OUR CORE VALUES
Gender Justice
So often minimized, overlooked and sacrificed in efforts for social justice, racial justice, economic justice, food justice and more, gender justice is essential to any social progress, and is a core value of AWS.
Equity
Our work centers marginalized communities and reflects our commitment to opportunities, access and advancement for all to thrive and flourish, across lines of social identity and experience.
Language and Cultural Responsiveness
Our work upholds language and cultural responsiveness as essential components of effective work to end violence.
Compassion
We value compassion not just when it is easy, but when it takes commitment, struggle, self-grounding, and a re-orienting of our mindset. We strive to grow beyond simple responses of judgment, anger, blame, and withdrawal. Compassion is key.
Integrity
We uphold integrity in our work by holding ourselves to the same standards we want others to meet, and by taking responsibility for our actions and impacts.
Sustainability
We serve our mission in dependable and effective ways when we grow responsibly and sustain ourselves and each other, our programs and organization, our communities, and our field overall.
our approach is…
Intersectional
AWS draws from Kimberle Crenshaw’s critical race theory in our approach to ending gender-based violence. AWS’s approach to crisis response, program development, staffing, advocacy, collaboration, and movement building is grounded in intersectionality.
Margin-to-Center
AWS draws from Margin to Center, Bell Hooks’ 1984 and 2014 book of feminist theory to center survivors and communities who are marginalized in our field, systems, communities, and society-at-large. When we maintain a practice of centering the marginalized, we build strategies that are more likely to integrate support for all.
Survivor Centered
Survivors have been drivers of the movement to end gender-based violence around the world. AWS's work centers the experiences of survivors, with survivors as active partners in developing and implementing their own plans for safety, care and action, and engaging as advisors to AWS’s programs. We believe that grounding our work in the daily lives and leadership of survivors allows us to make a profound, authentic and current contribution to social change beyond the walls of the shelter and organization.
Trauma-Informed
AWS uses a trauma-informed approach in its program development, organizational development, and collaboration and movement building work. We combine an evolving understanding of brain and body science, culture, and history to make our responses grounded, healing, and effective.
Self-Reflective and Responsible
Without self-reflection, we do not advance individually or collectively. Self-reflection and the taking of personal responsibility requires emotional education, intelligence, awareness, mutual vulnerability, action, wisdom, and time.
Building a Movement
AWS’s vision and goals extend far beyond the limits of one career, program, organization, community, piece of legislation, or social action. We take the long view of the movement for social and gender justice, and of our role in it. We build bridges to last.
our culture
Anti-Oppression and Anti-Homo/Bi/Transphobia
There are many ways that people have and continue to divide themselves from one another and provide or deny rights and opportunities based on those divisions. AWS uses a holistic approach in eliminating all forms of violence and oppression, while promoting shared power and equitable access to well-being. AWS recognizes that lesbian, bisexual, queer women and transgender and gender nonbinary and/or gender non-conforming survivors of violence face compounded forms of oppression within many communities, organizations, systems and laws. AWS developed programming and ally-based infrastructure since the early 1990’s to support LGBTQ+ communities and survivors in our organization and communities.
Team-Based and Ethically Collaborative
When we work toward a shared mission and vision, more minds are better than one. AWS’s structure has been team based since our inception. Collaborations are built with equity in mind, not equality in order to empower those who are smaller, newer, less resourced, and marginalized.
Consensus Oriented
AWS values informed consensus-building and shared leadership and avoids over-dependence on hierarchy. Each team member is a vital part of AWS, and takes responsibility for their own learning and work performance and practices self-reflection and openness to input and feedback from other staff. Sustainable decisions contain group input, discussion, and consensus-building.
Direct Communication
Direct communication that is compassionate, curious, and that withholds pre-judgment and critique is essential to our culture and to the work of ending abuse.
Responsible Use of Power
Power has no inherent positive or negative value. We neither abuse or shirk power and privilege. Instead we take responsibility for the powers and privileges that we have, and use them to support empowerment, in service of AWS’s mission, values, and approaches.
WHY DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND ANTI-OPPRESSION?
The root cause of domestic violence is the abuse of power.
Domestic violence and anti-oppression work both understand that the root cause of violence is the abuse of power. We recognize the abuses of power inherent in sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ageism and ableism. Ignorance of power imbalances can result in unintentional collusion with oppressive norms. By using an anti-oppression framework in our organization, we cultivate an ongoing awareness of power so that our anti-violence programs can reflect respect, justice and peace.
Gendered violence is minimized and misunderstood as "personal".
In families, communities, institutions and movements, both conservative and progressive, gender oppression and gendered violence tend to be minimized, or relegated as personal instead of political. Gendered violence is de-prioritized, under-analyzed and rendered irrelevant to issues considered to be larger or more pressing. Gendered violence reflects and bolsters systemic aggression and oppression, and inflicts damage of devastating scope and depth in our world.
Everyone deserves safety.
If we are to fully uphold our commitment to end violence against women, then we must continually work to ensure that all women have access to programs, services and support. We must address barriers (linguistic, cultural, physical, etc.) that may deny survivors safety and support. AWS is committed to making all areas of our organization (and beyond) reflective of an approach that sees and values everyone.
Basic needs are not special needs.
If we see our existing services as core, supplementing them depending on special populations, the special elements always seem extra, like add-ons and are the first to go in lean times. For a DV survivor who is in a wheelchair, a shelter that is wheelchair accessible is a basic need, not a special one. Social and legal services that can let her know her rights and connect her with independent living resources are a necessity. If someone speaks Burmese and not English, speaking to a Burmese speaking advocate is a basic need, not a special need, for the survivor.
Anti-Oppression work includes mindful interactions.
We are mindful about how we interact with everyone. Sometimes it can be easy for organizations to think of anti-oppression work only as it relates to clients. But we meaningfully put anti-oppression values into practice when we use them with everyone in the day-to-day, including those we disagree with, those who have more or less power than we do in any interaction, and those we don't like.
Patience and ongoing learning are time savers and life savers.
Experiential differences between the privileged and oppressed are complicated. Communication between these groups can be painful and challenging. Ongoing dialogue and learning about how power, privilege and oppression play out, helps to create channels of understanding and trust. These channels act as communication lifelines when real-time incidents (i.e. the messy, painful, disappointing ones that can tear agencies apart) occur.
Lifelong work, so celebrate milestones.
We cannot end gender oppression and social inequity our lifetime. But in a single generation we can make major transformations in the individual lives of our clients and their families, in communities, media, laws and cultural values. "No end" does not equal "no successes. We celebrate every win, no matter how small.
Find the courage to change and evolve.
Change is hard; there is always some resistance within us and others. But we have hope that our clients can make major transformations for themselves and their families; we have hope that our communities can embrace the values and practices of health and peace, rather than collusion, dominance and victim-blaming; and we have hope that individuals using violence can commit to choosing new ways of living. As individuals, as organizations and as a movement, we are stronger when we can assess our environment, identify needs for change and evolution, and move forward.
Be good allies.
It takes commitment, forethought and action to be a good ally. We must challenge imbalances and abuses of power, and build bridges across the differences that they cause. Inside AWS, A commitment to being good allies is built into our operating structure. Outside of the walls of AWS, an anti-oppression approach built on being a good ally can help us to transcend turf and ego issues. It can be our best contribution toward building a bigger movement to end domestic violence.