Do Good on Purpose
Do Good on Purpose is a narrative interview podcast exploring the defining social challenges of our time, and the leaders working to solve them.
Hosted by Dorothy Stuehmke, former U.S. diplomat and social impact leader, the show features thoughtful conversations with changemakers across philanthropy, nonprofit leadership, and global social innovation.
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This is a podcast about modern generosity, social impact, and turning insight into action.
Because change rarely happens by accident.
It happens when people decide to Do Good on Purpose.
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Do Good on Purpose
She Built DC's First Domestic Violence Org for Black Women: Alana Brown Founder of The Safe Sisters Circle
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Black women in the United States experience domestic violence and sexual assault at disproportionately high rates. And yet for too long, the services built to help them have failed to reflect their culture, their community, or their experience - leaving Black women survivors without the culturally specific, trauma-informed care they deserve.
In this episode, Dorothy Stuehmke speaks with Alana Brown, founder of The Safe Sisters Circle, about what it truly takes to build an organization made by Black women, for Black women - and why that distinction changes everything for survivors.
Alana's path to this work took her from Georgetown Law, to prosecuting cases, to advocating for survivors at domestic violence nonprofits, to fellowships with human trafficking and international gender-based violence organizations - where she witnessed again and again the profound disconnect between the systems built to help Black women and the women those systems were supposed to serve. In 2018, she decided to do something about it.
Together, Dorothy and Alana explore:
- Why the existing domestic violence and sexual assault support system has too often failed Black women survivors - and what culturally specific, trauma-informed care actually looks like in practice
- How The Safe Sisters Circle provides free legal representation, mental health support, and holistic healing services - including the 10-week Healing Project - to Black women and girl survivors in Washington, DC's Wards 7 and 8
- What it means to staff an organization with Black women attorneys so that clients are served by people who share their culture and understand their experience
- What it will take to build the systems, the services, and the communities that truly keep Black women safe
This episode connects to the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle, where you can directly support The Safe Sisters Circle and its mission to ensure every Black woman survivor has access to the culturally specific care she deserves.
🤝 Support The Safe Sisters Circle through the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle: https://www.grapevine.org/giving-circle/LjPhN5M/Do-Good-on-Purpose-Giving-Circle
- For $25, you ensure a survivor is able to safely get to and from a court hearing without interacting with or being followed by their abuser.
- For $50, you help a survivor cover the cost of essential case filing fees and/or court costs.
- For $100, you provide a group of survivors access to Know Your Rights workshops which help them navigate the various aspects of the legal system.
- For $175, you give a survivor a counseling session to work on healing from their trauma.
- For $250, you sponsor one survivor's full month of holistic support, including case management and flex funds.
🔗 Connect with Dorothy Stuehmke:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorothystuehmke/
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Welcome to the Do Good On Purpose podcast, where you can listen to leaders discussing solutions to the most pressing challenges in our world, and where you can also support them by donating through the show's Giving Circle using the link in the show notes. Think of a giving circle as a way to give together, combining what each of us can contribute so that we give bigger, we give better, and we make a much greater impact than any one of us could ever make alone. There is a crisis happening in plain sight. Black women in the United States experience domestic violence and sexual assault at disproportionately high rates. And yet they remain among the most underserved by the systems and institutions that were supposed to protect them, turned away, disbelieved, or offered services that didn't reflect their lives, their communities, or their culture. My guest today saw that gap firsthand as a prosecutor and decided to do something about it. Alana Brown is a victim's right advocate, public interest attorney, and the founder of the Safe Sisters Circle, a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit organization that offers free legal and therapeutic services specifically to black women and girls survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Founded in 2018, the Safe Sisters Circle was built around a simple but powerful belief that black women survivors deserve to be served by people who look like them, understand their experience, and place their needs first. Alana's path to this work took her from Georgetown law to prosecuting cases to advocating for survivors at domestic violence nonprofits to fellowships with human trafficking and international gender-based violence organizations, where she witnessed again and again the profound disconnect between the systems built to help black women and the women those systems were supposed to serve. What stands out the most about Alana is her conviction that violence against women is not inevitable. It is preventable. And that building the services, the systems and the communities that keep black women safe is not just possible. It is the work of our time. On today's episode of the Do Good on Purpose podcast, we explore what it really means to center black women survivors, what culturally specific, trauma-informed, holistic care looks like in practice, and what it will take to build a world where every black woman feels safe, seen, and supported. Alana Brown joys itself. Alana Brown, thank you so much for being on the Do Good on Purpose podcast with me today. This is a particularly moving topic, uh, one that I think that people really need to hear about and will learn something from. It's it's a tough topic. So I want to thank you so much for being here with me. I think this organization that you started in Washington, D.C. The Save Sisters Circle is doing some pretty incredible work on the front lines of helping women um, you know, tackle and confront and deal with the trauma of sexual violence, of harassment. And um I just want to thank you for being here and and sharing your journey and how you're helping women in this moment. Thank you. So Alana, I I want to start really with an understanding of, you know, this issue that African American women in particular in the United States are experiencing at really high rates. This this issue of domestic violence and sexual assault. Um the data is showing that this is pretty incredible to me, pretty high levels here. One in four black girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18. One in five black women are survivors of rape, but thirty-five percent of black women experienced some form of contact of sexual violence during their lifetime, and forty to sixty percent of black women report being subjected to coercive sexual contact by 18. These are like strikingly high numbers, high percentages. And so, you know, I would love for you to open the conversation here and ground us in understanding why are women, African American women in the United States, and in particular in DC, where you've where you're running your your organization, um why are they the among the most underserved by the existing system and the resources that are out there? And more importantly, maybe we can start with an understanding of the definitions of domestic violence and sexual assault, just to give people really the grounding and the context here. So over to you.
SPEAKER_00Um I would define domestic violence as a series of events or actions where someone uses power or control over their intimate partner, over their wife, over their anyone you know they have an intimate relationship with. An issue is power and control. It's not just about like what you see on TV with just like physical abuse. They use this power and control to abuse people in various ways, whether it be physical, emotional abuse, financial abuse is very popular, um, abuse through social media. But the point is that if a person has power over another person, uses that power against them.
SPEAKER_01Got it in a really negative way.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Um that hurts them, but that caused them to suffer injuries and cause them emotional distress and emotional trauma. Right.
SPEAKER_01So this issue of power and using it in a negative way. So why are African American women in particular among the most underserved by the system today? Can you help us understand the reality that African American women, survivors in particular, are facing?
SPEAKER_00So let me go back a step and say that I said it's a lack of power. I would say in society, black women don't have a lot of power in this society, particularly in America. Um, we don't have a lot of power, we're not listened to, we're not respected. And so that just comes into play when people feel like I already don't have power, and someone's coming around me and hurting me. Maybe I deserve it, or maybe this is something that just happens, or maybe this is my lot in life. In terms of the system, I would say it's just it's not made for black women survivors, period. This is not made really for black people, to be honest. If you really study this, and I was a prosecutor and I did civil law. Um, so I've been litigation from various perspectives. And I would just say this system's not made for black women. A lot of times black women are considered victims. A lot of times they're seen as really strong, powerful, or maybe like their physical structure is big. People say, how can they be abused or too strong? And that comes against us to say, like, we're not strong, we're just women who survive what we're surviving, but it doesn't mean that we can be abused, or it doesn't mean we can't be abused, or we can't be hurt physically, or we can't be hurt through financial or mental situations. And so what I saw a lot was people weren't listening to black women as a litigator for different nonprofits in DC. People were not respecting them, people weren't had to try to be culturally specific to understand where they were coming from. And they would just use legal, kind of legal as like a tool. And not, but legal, legal is a tool, but it's not a solution to abuse. So what I saw was like, what else can we give black women to help them thrive, not just survive, but thrive after they've been abused? And that's where organization came in. However, um, and we know that the system doesn't work, we would do coach-specific training for our attorneys, knowing that when they go into court for custody cases or domestic violence cases, that the system is inherently anti-black, but it's also inherently anti-black women. There's a bias going there, and we discover like how do we handle this bias. We do black women therapists because we know that people who are comfortable with people who look like them being vulnerable and open to building trust. But the main reason is like, and then there's prevention, and we don't focus on prevention enough in the black community or any community. That's where the I think the solution to domestic violence is to stop it before it starts happening. So we can go into schools and go to um to neighborhood to do like we know your rights, know what is domestic violence. What's domestic violence? What's sexual assault? What does this look like? How can you get help? And a lot of people don't know they're actually inabusive relationships. People think that you're just this is what it is, but like have someone harmed you, like, oh yeah, someone harmed me the other day, like you're our survivor, you know, then that's abuse. Kind of have to explain to people sometimes because it's so normalized within their community and culture.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's really powerful. And I would love for you to talk a little bit more about um, you know, what you really saw firsthand as a prosecutor that prompted you to really bring these services in in a culturally sensitive, culturally relevant way to your community. So can you take us back to when you were a prosecutor and what you actually saw in the system?
SPEAKER_00Um, it was a long time ago. The system was not very empathetic to black or Latina women, because I think most of our clients, I was in Manhattan, so we had Spanish Harlem and um Warsaw Heights, and so we had a lot of Latina women as well as black women. And to me, that wasn't a for the office, it wasn't a priority. DGUIs were priorities, drug cases were priorities, but like people hurting black and brown women was not priority for them, and it was treated as such. And then a lot of times people don't listen to the survivors. That's any of any color, but mostly black women. People don't feel like we can be trusted. People don't feel like we're voracious. So, like I went at one time where I had a survivor coming on the weekend and disorder me. Then I walked out to use the restroom. And one of my coworkers was like, co-ADAs is like, oh, she was like looking around your stuff, doing all this other stuff. I'm like, I have no reason not to trust her. Like, you're just, I think you're distrusted basically because she's a black woman from a disadvantaged community. And she comes across a certain way, you're assuming that she can't be trusted. And I feel like that's the case with a lot of women survivors in New York in New York, at least specifically New York, I think in DC as well. And also, I don't think we serve them to double traumatize them into making them testify in court. Like if you don't want to testify, you don't want to, you know, go forward with the case, I think you have the right not to say no. We like to pin the people and put out warrants of people trying to make this testify. And I think that was just another type of trauma that people were going through. I say this as even as sort of civil litigation when we had civil protection orders. We never made them do it. But like if you want a civil protection order, we'll get one. If you don't want, that's fine with the other services. If you want to go with a criminal case, we'll support you as an advocate. You know, we're not prosecutors. And I also saw that a lot of people don't want their loved ones in the system. I mean, unfortunately, they do love their abusers. You know, somehow they're the father of their children or they have a relationship with them. And black men get killed in prison, and black men get killed by the police. And people don't want the state and the police involved in their cases a lot of times because they don't want that partner to get hurt or killed, potentially. So it's not really, like again, it's not really a system designed for us, it's not really designed to protect us or protect survivors in general. It's designed to like punish the abuser. But I think that's what the survivor wants.
SPEAKER_01I want to talk a little bit more about you because I think your background is so interesting and it really kind of perfectly positioned you to found this organization because of your vantage point. So you studied at Georgetown Law, which is pretty incredible. Um, you went into prosecuting cases in Manhattan, you said. And then you moved into advocating for survivors at domestic violence nonprofits, um, to having fellowships with human trafficking and international gender-based violence organizations. So you've really been working in this space of working with survivors and helping build trust and to give, I think, a uh a more nuanced lens to who they are as people, like a human lens to who these people are and what their needs are. Um, what did that journey across your career teach you about the relationship between law, between justice and the lived experience of survivors?
SPEAKER_00So law is not justice. Like I said earlier, law is a tool that may be used in a plethora of things towards justice. But I think justice is self-defined by survivors. A lot of times they would say, justice is me getting over my trauma. Just is me moving on, getting a job, getting like out of financial debt is caused by an abuser or get out of his financial control. My children are safe. That's a big one. A lot of times most of our survivors came in because of their children. Their children were witnessing abuse and they didn't want them growing up in this home of violence. I would say like 97% of our um clients had children, were mothers. And that motherhood really instilled in them a desire to protect their children. Um, and a lot of people didn't take that into consideration when they would take them on as clients. They saw them as like, bam, wham, legal services. Thank you, ma'am. Bye. We, you know, to work to cook the schools' kids to go to different schools, get them out in our safe house. We would help them with vouchers to get them to certain magnet schools, things like that. We realized like helping their kids was helping them. And they felt that that was justice. And we feel like help giving them career services, that we're fighting for them in court, we're listening to them. That's justice. Even if we don't get the civil protection order or they don't get full custody of their kids. At the end of the day, they would say to us a lot of times, like, this is the first time someone listened to me. Like no one's ever listened to my story, no one's ever listened to what I had to say, no one ever cared about what I was going through as a person, individual individual person. Each person's different. And we like care about each person. We always say quality or quantity of clients that we had because we want to make sure if they understand the system. We also explain and break down what's going on in the legal process so they know what's going on, so they make informed decisions of what they want to do with custody cases, or if they want to see a civil protection order, or do they want to testify um so they understand the you know the civil system a little bit better? And also I did do it for criminal advocacy as well. Um, because I just knew the criminal system very well and be able to explain to people who were kind of who wanted to go with a criminal case and they needed some support.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So let's build on that just a little bit more because you've been named a 2022 Washingtonian of the Year. Congratulations. And you received the National Bar Association's top 40 under 40 Advocates Award. Congratulations on that. Um what has recognition like that taught you about the relationship between visibility and impact? And what does it mean to you to do this work publicly?
SPEAKER_00I think visibility and impact means more people learn about the organization. And there will be and I'm gonna be honest, it's a lot, a lot of donations and a lot of funding. Because that for in a nonprofit, that's always an issue. You're always looking for funding, you're always trying to survive another day with with comes to financial things. So just me being um recognized gave more gave more visibility to the organization. And then also the vision to where our survivors were going through and people wanting to help them or understanding a little bit better, getting volunteers or getting donations. Um, because the impact was not me really being seen. The impact was people get civil protection orders. The impact is our people get therapy now, we can afford to open up a mental health clinic. People are getting infant seats for their scars, like some just different things help people help people live, basically. That's the impact of it. Is that it helped our survivors more than it helped me. I mean, it was great and I, you know, it was nice to have, but I I was more happy that it benefited our survivors because it could put them more on the map, got more funding, got to exp expand our programs and got people to understand what our clients maybe more empathetic to where our women were going through. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I think that's the mark of a true leader when you have that kind of recognition, but then you really actually use it to put the spotlight on the work that you're doing and to bring the human face to these survivors. So I think that's pretty incredible. Um, so let's let's talk about the organization you founded in 2018, the Safe Sisters Circle. Uh let's talk about it in depth here. You created it with a vision um to make a space where black women survivors felt seen, where they felt safe. Um, you've talked about it this a bit, uh, and also supported by in particular people who look like them and understood their experience. So what did it take to build that from scratch? Um, take us through the city.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'd say the hardest I think the hardest part, well, I'll say there was a woman who worked for the NAACP before I was building up my organization. She gave me a good quote and she said, Never promise community something you can't deliver. So never go on a community and say, like, I want to give you this, and then don't deliver on it because I'll never trust you again. Because trust is the biggest thing. And we worked in Ward 7 and 8, which is the East of the River community, the majority black community in DC. And we had to establish trust first. So we, before we even had clients, we did like Thanksgiving dinners, we did book bag drives for their kids, we did um open house, like like mommy and me day, like you get like self-care and things like that. And then we tried to get in so that our name would get out there so that this is the order you can trust. Also, when people have been traumatized and lied to and fooled by the system, they they feel more trusting with someone who looks like them. It's like, okay, this person can relate to what I've been to. This person I feel safe with. Even me, when I go see a doctor, well, most of my doctors are a woman of color, just for safety reasons of like what makes me feel safe personally. Um, and so building trust is the first step. I think it's doing good services, like actually seeing that they would give you know holistic services, the culture specific, we care about them, and then the word spreads. And then we have events like um Linda Rice events and other events, and then the word spreads from them. We do prevention events for younger kids, and we get like little gifts for teenagers, and they start the word, oh, you get a gift, you get a gift card. And they come and learn about prevention and how they can go to their own communities and talk about prevention and be aware of domestic violence and sexual assault.
SPEAKER_01That's great. So I love that you're leading with the trust and building trust because that's the most important part. I agree. I think you know, nonprofits um are working hand in hand with their beneficiaries in partnership with their beneficiaries, and you want to make them feel safe. And, you know, that's that is this the centerpiece of what you're doing is making these women feel safe and seen.
SPEAKER_00I will also say that I'm a good, you should listen to people at my daughter organization. I did um listening circles to the community centers with black women, but what they would want to see in a uh like in their attorney, what they want to see them having domestic violence cases, how they want to see custody, how do they see the court system as a whole? And I use that to build organizations. I did ground up. But even as like a black woman, they don't necessarily trust me because they're like, well, you don't know what I've been through. You have you don't necessarily come from. I come from I am originally from Ward 7, I grew up in a suburb of DC. So I was like, right, I don't know what it's like to grow up in this neighborhood and have these experiences. So they still have to trust you, even as a black person, you still have to gain trust from the community. Yeah, and trust that you care and understand them and get to know it better. So you work specifically in Ward 7 and 8. Can you tell our researchers? So my organization does work towards 7 and 8. So it's a disadvantaged community. It's about 98 to 99% um black, African American, or different types of self-identified black. And it's high rates of violence. I think 40% violence, 60% poverty rate, um, very high, according to the DC coalition, it's domestic violence at the highest rates from police officers for domestic violence and sexual assault calls come in from them. And just a lot of violence in general and um street violence.
SPEAKER_01So the need is great there. So you've been there since tw since 2018. Tell tell us how your approach is maybe different or distinct from traditional domestic violence services that are out there, or maybe it's really just truly filling a gap.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's finding a it was finding a gap. So when we were working in the system, there was a organization for immigrants, there's an organization for South Asians, there's immigration for LGBTQ, there was no direct services, legal services for black women survivors in DC. And we had the highest rate, and majority of DC is black women and black men, so it's like, but there's no services, that's what's the gap. It was like no one was serving us directly, and so someone needed, I feel like I could do that, I could serve the gap. And I feel like working in other organizations, I saw a cultural disconnect kind of with the people. People were white women, some white men, and the people we were serving were black women, some Central American women, and they just didn't understand where they were coming from. And so I wanted it was when I first started like, well, we serve black clients. So it's not just about giving them court representation, it's other things to serve the community and serve the people and the mothers that's gonna spread out to the community. The deputy director now, Sylvia Guzman, we call it a community-centered approach, and then we evolved the community as a whole into our healing process for survivors. And most like most legal services just don't, they just represent people in court. And we actually had a lot of clients come from other legal organizations and they were just like they were falling through the cracks, that people weren't listening, they weren't getting what they wanted, or people just like they weren't good enough perfect victims, so so to say. And so we get people who fall through the cracks. People other organizations don't want to work with, we'll work with anyone, um, was ethically legal to do.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, that's great. And so tell us a little bit more about the the actual model that you have. So you provide free legal services, right? So there's that legal component, but there's also therapeutic support. So there's a mental health planet, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, we call it mental health healing planet, and it provides different 12, so it does like one-on-one services. You have a black psychiatrist and black therapist and interns, and they provide 12-week programs for different survivors of trauma. And you don't have to be our client. It was like we mostly got our clients from legal services, because we had clients come in to say to us, like, well, we want, you know, black therapists, like we have black lawyers. And it just weren't black, free black therapy just wasn't out there for them. And we're like, ooh. And so then I was like, well, we could create one, let's get a grant. And so I applied for a grant and got one and we started with the clinic alongside with legal services. And some people, but you don't have to be part of legal services to get the therapy, therapy support. You come in as an individual who just needs black, black woman, or one of cover who just needs therapy and support and do a 12-week program with goals and action items. And we also do like healing circles, um, support groups, things like that. So, and then we also kind of build up the survivor advocacy side of things, which do like everything else. Like, how can our survivors get help or how can they find housing? How can we help their kids get into certain schools or different scholarships we can get them into? We got a woman into college one time um for finding different scholarships that would pay for her to get into college. Um, so we have a like a survivor advocacy um side of it too, to help outside the legal services and outside the mental health services to make it holistic. We all work together in tandem. Not work there, but it works together in tandem.
SPEAKER_01Sure, sure. And how how do these women come to you? Is it does it start with they need legal services? That's how you find them or generally yes.
SPEAKER_00Generally, yes. We always say we get them through legal, so we get that's how we get them, then we help them with everything else.
SPEAKER_01That makes sense, yeah. And you know, when I met you, Alana, we were at an event here in New York City for fundraisers and women in philanthropy. And um I was sitting with you talking, and another woman came over, and she realized that you had founded the Safe Sisters Circle, and she was like, I know your organization. And like I saw your your face light up, and I was like, Wow, like you're out there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that was exciting. That was exciting to hear.
SPEAKER_01It's validating. You know, it's validating. So talk a little bit about um maybe a story of how you helped one or two women through your organization. And and, you know, obviously with the appropriate privacy and right, anonymity is key here. I I I don't want you to share any names, but maybe someone who came in and how you helped them.
SPEAKER_00So one client we came in and she had been with another organization, I'm not named the organization, but she had been with another organization and kind of fell to us. And I was like, wait a minute, she's been through other organizations. How do we end up getting here? Because we had a there was a referral service people could call and then we get referred to different institutions in DC. It's a good thing. But we ended up getting her referred to her, but we saw that she had been with other organizations before us. We had her for about two years as a client. It started out as a custody case against her abuser. We got her some help, got her some therapy. She had a very hard upbringing, didn't get a lot of love growing up. But we also worked with her kids a lot because we believed there was abuse of the kids, and there was abuse of the kids, but even trying to get them a civil protection order through the mother for the kids was denied for us. So we had to take the kids to the hospital, we had to get them checked out, we had to get a letter from a doctor saying, Yeah, yes, they've been abused by this by this parent and this father of theirs. And was always fighting for her to get because he had custody of them at one time, like full custody because she was, you know, couldn't provide for them. She was low income, in poverty. She had some other issues situations going on in her life. They didn't feel like she was still able to take care of kids, so they gave a kids to the father. So our whole goal was to get the kids back to the mother, um, at least part-time and at least overnight. And eventually it was resumed his mother got most of the custody when they found out the father was abusing them. But just in terms of not listening to black woman, she was saying her kids are getting abused all this time, and no one was listening to her in the court system. They got more abuse. They'd rather be there than be at home with the father. We got the kids and just one of them we need to be in a special school in Maryland for kids who have learning disabilities. And we got him into that. We got them into a school, we got them, we moved them to Maryland basically. Um, got them out of an area he couldn't find them and put them in schools in that area, and we got them into therapy for the best they could. And there were several programs, there are three programs for children who've been survivors of domestic violence or have seen domestic violence or sexual assault. DC's very good for that. So we're able to cook them up with different organizations to help them. And then they also have a little bit of custody, but is I felt the mother felt satisfied with our service, the best that we could do. I think she just felt like at the end of the day, we tried the hardest we can. We had we had like two, two and a half years in this case. The custody cases last forever. Um then we had to go to domestic violence court again because things kept happening. And then we saw him with another woman who was domestic violence court that he was abusing. Oh, it's just a a lot going. A lot of people with the same with the same um guy? Same guy, different woman. Wow. Um, didn't surprise us because abusers abuse lots of people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, I guess the power dynamic, then he wants, you know, that's all that stuff. So that was really a case where we select we ran the gamut. We uh paid for her to be in a hotel for a period of time, using our funding to keep her safe, a safe house before we found a place for her to live. So it was just like so many issues in a one. You have to like digest them all. Like, what do we do for the legal? What do we do for mental? What do we do for housing? What do we do to keep her safe? The first we have a safety plan. Our first thing we do is a safety plan. Yeah. How can we most keep you safe? And before we go to court, kids too. Yes. How do we your family safe? Right. And then once that safety plan is in position, then we move to like, okay, now how do we prepare for trial? How do we pre how do we help you after trials or how do we help you, you know, get a job, or how do we help you deal with your trauma that you faced?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Wow. That's really tough work. Um you've talked a lot about what happens when they come to you after violence has taken place, right? And how you help support them through the experience of going to trial, help their families get back on their feet again, keep them safe, give them the wraparound support they need to just keep going, right? Uh talk a little bit about the prevention side because you mentioned it a little bit in the beginning. What are you doing to help prevent these types of episodes from happening in the community?
SPEAKER_00Well, what they're doing is they're going into a lot of like, first I should say things that people are missing is the men getting services. And like we go a lot of times to the young girls and teenagers. I remember I had a case we did some a class for it, it was middle schoolers, and when the survivors, when the girls was was a survivor. She never stayed out the question she was asking at the tell. And I was like, she was only like 12. She's already in an abusive relationship. So it starts really young. Yeah, start around like 10 or 11, start educating people. And then you also have to educate the men, the boys, because they're the ones doing the abusing. Let them know like this is not how you treat people, it's not how you treat women. This is like there might be violent trauma because a lot of them aren't necessarily monsters. They've made hurt people, hurt people. So they've been hurt and they've been have mental health issues, they have other things going on too. I think a lot of people forget that. Like it can't just be the woman's say a woman. It has to be the men not abusing women, or the, you know, or vice versa. Like, you know, abusers not men knowing the abuse.
SPEAKER_01Of course, I think it's an excellent point. You know, they're they're part of the equation. Um, where are you reaching these people? Are you going into schools?
SPEAKER_00Going into schools, and we had one event where we had my body, my rights, where we talked about sexual violence, reflexive justice, domestic violence, and we had other organizations that worked with children. Like we had a uh Baswan Academy, a bunch of young girls in the community, then we had this other organization that were of kids with the DC Girls Coalition that worked with different girls and different communities. So, and then brought them to our own space and had there a couple of times. And that so then we do go to certain schools, schools asked us to go into them, we'll go into them. Boston community center, like I said, the services are located in Ward 7, 8. So our my biggest issue was that people didn't have to take like a metro ride, a bus ride to get to the legal provider. So our offices were in at Acostia, now they're in a safe space. I mean, I won't say, but it's in Ward 7. And so people could get to us easily. Or easily accessible, you see that, oh, you're part of the community, you eat around here, you work around here, you're part of us. Um, so they don't have to go very far to get what they need.
SPEAKER_01Right. So you've talked about so much that you're doing. It's very multi-layered the work that the organization does. It it really operates at the intersection of gender-based violence, of race, of socioeconomic status, right? And all of these things are kind of coming together and compounding in ways that are creating barriers for black women survivors and victims of sexual abuse and and and violence. So what changes still need to happen in law and policy and funding and in culture to really address these issues?
SPEAKER_00I think I start with culture first. It's my idea was like, oh, I want to stop the you know community from abusing women at black culture and DC to stop abusing women. That's just like a big goal. Um, that was not necessarily feasible, but some of that's that was my that was my vision. And so, like I said, we do a lot of preventative services. We go into the neighborhood, we try to discuss, we try to unnormalize abuse, basically. So this is not normal. As a woman, you shouldn't be going through this, you shouldn't be harmed, children should be harmed, we shouldn't be seeing people harmed. As a man, you should be harming people. This is for organizations that we did collaborations with. And then I would say with policy, that you know, there is funding for culture-specific organizations. So there was for office of victims against violence against women, they are trying to now combine that with another office. And in this administration, people aren't getting a lot of funding, especially once that serve um BIPOC people because of the administration. So, like saying what funding you need now is is good, but they're not, they're not, we're not gonna get, I mean, they're not gonna get it right now from like the federal government because what they're because there are service specifically black women and some Listina women, and the service is so we call culturally specific. And they have like these rules like you have to be like married and like all like all these morality clauses and the applications don't apply to our clients. So I guess to go back to what it used to be, where it's just like there was priorities on people who dealt with sexual abuse and domestic violence, there are priorities people who did legal services. There was a legal services federal brand. So this is changed the policy and the knowledge that different people, I believe grants were like based on culture-specific people. I think policy addressing that as well. Going to Congress, talking to different politicians saying, like, we need services that are addressing the problem that our communities are facing. And we need to change the policies in the court. I think judges and lawyers and clerks need to be more trained in how to deal with domestic violence survivors and sexual abuse survivors. There's a lot of lack of empathy, a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of just like, and also racial bias. So they think they need to be training in that as well.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01A lot of support for people to really understand the issues and more people who who look like the people who are going through this, um, so that trust can be established.
SPEAKER_00And also I would also say that we're trying to share our model of other organizations across the country. I know Nobia is because we want other people to have the benefit of this this model that we created.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so creating more organizations that are having co-specific for black women survivors is also another thing that would help the multipliers of what we're doing in different locations and spaces would be great too. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That sounds great. Um it's complicated, it's really complicated. And so until that day really comes, I think you're you're really working to, like you said, un unnormalize abuse and bring more people of color into supporting these women and you know, so that the trust can be built and that healing can happen and discussions with young men around you know, prevention and and what this all really does to a community um really means. So I think you're you're truly filling that gap. But what gives you hope right now when you think about the future of, you know, women who are going through this and just this broader movement in a way, right? That you're starting this movement and you want to inspire others across the country uh take a look at it.
SPEAKER_00I think everyone should sort of cater to your own community. Um, but I guess what gives me hope is the survivor's resilience. First of all, the gray mothers, people always have this stereotyping with black mothers being terrible, and they're not, they're great. Like I said, most of them come to us because it's of their children. Um and the idea that they can, after all this abuse, all this trauma, they can still get up the next day and get jobs, they can still go up the next day and try to go to school and get education, they can try to help their children adjust here, take their children to school, take their children to stay, take their children to sports. So it's just like a resilience in women are women who have been through so much. And the intelligence, like they're very smart and very like know themselves very well to tell us what they want to happen in the case, and we listen to that. Um, it also gives me hope that there are more culture-specific organizations popping up. Like I said, you know, I started my consulting business because I want more of them to pop up and more of them to get non-profit support. Um, so we could be there could be more black women and women of color supporting their own organizations, supporting their own communities. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So that gives me go. So let's talk about your new work now just for a moment, because it's sort of an extension of uh what you started at Safe Sister Circle, which is to really kind of go back to the community um and lift your community up. And so I know you founded Safe Sister Circle. Uh you're very close with the executive director, but you're now focused on your consulting, which works with black women and women color-led nonprofits, a lot of grassroots organizations.
SPEAKER_00I see a lot of people out there when I was working who are doing all the work, weren't getting paid for it, weren't getting grants, aren't getting support from like the community or the council or the state and stuff like that. And I was like, we need help because we're doing the work anyway. We need help to like make that sustainable, make that to you know, get your 501c3, get your strategic plan, get your you know, program, how you develop a program that is culturally specific. Like, what does that mean? And how do you develop a program? How do you do make sure there's an impact? How do you, you know, catch that impact and data for mentors and other people? Um, so that's what I'm really working on with women of color and um black women organization. I work with BIPOC people in general, like I have a black male client. So I'm not, I don't I'm not exclusive to that, but that's like one of my goals is to get more of us in the nonprofit world, leading our own organizations. I'm also a lawyer by trade. Obviously, I'm a lawyer and I do like legal support to people don't have 501c3s, bylaws, implementation, things like that, like how to get certified, different things like that. Because I had it for myself and I thought I was just like, okay, anyone can do this, but no, that's not the case. Like nobody legal services as well, which I do provide.
SPEAKER_01I think, I think you're you're so inspirational, Alana, because you see the gap um and you figure out how to respond to it. And when you build something, you bring the right team in, you get things up and running, you stay close to it, but then you see another gap and you go to create a way to fill that new gap. Um, but you're still involved, you're still connected to everything that you've done that have that has like brought you to where you are. And I think that's that's such um a a true trait of a leader today. So I want to thank you so much for all that you're doing and just ask you one last question. Um if people feel moved by what you've discussed and shared uh about the work that you helped to create at Safe Sister Circle, um, if people feel moved to donate to the giving circle to support that organization, what would those donations support?
SPEAKER_00It'll be very specific here. Okay. So for $50, you can help a survivor cover the cost of essential case fees, Safao, and domestic violence and uh family court. For $100, we provide a group of survivors with to access and know your rights at witness domestic violence and sexual assault workshops, which helps them navigate the various aspects of the legal mental health system. And for $175, we give a survivor counseling sessions to work on healing from their trauma. And for 250 sponsors, one full survivor is full month for holistic care, which includes legal services, mental health, survivor advocacy.
SPEAKER_01This is super specific and I appreciate that. Um, we will put that in the show notes so people can understand if they do want to donate through the giving circle at any of those amounts. That's what the donation would go to support. So thank you for painting that picture for us and giving us a very true sense of how people's dollars will will best go into the community that you're serving. So Alana, thank you so much for being with me today. This was so informative. I learned a lot and I think there's still such a need. I can't wait to see how you continue to iterate in your career and continue to serve your community. Um, and I can't wait to uh to see how people respond to this to this podcast.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you for having me and thank you for letting me share a story of the safest circle and the survivor stories as well.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode on the Do Good on Purpose podcast. And if today's conversation inspired you, please consider supporting the work through the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle, which is linked in the show notes. And if you really enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. Share it with someone who believes in building a better world because change rarely happens by accident. It happens when people decide to do good on purpose.