Emerge Center Against Domestic Abuse will change CEOs starting next month. What will not change is our commitment to creating a community that’s safer for everyone experiencing domestic violence (DV).
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At Emerge, we honor the work, strength, and resilience of Indigenous communities, especially the Indigenous women leading the movement for safety and justice. This month’s episode of Liberation through Love addresses a critical issue: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). We are privileged to host April Ignacio, a survivor, advocate, and co-founder of Indivisible Tohono, for a powerful conversation on the root causes of this epidemic, the barriers to safety, and the ongoing fight for justice.
Did you know that more than four in five Indigenous adults have experienced psychological aggression, physical violence, stalking, or sexual violence by an intimate partner? Additionally, Native American women are three times more likely to be murdered than white women.
Despite these harrowing statistics, many people remain unaware of this crisis. A recent survey by the First Nations Development Institute revealed that over half of non-Indigenous respondents had never heard about the violence Indigenous women endure. It’s time to change that.
The ongoing violence against Indigenous women is not just an Indigenous issue; it’s a community issue that demands our collective attention. It requires men to listen, reflect, and take responsibility for changing harmful attitudes to ensure the safety and well-being of Indigenous women and girls. It calls on all of us to cultivate safer communities for everyone.
This episode is a call to action. By understanding the scope of the MMIWG crisis and the challenges faced by Indigenous communities, we can all play a role in creating a safer future. Listen now, share widely, and be part of the change.
This is a conversation you won’t want to miss. Listen to Episode #2 of Liberation through Love now, and share widely!
You are invited to join us on Tuesday, March 19, 2024, for our upcoming “Lunchtime Insights: An Introduction to Domestic Abuse & Emerge Services.”
During this month’s bite-sized presentation, we’ll explore domestic abuse, its dynamics, and the barriers to leaving an abusive relationship. We will also provide helpful tips for how we, as a community, can support survivors and an overview of the resources available to survivors at Emerge.
Enhance your knowledge of domestic abuse with the opportunity to ask questions and dive deep with members of the Emerge team who have decades of experience working with and learning alongside survivors of domestic abuse in our community.
In addition, folx interested in co-conspiring with Emerge can learn about ways to increase healing and safety for survivors in Tucson and southern Arizona through employment, volunteering, and more.
Space is limited. Please RSVP below if you are interested in attending this in-person event. We hope that you can join us on March 19.
The last two years have been difficult for all of us, as we’ve collectively weathered the challenges of living through a global pandemic. And yet, our struggles as individuals during this time have looked different from each other. COVID-19 pulled back the curtain on the disparities that impact communities of color experience, and their access to healthcare, food, shelter, and financing.
While we are incredibly grateful that we’ve had the ability to continue serving survivors through this time, we acknowledge that Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities continue to face racial prejudice and oppression from systemic and institutional racism. Over the last 24 months, we witnessed the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, and the murders of Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, George Floyd, and Quadry Sanders and many others, including the most recent white supremacist terrorist attack on Black community members in Buffalo, New York. We’ve seen increased violence toward Asian Americans rooted in xenophobia and misogyny and many viral moments of racial bias and hatred on social media channels. And while none of this is new, technology, social media, and a 24-hour news cycle have catapulted this historic struggle into our daily conscience.
For the last eight years, Emerge has evolved and transformed through our commitment to becoming a multicultural, anti-racist organization. Guided by the wisdom of our community, Emerge centers the experiences of people of color both in our organization and in public spaces and systems to provide truly supportive domestic abuse services that can be accessible to ALL survivors.
We invite you to join Emerge in our ongoing work to build a more inclusive, equitable, accessible, and just post-pandemic society.
For those of you who have followed this journey during our previous Domestic Violence Awareness Month (DVAM) campaigns or through our social media efforts, this information probably isn’t new. If you have not accessed any of the written pieces or videos in which we uplift our community’s diverse voices and experiences, we hope you will take some time to visit our written pieces to learn more.
Some of our ongoing efforts to disrupt systemic racism and prejudice in our work include:
Systemic change requires time, energy, self-reflection, and at times discomfort, but Emerge is steadfast in our unending commitment to building systems and spaces that acknowledge the humanity and worth of every human being in our community.
We hope you will stay by our side as we grow, evolve, and build accessible, just, and equitable support for all domestic violence survivors with services that are centered in an anti-racist, anti-oppression framework and are truly reflective of the diversity of our community.
We invite you to join us in creating a community where love, respect, and safety are essential and inviolable rights for everyone. We can achieve this as a community when we, collectively and individually, have tough conversations about race, privilege, and oppression; when we listen and learn from our community, and when we proactively support organizations working towards the liberation of marginalized identities.
You can actively engage in our work by signing up for our enews and sharing our content on social media, participating in our community conversations, organizing a community fundraiser, or donating your time and resources.
Together, we can build a better tomorrow – one that brings racism and prejudice to an end.
This week, Emerge honors all the staff who work with children and families at Emerge. The children coming into our Emergency Shelter program were faced with managing the transition of leaving their homes where violence was happening and moving into an unfamiliar living environment and the climate of fear that has permeated this time during the pandemic. This abrupt change in their lives was only made more challenging by the physical isolation of not interacting with others in person and was undoubtedly confusing and scary.
Children living at Emerge already and those receiving services at our Community-Based sites experienced an abrupt shift in their in-person access to staff. Layered onto what the children were managing, families were also forced to figure out how to support their children with schooling at home. Parents who were already overwhelmed with sorting out the impact of the violence and abuse in their lives, many of whom were also working, simply did not have the resources and access to homeschooling while living in a shelter.
The Child and Family team sprang into action and quickly ensured that all children had the necessary equipment to attend school online and provided weekly support to students while also quickly adapting programming to be facilitated via zoom. We know that delivering age-appropriate support services to children who have witnessed or experienced abuse is crucial to healing the whole family. Emerge staff Blanca and MJ talk about their experience serving children during the pandemic and the difficulties of engaging children via virtual platforms, their lessons learned over the last 18 months, and their hopes for a post-pandemic community.
bell hooks said, “But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do, not just what we feel. It’s a verb, not a noun.”
As Domestic Violence Awareness Month begins, I reflect with gratitude on the love we were able to put into action for survivors of domestic violence and for our community during the pandemic. This difficult period has been my greatest teacher about actions of love. I witnessed our love for our community through our commitment to ensuring that services and support remained available for individuals and families experiencing domestic violence.
It is not a secret that Emerge is made up of members of this community, many of whom have had their own experiences with hurt and trauma, who show up every day and offer their heart to survivors. This is undoubtedly true for the team of staff who deliver services across the organization—emergency shelter, hotline, family services, community-based services, housing services, and our men’s education program. It is also true for everyone who supports the direct service work to survivors through our environmental services, development, and administrative teams. It is especially true in the ways we all lived in, coped with, and did our best to help participants through the pandemic.
Seemingly overnight, we were catapulted into a context of uncertainty, confusion, panic, grief and a lack of guidance. We sifted through all of the information that inundated our community and created policies that tried to prioritize the health and safety of the nearly 6000 people we serve every year. To be sure, we are not healthcare providers tasked to care for those who are sick. Yet we serve families and individuals who are at risk every day of serious harm and in some cases death.
With the pandemic, that risk only increased. Systems that survivors rely on for help shut down around us: basic support services, courts, law enforcement responses. As a result, many of the most vulnerable members of our community disappeared into the shadows. While most of the community was at home, so many folks were living in unsafe situations where they did not have what they needed to survive. The lockdown decreased the ability for people experiencing domestic abuse to receive support by phone because they were in the home with their abusive partner. Children didn’t have access to a school system to have a safe person to talk to. Tucson shelters had decreased capacity to bring individuals in. We saw the impacts of these forms of isolation, including increased need for services and higher levels of lethality.
Emerge was reeling from the impact and trying to maintain contact safely with folks living in dangerous relationships. We moved our emergency shelter overnight into a non-communal facility. Still, employees and participants reported having been exposed to COVID on a seemingly daily basis, resulting in contact tracing, reduced staffing levels with many vacant positions, and staff in quarantine. In the midst of these challenges, one thing remained intact—our love for our community and deep commitment to those who are seeking safety. Love is an action.
As the world seemed to stop, the nation and community breathed in the reality of the racialized violence that has been occurring for generations. This violence exists in our community, too, and has shaped the experiences of our team and the people we serve. Our organization attempted to figure out how to cope with the pandemic while also creating space and beginning healing work from the collective experience of racialized violence. We continue to work toward liberation from the racism that exists all around us. Love is an action.
The heart of the organization kept beating. We took agency phones and plugged them in at people’s homes so that the hotline would continue to operate. Staff immediately began hosting support sessions from home telephonically and on Zoom. Staff facilitated support groups on Zoom. Many staff continued to be in the office and have been for the duration and continuation of the pandemic. Staff picked up extra shifts, worked longer hours, and have been holding multiple positions. Folks came in and out. Some got sick. Some lost close family members. We have collectively continued to show up and offer our heart to this community. Love is an action.
At one point, the entire team providing emergency services had to quarantine due to potential exposure to COVID. Teams from other areas of the agency (administrative positions, grant writers, fundraisers) signed up to deliver food to families living at the emergency shelter. Staff from across the agency brought toilet paper when they found it available in the community. We arranged pick-up times for folks to come to the offices that were shut down so that folks could pick up food boxes and hygiene items. Love is an action.
One year later, everyone is tired, burned out, and hurting. Still, our hearts beat and we show up to provide love and support to survivors who have nowhere else to turn. Love is an action.
This year during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we are choosing to lift up and honor the stories of the many employees of Emerge who helped this organization stay in operation so that survivors had a place where support could happen. We honor them, their stories of pain during illness and loss, their fear of what was to come in our community—and we express our endless gratitude for their beautiful hearts.
Let us remind ourselves this year, during this month, that love is an action. Every day of the year, love is an action.
Emerge has been in a process of evolution and transformation for the last 6 years that is intensely focused on becoming an anti-racist, multicultural organization. We are working every day to uproot anti-blackness and confront racism in an effort to return to the humanity that lives deep within all of us. We want to be a reflection of liberation, love, compassion and healing – the same things we want for anyone suffering in our community. Emerge is on a journey to speak the untold truths about our work and have humbly presented the written pieces and videos from community partners this month. These are important truths about the real experiences that survivors have trying to access help. We believe that in that truth is the light for the way forward.
This process is slow, and every day there will be invitations, both literal and figurative, to revert to what has not served our community, served us as the people who make up Emerge, and that which has not served survivors in the ways that they deserve. We are working to center the important life experiences of ALL survivors. We are taking responsibility for inviting courageous conversations with other non-profit agencies and sharing our messy journey through this work so that we can replace a system born out of a desire to categorize and dehumanize people in our community. The historical roots of the non-profit system cannot be ignored.
If we pick up on the point made by Michael Brasher this month in his piece about rape culture and the socialization of men and boys, we can see the parallel if we choose to. “The implicit, often unexamined, set of values contained in the cultural code to ‘man up’ are a part of an environment in which men are trained to disconnect from and devalue feelings, to glorify force and winning, and to viciously police each other’s ability to replicate these norms.”
Much like the roots of a tree that provides support and anchorage, our framework is embedded in values that ignore the historical truths about domestic and sexual violence as being an outgrowth of racism, slavery, classism, homophobia, and transphobia. These systems of oppression give us permission to disregard the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color – including those who identify in the LGBTQ communities – as having less value at best and non-existent at worst. It is risky for us to assume that these values still don’t seep into the deep corners of our work and influence everyday thoughts and interactions.
We are willing to risk it all. And by all we mean, tell all the truth about how domestic violence services have not accounted for the experience of ALL survivors. We have not considered our role in addressing racism and anti-blackness for Black survivors. We are a non-profit system that has created a professional field out of the suffering in our community because that is the model that was built for us to operate within. We have struggled to see how the very same oppression that leads to unconscionable, life-ending violence in this community has also insidiously worked its way into the fabric of the system designed to respond to survivors of that violence. In its current state, ALL survivors cannot have their needs met in this system, and too many of us working in the system have engaged a coping mechanism of distancing ourselves from the realities of those who cannot be served. But this can, and must, change. We must change the system so that the full humanity of ALL survivor is seen and honored.
To be in reflection about how to change as an institution within complicated, deeply anchored systems takes great courage. It requires us to stand in the circumstances of risk and account for harm that we have caused. It also requires us to be precisely focused on the way forward. It requires us to no longer stay silent about the truths. The truths that we all know are there. Racism is not new. Black survivors feeling let down and invisible is not new. The numbers of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women are not new. But our prioritization of it is new.
Black Women deserve to be loved, celebrated, and lifted up for their wisdom, knowledge, and accomplishments. We must also acknowledge that Black Women have no choice but to survive in a society that was never intended to hold them as valuable. We must listen to their words about what change means but fully assume our own responsibility in identifying and addressing the injustices that happen daily.
Indigenous Women deserve to live freely and be revered for all that they have woven into the earth that we walk on – to include their very bodies. Our attempts to liberate Indigenous communities from domestic abuse must also include our ownership of the historical trauma and truths that we readily hide about who planted those seeds on their land. To include ownership of the ways that we attempt to water those seeds daily as a community.
It is okay to tell the truth about these experiences. In fact, it is critical to the collective survival of ALL survivors in this community. When we center those who are listened to the least, we ensure the space is open for everyone.
We can reimagine and actively build a system that has a great ability to build safety and hold the humanity of everyone in our community. We can be spaces where everyone is welcome in their truest, fullest self, and where everyone’s life has value, where accountability is seen as love. A community where we all have the opportunity to build a life free from violence.
The Queens is a support group that was created at Emerge to center the experiences of Black Women in our work. It was created by and is led by Black Women.
This week we proudly present the important words and experiences of the Queens, who journeyed through a process led by Cecelia Jordan over the last 4 weeks to encourage unguarded, raw, truth-telling as the pathway to healing. This excerpt is what the Queens chose to share with the community in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
