More than a year after the arson attack that destroyed our Mid-City offices, Women With A Vision has been working hard to rebuild our physical infrastructure, to rebuild a home that would provide a safe space for our clients, and in which we will be able to serve our community through educational services, harm reduction resources, and programs focusing on improving the lives of women and their families.
But space for us is more than a physical structure; so much of our work is also about sharing emotional and mental space with people – it’s about building and sustaining close relationships with the women and LGBTQ communities we’ve worked with for over twenty years. It’s about listening to their needs and hearing their stories. It’s about providing room for the vulnerable populations often most adversely impacted by our city’s laws and policies – the poor, women, transgendered people, and disenfranchised communities of color – to take the stage, and to be at the forefront of making the changes they want to see in the city and in the world.
New Orleans is a city in flux, still struggling to rebuild from one of the greatest disasters in its history. Eight years after Hurricane Katrina, some New Orleans neighborhoods have rebounded, but many have been left out (and actually pushed out) of the recovery process. Low-income communities continue to face difficulties in accessing affordable health care (exacerbated by the destruction of the city’s safety-net healthcare system), affordable housing (rents have quadrupled since Hurricane Katrina and continue to rise as gentrification takes root in several poor communities of color), food, education, and jobs. There are communities where crime and trauma are every-day lived experiences for families and children.
“It’s a problem when post-traumatic stress disorder is treated like a thing that only happens after a large, tragic exceptional event disrupts your life,” said Shaquita Borden, Women With A Vision’s Director of Program Development and a PhD candidate in Public Health at University of Alabama Birmingham. “This doesn’t address what happens to people when their entire life is one exceptional event. We work with women who have spent their lives dealing with tragedy.”
At WWAV we deal with this simple truth: the women and LGBTQ people that we support  continue to carry the scars of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, systemic poverty, HIV/AIDS, and domestic violence. That’s why a key part of WWAV’s rebuilding post-arson has been about finding ways to bring together these communities to discuss the social justice and structural health issues that affect their lives in New Orleans.
“What do we mean by community voice?” posed Desiree Evans, Women With A Vision’s Education and Outreach Director. “We mean giving space to the people most impacted. Voice matters because so often the marginalized communities we work with have been spoken over. They’re invisibilized, or even worse, hyper-visibilized – meaning they’re turned into a stereotype, an image, that politicians and the mass media blame for all the ills happening in our cities. Our communities become synonymous with ‘problems that need fixing’, and in the process they are stripped of their humanity. But at Women With a Vision, we are about recognizing the humanity in our communities. We move with and work from a philosophy steeped in the principles of human rights and human dignity. The people we work with deserve a voice, a place at the table, and deserve a right to live in this city and be heard.”
Women With a Vision’s new Community Voices Project was birthed from the idea that the people who are best able to speak about the needs of a community are the ones who belong to that community. In monthly meetings, we have begun to create safe spaces for women and the LGBTQ community to talk about their experiences and to share their stories.
As Women With a Vision’s Executive Director Deon Haywood said at the first meeting, “After our success working on the NO Justice campaign, the majority of the women we worked with, they started saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do next? What’s our next fight?'” For Haywood and the staff of WWAV, the first step to answering that question has been to ask the women most impacted: What do you need? What is important in your life? What do you want to see happen?
This summer’s meetings are the first in a series intended to engage our populations in discussions and advocacy related to policies that are ultimately harmful to their lives and their health, creating a safe space for them to meet regularly to talk about topics important to them, to define their issues in their own terms, and to share stories that may never have been spoken out loud before.
“At WWAV, we want to develop our campaigns with direct input from the women we work with – sex workers, substance users, formerly incarcerated, and LGBTQ women,” Haywood said. “We never like to take on a campaign where we are sitting around and deciding for ourselves. Everybody has a part to play, a role here in making a change. We’re talking about building a movement in New Orleans made up of poor people, low-income people, no-income people, drug users. We want to give these women a place to speak their truths.”
Women With a Vision launched its first Community Voices Project event on July 25, 2013, holding space with a room full of formerly-incarcerated women.
“No matter where we go, nobody seemed to be talking about the issues of how incarceration affects women, their families, their daily life. We just haven’t heard a lot about this,” Haywood said. “We wanted to change that.”
WWAV is working with women to explore the stigma and particularities of what it means to be a woman who has been touched by some aspect of the criminal justice system and to discuss how these experiences are not the same as men’s experience. Even though the experience of women in prison remains the unheard story in so many criminal justice circles, the statistics are staggering. Largely as a result of the war on drugs, women are the fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population, increasing at nearly double the rate for men. Two thirds of women in prison are there for non-violent offenses, many for drug-related crimes. Women of color are disproportionately locked up in greater and greater numbers, comprising 60-80% of imprisoned women.
“Yet, this is a population that is often overlooked,” said Laura McTighe, a Women With a Vision board member who is also working on an oral history of WWAV. “The needs of women in the system are often not addressed and are overshadowed by men’s issues. And even after they are released, formerly-incarcerated women are not part of the conversation. So many post-release services aren’t geared toward women, and we want to build with them to change this. To ask them: what are the services they need to keep moving forward?”
McTighe went on to explain that these conversations are the first step to organizing for social change. “People talk about reducing recidivism and increasing civic engagement like they are completely separate goals, but we know that they are not. If people are going to be able to stay out of prison, they must be part of creating a world they want to live in. One of ways we are thinking of this project moving forward is that community organizing is a reentry program.”
In the meeting WWAV staff and community members discussed the many roadblocks and barriers that prevent formerly-incarcerated women from moving on after they are released. Women find themselves facing obstacles to effectively reentering society and providing for themselves and their children, including trouble attaining adequate housing and employment, and restrictions from governmental assistance programs such as housing, employment, education, and subsistence benefits. On top of that they face a severe lack of access to medical, behavioral, and substance abuse treatment/counseling.
These were all stories we heard first hand at the meeting. It was a powerful moment, for the women who came out, to hear about one another’s experiences after being released. The attendees told harrowing accounts of their time in and out of prison, facing addiction, police abuse and violence, and untreated trauma and PTSD. They talked about the stigma, the shame, and the depression that comes during and after incarceration. They spoke about trying to get a job, and being qualified to do that job, but being turned away.
One attendee spoke about her struggles in the last two years. “When I was released, it’s when I really faced the horror of being a convicted felon. Returning to the job market has been difficult.” She went on to talk about the exorbitant probation fees she’s forced to pay, explaining, “They want to see their money every month, or they’re quick to threaten me with jail. You would think that they see I’m out here doing the right thing, but  it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to pay almost $800 a month in just probation fees in addition to my other experiences.”
The meeting was the first time many of the women had spoken aloud about their experiences. “This is the first time that I have really been in this kind of setting, and I didn’t realize how much pain that the suffering, the torture, the abuse, the beatings, the macings, the rapings – I didn’t realize how much they really affected me until right now,” said one attendee, who had just been released two months earlier from a 12-year stint in prison, five years of which were spent in solitary confinement for fighting for the right to practice her religion.
Women feeling safe enough to tell their stories for the first time was a theme we heard again and again that following week when Women With A Vision held space for Black women survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
Black women in the United States are at a greater risk of being assaulted by intimate partners than any other group of women. But the issue of domestic abuse and sexual assault against black women is not often discussed in our communities, and the scope of violence against Black women and the barriers they face in receiving adequate support services remains hidden. We do know that Black women are less likely to access the services provided to victims of abuse, sexual assault, or domestic violence. We also know that many of these social services and support programs don’t link up with Black communities and don’t understand the specific barriers that Black women face in their lives – both structural and sociocultural – that prevent access.
For WWAV it was important to have a safe space centered around the experiences of Black women. As a Black-women led organization, WWAV staff members have witnessed first-hand how our communities struggle with the issue.
Attendees at the meeting spoke about growing up and feeling stigma and shame for being a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, and how so often as Black women they were told to be strong and to not show weakness.
“Black women don’t have a choice,” one of the attendees said after the meeting was over. “We are born with the burden of oppression and abuse. We don’t get therapy because we must be strong. All we do is hold it in, die slowly on the inside, or become an addict.”
Both events created a space where women’s stories of survival could be shared, even if the rest of society invisibilized their pain. “It’s why safe space is critical,” said Evans. “We work with populations that are often talked over, talked on behalf of. Who are made to feel unsafe every single day in how they are forced to move through the world. Who are made to feel as if their pain and experience is not valid. But we want to make sure that the women we work with feel safe, feel valued, feel heard. To make sure their voices are held up as important. That’s why this series is about working with the people directly impacted, giving them the stage, a chance to tell their stories, a chance to give voice.”
Haywood agreed. “Our vision is driven by the community, by the lives of women dealing with every day life,” she said. “And this is the work we’ve been doing for 22 years, highlighting the stories of people we are in community with and working with them to make their voices heard. We center our work on the things that put people most at risk for incarceration, HIV, and other health risks. This is the way we do advocacy at Women With a Vision, and the way we link people to health.”
Women With A Vision’s next Community Voices event is Thursday, August 22nd at 5:30 p.m.  We will be holding space for LGBTQ survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence at the Rosa F. Keller Library and Community Center, 4300 S. Broad Street. Please spread the word and help us build these safe spaces for our communities!