SASS’s commitment to our core mission has been clear since our founding in 1991, but as the agency has grown and adapted over the past three decades, so too has our understanding of our place within the movement against sexual violence.
In 2024, an 8-member committee underwent a 6-month strategic planning process, envisioning the future of our organization. Together, we refined our Mission, Vision, and Values and recommitted to our work by developing our agency’s Strategic Plan and “Theory of Change”, which map out how we will continue to turn resources into solutions for survivors. These 2024 updates to our Mission, Vision, and Values statements demonstrate that growth and SASS’s enduring commitment to creating a more just world.
SASS’s mission is to create opportunities for survivors of sexual violence and their supporters to find healing, justice, and liberation. We support people who have experienced sexual violence in any form, including intimate partner violence, family violence, sexual harassment, stalking, trafficking, and more.
Systemic oppression is a root cause of sexual violence and sexual violence is a tool of oppressive systems. SASS acknowledges that we live within oppressive systems and that those systems impact all of us. SASS’s role in dismantling those systems starts with supporting and centering survivors and collaborating with partners who are also working towards collective liberation.
SASS envisions a world that supports bodily autonomy, dignity, and freedom of choice for all people, and a culture that centers consent, equality, and liberation.
SASS is committed to building a community of care that:
- values all people,
- honors all ways of being,
- demonstrates radical acceptance,
- practices harm reduction,
- mitigates trauma, and
- engages with the multi-systems work needed to reduce the prevalence of violence.
SASS’s work is guided by anti-oppression, anti-racism, decolonization, and collective liberation. Our values teach us that:
- There is no singular way to be a survivor. Each person is an expert in their own experiences and needs. We know sexual violence takes many forms and occurs in many settings, so each survivor gets to define their own understanding of what they have experienced. We believe survivors and recognize the courage it takes to tell one’s story.
- Every person has the right to make decisions about their own body, free from coercion or violence. Coercion and violence can be physical, emotional, psychological, financial, and spiritual, and can be perpetrated by individuals and systems.
- It is our responsibility to do the work it takes to be a welcoming and safe space for people of all genders, races, religions, abilities, and backgrounds. We stand in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, with trans- and gender-expansive people, with LGBTQIA+ people, with disabled and neurodivergent people, with people who have experienced houselessness and incarceration, with people impacted by war and state-based violence, with people being denied access to reproductive and sexual healthcare, and with survivors everywhere.
- No one is free until everyone is free. All individuals, communities, and movements for justice are interconnected.
- There is no wrong door. Anyone who finds themselves at SASS is deserving of care and we are committed to connecting people to the support they deserve, wherever that might be.
- All people deserve radical acceptance for who they are. Informed by principles of harm reduction and trauma-informed care, SASS accepts everyone without judgment. We reject carceral, punitive, or patriarchal approaches to supporting survivors. No matter what a person chooses to do in their pursuit of justice, healing, and liberation, SASS supports their right to make those choices.