organizations and I know Moe you've also done that work just people kind of in sort of the consequences on people who are working in the organization when that's the wheel you're in and so I think your question about like how are we trying to think of prevention differently was how do we move from the this other center not try to make the organizations that are haven't been sort of meeting the needs of more marginalized people especially multiply marginalized people like how do we actually go to them models and ideas that are really born out of the communities that are left out of these systems.

0:33:13.6 Sid: So I think that was sort of the move we made. And one of the things, I think... One of the first things that happened when we came together as a team is sort of we need to sit and acknowledge that because we're working, we're doing this based on this coalition we need to acknowledge the history of racism within the organizations we're sort of centered in and that that had to be done at the outset to build trust as a group to know where we were moving from as a group. One of our members offered a tool that she had used with a lot of other groups and brought that to one of our first meetings and that tool was sort of like, "What are anti-racist commitments as a group?"

0:33:52.1 Sid: "What is our understanding as a group of how we're going to move and think about our own commitments?" And I think that really set us up so well to then ask at every step is what we're doing now reflective of that that I think we had already been doing some of the bringing in some of the cultural work and our ancestors like Dee spoke about. We had already done that a few times, but that moment helped us be like, "Oh we're doing this thing, let's actually continue to do that, let's have a framework for why we're doing that, let's talk about that as part of an anti-racist commitment to our meeting, culture, and how we're moving." I think that was like real shift and also an example of how this wasn't about me as somebody as a trained researcher bringing in research tools and saying these are the tools we're going to use it was about saying... All of us have tools we've been using that are useful for research, unless when somebody sees something, "Oh this tool would be useful, let's use that. Let's actually kind of merge our tools as a group."

0:34:54.7 Moe: Let's talk about what our next podcast together will cover.

0:34:58.7 Sid: I know that our second podcast is going to focus more on what we found when we had all this amazing data like the interviews that... 46 interviews with people talking about their work in depth and we wanted to try to think about what we were learning when we put those interviews together. We saw sort of trends or core ideas that were falling kind of into these four areas.

0:35:25.0 Diane: So the four areas that we in talking with people decided kind of worked as categories although there was lots of overlap. We drew it in the report as concentric circles so community and belonging, abolition and transformation, healing and accountability, liberation and agency, but it was really helpful for us and especially thinking through the interviews. So those were developed after we... After we did all the interviews and we're going through them.

0:36:00.6 Moe: I'm really looking forward to our next conversation about this. It's been really fun to talk through this process with you and I just know that people are going to be really excited to hear about all of the knowledge and wisdom that came from the action items in the project and it'll be fun to talk with you about it again. So thanks both of you for being here.

0:36:24.7 Moe: Thanks for listening to this episode of resource on the go for more resources and information about preventing sexual assault visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources at nsvrc.org.

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