SURVIVOR LED MOVEMENT
We practice and build:
- Healing Justice
- Transformative Justice
- Survivor-led Abolition
- Survivor-led Movement
- Community-owned Solutions
- Deprofessionalized Peer Support
- Mutual aid Projects that Disrupt & Heal
Together, we are changing the future of community and personal care from the inside out.
WE NEED
HEALING JUSTICE NOW
The iconic movements of the 1960’s and ’70’s were met with police reforms that included new partnerships with Domestic Violence (DV) Agencies. These alliances led to pro-criminalization and pro-police culture. The anti-domestic violence movement quickly morphed into a white feminist-led profession that divorced itself from a volunteer-powered, survivor-led, mutual-aid movement for justice. This co-optation has failed to serve the most vulnerable survivors and has failed to interrupt gender-based intimate partner violence.
It’s time to support and create survivor-led mutual aid projects that are founded on culturally sensitive, trauma-informed, restorative justice principles and practices. We need personal and collective care practices that are anti-racist, abolitionist, and liberatory.
“Our movements themselves have to be healing, or there’s no point to them.”
JOIN THE SURVIVOR-LED MOVEMENT TODAY!
Survivor-led Peer Support
Survivor Led Movement provides Free Peer Support through the mutual-aid-supported Peaceful Life Project. Peer Support Providers are Survivors of IPV with lived experience as abolitionists who have divested from Family Policing. Peer Support Providers have received extensive training as subject matter experts with lived experience. We co-create survivor-centric strategies for Healing Justice. We do not partner with the police or any adjacent agencies in any way nor do we provide legal or medical advice.
Seasoned Survivor Guided Practices
Establish, expand, and refine daily Ayurvedic Yoga practices that rejuvenate, inspire, and clarify your relationship to purpose, pleasure, prosperity, and freedom.
HOW you care for yourself is foundational to disrupting gender violence.
These practices are presented specifically for survivors’ needs for liberation from state and interpersonal violence. Together, we become “Seasoned Survivors.”
Begin your new practice today!
Survivor-Led Business
Would you like to begin or refine a business that sustains your work as a Survivor, provides mutual aid to the movement, and disrupts “business as usual?”
Join a small cohort of Abolitionist Survivors to collaborate around building businesses that interrupt colonized capitalism and interrupt gender-based intimate partner violence at its economic foundation.
CULTURE
MUTUAL AID –
The Peaceful Life Project
“Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.”
DEAN SPADE
The Peaceful Life Project is our answer to the call for an approach that is as diverse and intersectional as the Survivors who are impacted by gender-based intimate partner violence.
We meet to practice healing justice and to collaborate on creating mutual aid projects that center the most vulnerable survivors’ needs. Together, we are changing the quality of survivorship from the inside out.
The Practices
PRACTICE BECOMES PRAXIS
REST
That this group would somehow form a family the way we all became the Brady Bunch.
MEDITATE
That this group would somehow form a family the way we all became the Brady Bunch.
REFLECT
That this group would somehow form a family the way we all became the Brady Bunch.
STUDY
“There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.” -Adrienne Maree Brown
COMMUNICATE
“There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.” -Adrienne Maree Brown
ORGANIZE
That this group would somehow form a family the way we all became the Brady Bunch.
CULTURE OF CARE
That this group would somehow form a family the way we all became the Brady Bunch.
COMMUNITY BUILDING
MEET OUR TEAM
YOUR NAME HERE
Cohort Leader
We aim to hire supporting staff in 2024. We prefer to hire within the community, providing living wages and meaningful employment to Survivors.
NIKKI DESALVO
Director & Founder
I teach mutual aid movement makers, who are Survivors like me, how to establish daily practices so that we can better serve our movement.
I create survivor inclusive spaces for movement collaboration.
YOUR NAME HERE
Yoga Trainer
We aim to launch our yoga teacher training in 2024.
Will you be there?
Testimonials
WORD FROM THE PEOPLE
“I reported my kids’ sex abuse by their other parent. CPS did nothing. I didn’t know that a whole movement exists, outside of Family Policing, to interrupt post-separation abuse. Like actually DO something to prevent it. And, I’m now part of it.”
“Nikki helped me create a reasonable plan to rejoin the workforce, organize mutual aid, and begin building a business so that I do not have to rely on my abuser for financial support. It’s a lot of work and I have to take really good care of myself, but I’m on a path to personal and collective liberation. Family Court would have bankrupted me and allowed my abuser unchecked access to me and my kids for years. I’m so grateful that I’ve been working on figuring out how to use my business to invest in liberating other survivors. “
“I didn’t realize that the words that I was using, and my interpretation of Yoga philosophy; could be experienced as victim-blaming. Nikki opened my eyes to the survivor’s perspective. Now, I check my interpretations and language carefully.”
LEARN
LATEST THOUGHT PIECES
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MOVEMENT MAKERS & PARTNERS
Ready to Make a Move?
The movement needs all of us – survivors, allies, and accomplices.
Thank you for showing up and thank you for your support.