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thesoarcollective.bsky.social
The SOAR Collective
@thesoarcollective.bsky.social
23 followers 5 following 32 posts
The SOAR Collective aims to mobilize advocates to demand accountability and revolutionize the way anti-violence organizations operate.
https://bio.link/thesoarcollective
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Episode 6 is here! 🎙️ What does setting boundaries actually mean and why is it so hard? Steph is joined by Lauren R. Taylor to unpack the challenges of boundary-setting, from internalized barriers to fear of retaliation. Listen on Substack (link in bio) or your fave podcast app! #WeDeserveBetter
January 5, 2026 at 5:15 PM
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We can’t end violence without addressing its root causes. Advocates are calling for prevention funding, anti-oppressive practices, deeper training, and systems change—not an endless crisis-response cycle. 📊Learn more about our assessment & key findings at the link in our bio. #WeDeserveBetter
December 30, 2025 at 5:22 PM
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December 30, 2025 at 5:23 PM
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Would you like to be a guest on the We Deserve Better Project's 'RE:Imagining Anti-Violence Work' podcast?

If you’re interested, send an email with the subject line “podcast” to wedeservebetterproject@gmail.com.
December 22, 2025 at 8:51 PM
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Survivors deserve more than being “included.” Survivors must be centered, compensated, and given real power in decision-making—not exploited for labor or stories. 📊Learn more about our assessment & key findings at the link in our bio. #WeDeserveBetter
December 16, 2025 at 8:25 PM
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Anti-violence workers are very familiar with the Power & Control Wheel. But did you know there is a Workplace version? Read our post for some examples & follow along for additional information and tools for worker power. Email wedeservebetterproject@gmail.com to get involved! #WorkerPowerWednesday
December 10, 2025 at 8:52 PM
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Talk It Out Together is back next week on Tuesday, December 16 ✨ Join us this month for end of year reflections.
TIOT is a space for anti-violence workers to connect, share challenges, and support each other. 🔗 Register now at the link in our bio. #advocates #antiviolence
December 8, 2025 at 5:32 PM
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Episode 5 is here! 🎙️Steph and Megan explore how reading and writing practices for advocates can be used as a tool to prevent and combat compassion fatigue, especially when implemented organizationally and on agency time. Listen on Substack (link in bio) or your fave podcast app! #WeDeserveBetter
December 1, 2025 at 5:40 PM
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Fellow staff at anti-violence organizations shared current practices that make big impacts! Download our report to learn more ways to increase transparency and communication at your workplace before the end of 2025! Link in bio.

We're excited to keep collaborating with RAFT!
November 20, 2025 at 10:45 PM
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Advocates are saying it plainly: the old ways aren’t working. Survivors deserve new, community-rooted, non-carceral approaches—and advocates won’t stay in jobs that won’t evolve. 📊Learn more about our assessment & key findings at the link in our bio. #WeDeserveBetter
We Deserve Better Project 2023 Assessment; Key Finding #6: Advocates are adamant that traditional methods are no longer working and that survivors deserve new and innovative services. Learn more at wedeservebetter.work/key-findings Innovation is needed: 52% of anti-violence workers identified “lack of viable alternatives for clients and survivors” as a challenge or reason they left their job; 43% of advocates said “opportunities to innovate” would make them more likely to stay; “Antiquated ways of running local programs, coalitions, and national projects have to change. Look at concepts like transformative justice, prevention through liberation, prioritizing an anti-racism lens on all things, etc. This is where we need to find our direction for moving this work forward if we want this work to live on and actually be responsive to the needs of the most marginalized (and therefore benefiting everyone)." - Advocate from Pennsylvania Move away from carceral systems: “Anti-violence as a field is still rooted in the criminal justice system and that system is traumatizing to work in and send survivors to.” - Advocate from Ohio; This is an even more important point when we recognize that so many advocates are survivors themselves. "[There is] Inconsistency among the community with regard to how anti violence systems “should” work. Often times law enforcement is not trained on trauma informed procedures for dealing with anti violence cases. They may often become part of the problem by not believing a survivor when called out to a scene."- Advocate from Pennsylvania Meeting Basic Needs: Anti-violence workers shared desires to provide additional holistic services to meet basic needs to provide space for healing. “In many cases, there is no real justice for survivors. We need to help our communities meet their basic needs—food, housing, transportation, healthcare, and relationship-building.” - Advocate from Wisconsin; Advocates would also like to see more culturally-specific and inclusive services for people with disabilities. “[We need] more no-strings-attached funding for survivor needs, housing that is disabled accessible, and open to care attendants and interpreters.” - Advocate from Virginia
November 19, 2025 at 10:14 PM
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This quote, this statement, is a reminder that together we can resist.
Together we can protect.
And together, we can make it through.

#WeKeepUsSafe #CollectiveCourage #CommunityPower #SolidarityInAction
“To get to any of us, you have to go through all of us.” - Zohran Mamdani
November 13, 2025 at 7:10 PM
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Talk It Out Together is back next week on Tuesday, November 18 ✨ This month we’ll discuss grief and loss in the anti-violence field.

TIOT is a space for anti-violence workers to connect, share challenges, and support each other. 🔗 Register now at the link in our bio. #advocates #antiviolence
Join us on November 18 from 4:30 - 6 pm ET. Talk It Out Together: This month we’ll discuss grief & loss in the anti-violence field. What are you grieving? Where do you store grief in your body? How is your grief showing up? Is burnout a form / manifestation of grief? If so, what would healing look like when burnout is tied to grief? How can organizations recognize & repair when burnout may actually be rooted in unacknowledged grief (personal or collective)?
November 11, 2025 at 5:27 PM
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Episode 4 is here! 🎙️Steph talks with Kayla DeCant about what it takes to fund anti-violence work. They dive into creative strategies, transparency, and staying grounded in your values—especially in times like these. Listen on Substack (link in bio) or your fave podcast app! #WeDeserveBetter
New Episode of the RE:Imagining Anti-Violence Podcast, brought to you by the We Deserve Better Project; Episode 4: Fearless Funding in Tumultuous Times; Audio clip starting at 38:06
November 3, 2025 at 5:09 PM
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You can do everything right—and still get soaked. Anti-violence workers aren’t failing; the environment is unforgiving. We’re being asked to do the impossible in broken systems. It’s not a people problem—it’s a systems problem.
You can do everything right and still get soaked. Anti-violence workers are being asked to do more with less—not because we’re failing, but because the systems are. Illustration of an umbrella with rain.
October 28, 2025 at 8:02 PM
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#WorkerPowerWednesday Affirmations!

If working with survivors is your passion–you deserve to have the support you need to continue doing that. #Unionizing or collective action can be the tool to build the workplaces we need.

To join us, reach out at wedeservebetterproject@gmail.com!
Affirmations for Anti-Violence Workers: You deserve a liveable wage. You deserve safe working conditions. You deserve transparency. You deserve time for self-care. You deserve to have your voice heard. An illustration of a person holding a megaphone is next to the affirmations.
October 22, 2025 at 5:25 PM
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We’re all doing our best to move through the world while carrying collective & personal trauma—sometimes colliding, sometimes connecting. Building awareness around our own trauma responses is one way we can show up with more care & accountability.
We're all just navigating through each other's trauma
October 16, 2025 at 4:03 PM
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Talk It Out Together is back on Tuesday, October 21 ✨ This month we’ll discuss harm reduction for advocates in the anti-violence field.

TIOT is a space for anti-violence workers to connect, share challenges, and support each other. 🔗 Register now at the link in our bio. #advocates #antiviolence
October 14, 2025 at 3:22 PM
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October 6, 2025 at 5:42 PM
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Episode 3 is here! Steph and Jess H, a former anti-violence worker and current mental health therapist, examine how “self-care” rhetoric can mask systemic harm and exploit workers. Listen on Substack (link in bio) or your fave podcast app! #WeDeserveBetter
New Episode of the RE:Imagining Anti-Violence Podcast, brought to you by the We Deserve Better Project; Episode 3: Self-Care or Staff Exploitation? Audio clip starting at 37:33
October 6, 2025 at 5:42 PM
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Napheesa Collier reminded us that leadership is not about titles or power—it’s about integrity, accountability, and the human element.

#BelieveInBetterLeadership #AccountabilityMatters #WNBA #NaphessaCollier #LeadershipWithIntegrity #AntiViolenceMovement #AdvocateVoices #StandUpSpeakOut
That is what leadership looks like. It’s the human element. It’s a basic integrity and it’s the bare minimum any leader should embody. - Napheesa Collier, WNBA player, post-season exit interview calling for accountable leadership
September 30, 2025 at 11:03 PM
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Our 2023 Assessment shows that leadership at anti-violence orgs often replicate the same toxic power dynamics this movement is meant to end. Advocates deserve better—and so do survivors. 📊Learn more about our assessment & key findings at the link in our bio. #WeDeserveBetterProject
Slide 1: We Deserve Better Project 2023 Assessment; Key Finding #5: Leadership at anti-violence organizations often replicate the same toxic, abusive, and violent environments and power dynamics that this movement aims to prevent. Learn more at wedeservebetter.work/key-findings Slide 2: Replicating Patterns of Abuse: "There seems to be a particular dynamic in the anti-violence field where the workplaces themselves harm workers in ways that resemble the abuses and harms we respond to in our communities." - Advocate from Ohio; Graphic of Workplace Power & Control Wheel Slide 3: Advocates Experience Racism: 30% of advocates who completed our survey experienced white supremacy culture or racism at their current or former agency. "The practice of hiring activists, especially from marginalized backgrounds, with no plan for how to support them during periods of crisis, trauma triggers, burnout, and moral injury makes it impossible for us to effectively support survivors." - Advocate from New York Slide 4: Oppression & Microaggressions: "[There is] an abundance of racism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and overall institutional oppression. In my experience, truly dedicated and passionate advocates were turned empty by the time they had a chance to flee the toxic workplace. Nearly every advocate that left had been victimized by leadership in one way or another." - Advocate from Pennsylvania
September 25, 2025 at 8:42 PM
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Advocates deserve better. Survivors deserve better. Our movement deserves better.
Slide 5: Where is the accountability? 60% of advocates tried to hold leadership accountable by using the following strategies: Open communication & feedback; Asking for help from supervisor, HR representative or Board of Directors; Collective group efforts, including writing anonymous letters to leadership & engaging in unionizing efforts. “We are taught to advocate for our clients but when it comes to us… the rules seem to become unclear regarding how to stay safe while doing our jobs.” - Advocate from Kentucky Slide 6: Retaliation is a Serious Fear: The top two reasons anti-violence workers chose not to share concerns with leadership: Fear of retaliation; Thought it would be unproductive or ignored. "[We have talked] with our executive director about the lack of leadership from management. However, it seems that this leader finds out about what is said and there is retaliation." - Advocate from Wisconsin. Nearly half (48%) of all discrimination claims filed with the EEOC included an accusation of retaliation. In 2024, charges alleging retaliation were the most prevalent filings for the seventeenth consecutive year. Slide 7: Why Are Advocates Leaving? Nearly half of advocates reported the following challenges or reasons they left their jobs: 49% cited “resistance to addressing internal conflict”; 48% cited “ineffective management”’ 47% cited “lack of transparency from organizational leadership and boards of directors”. "They are creating harm and victimizing their own employees in the name of helping victims. They're creating more harm in employees' lives while trying to uphold their mission. They refuse to create internal change in a field that is all about culture change. They hire excited change makers who are given a false perspective of the job, and are then let down and blindsided." - Advocate from Pennsylvania Slide 8: We Deserve Better: “So long as our movement engages in needless power games and toxic management practices, we will be as traumatizing to one another as abusers are to their victims. We must make a collective sea-change effort to no longer tolerate this as a culture.” - Advocate from Ohio; “The movement would be transformed when leadership…begins to treat those served with respect; when leadership is mandated to invest in staff and leadership training; and when microaggressions are no longer tolerated.” - Advocate from Pennsylvania
September 25, 2025 at 8:56 PM
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Community isn’t something we inherit—it’s something we build and rebuild with care and intention. Courtney Gustafson said it best: community is an action, and belonging is something we invent. 🌱 #community
“It would be so many years before I learned that community was an action, something we build and rebuild and contribute to -- that belonging is something we invent.” - Courtney Gustafson, ‘Poets Square’
September 23, 2025 at 11:59 PM
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Turnover is high in the #AntiViolence field, but we can reduce this by making sure workers, many of them survivors themselves, have healthy, supportive workplaces to continue doing the work they love. #WorkerPowerWednesday

To join us, reach out at wedeservebetterproject@gmail.com!

#Unionizing
Why Unionizing? Unionizing is not workers “being difficult” or choosing their wellbeing over survivor safety. Unionizing is an act of love, a sign of commitment to this work. Anti-violence workers, many survivors themselves, deserve to have their needs met to continue supporting survivors. You cannot pour from an empty cup. #WorkerPowerWednesday; We Deserve Better Project
September 17, 2025 at 9:15 PM
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Being a leader isn’t always easy—and an important skill to have is knowing when to ask for help. The next time you find yourself unsure what to do—remember: you don’t need to have all the answers. Invite your team to be part of the problem-solving process and figure out the solution together.
A reminder for leaders–you don’t have to figure it out on your own. No one expects you to have all the answers–but your team can’t help if they don’t know what’s happening. Be transparent: share what you can, clarify what’s confidential, and invite your team to be part of the problem-solving process.
September 16, 2025 at 9:32 PM