A Legacy of Service
We are proud, as a survivor-led organization, to have implemented programs that promote gender justice, racial healing, reproductive health, and reconciliation.
Our work is rooted in the belief that our collective survival depends on our collective action.
We celebrate our milestones, each watershed moment of birth and tears, of witnessing ourselves as our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
It’s been a decade of struggle, a decade of uplift, a decade “in defense of ourselves”, a decade of “words of fire” and a decade of “some of us are brave” with our eyes wide open and our feet deeply rooted in spells and magic and foretellings of liberation which leaves “no one behind enemy lines”.
Milestone Moments & Accomplishments
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Convened the first-ever Black Women’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission (BWTRC) to focus on Black women and sexual violence
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Created multimedia cultural productions, the Mother Tongue Monologues theater, that produced critical analysis in the years preceding the BWTRC and formed programs steeped in the mandates of Truth, Justice, Healing and Reconciliation
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Developed powerful partnerships at federal and local levels, influencing key policy that shaped the national cultural gaze to one that centered Black women and girls, rather than pornified their bodies and identities.
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Testified at the United Nations, demanding that Black women be written into international human-rights history — offering testimony before the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Committee Against Torture (CAT), and calling for ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
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Created the Sista’s Van, a mobile healing unit to serve survivors of sexual violence, trafficking, and reproductive violence.
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Founded the Museum of Women’s Resistance, guiding visitors through the history of social justice movements led by women of the Global South and Diaspora
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Developed the Sexual Abuse to Maternal Mortality Pipeline report and training series
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Designed trainings geared towards the prevention of and intervention in gender violence in the workplace. Notable clients included the NFL, NYPD, HBCUs, and A+E Networks
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Created the Liberatory Trauma-Healing model through an iterative cycle, which we as survivors used to liberate ourselves. Through our Liberatory Trauma Healing Model, we cultivated and built brave space, mobilized communities, truth councils and cohorts of fierce advocates, activists, and community leaders.
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Wrote think pieces, articles, critical responses and open letters as counter-narratives to the thinking at various times.
Our Tenth Anniversary
Celebration
In this video, enjoy the opening and welcome ritual led by Shawnee Benton Gibson, followed by an in-depth conversation with Executive Director Farah Tanis and Associate Director Sevonna Brown about the founding and future of BWB.
The celebration continued with meaningful reflections from community members, clips from our decade of events, and live music and poetry created and played to specifically celebrate the joy and power of our 10th Anniversary.