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| Our Voices and Faces Project team in action. Please help us do even more in 2025. |
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To heal, survivors of sexual violence first need to be heard.
That’s why The Voices and Faces Project needs your support.
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It's been an exciting, expansive year at The Voices and Faces Project.
18 years ago, our award-winning storytelling project and testimonial writing program was founded by a small community of Chicago-based survivors and their allies.
In 2024, thanks to the engagement of partners and allies like you, our global Voices and Faces Project community is being heard in more ways, and more places, than ever before:
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• We graduated our 1300th writer from The Stories We Tell, an immersive, two-day testimonial writing workshop for survivors of gender-based violence seeking to use their personal stories to create political change. Our signature program has traveled across the North American and African continents, and will head to new regions in 2025.
• We collaborated with UN Women to pilot a narrative advocacy workshop series in the Republic of Georgia. Local Storytelling, Global Change: Using Narrative in the Fight for Gender Justice, was created for rising Eastern European gender-justice leaders, through funding from the U.S. Department of State.
• We debuted Breaking Free, a writing program for those who have experienced religious-based sexual trauma. The curriculum was created by Stories We Tell co-founder R. Clifton Spargo, an alum of the Yale Divinity school, in dialogue with Linda K. Klein, author of "Pure."
• We developed Meeting People Where They Are & Moving Them Towards Justice, a narrative advocacy training for those seeking to think in new ways about how language, word choice, and personal narrative can break through ideological barriers during times of high political conflict.
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• We entered into an ongoing partnership with the International Research and Exchanges Board, becoming a host organization for their global fellows program; supporting the development of two rising gender-justice leaders, Teona Japoshvili (Republic of Georgia) and Warda Bouye (Morocco); and developing culturally relevant narrative advocacy programs for each of these regions.
• We launched Here to Be Heard, a concert benefitting our Stories We Tell Scholarship Fund. Created in collaboration with two legendary Chicago Blues artists — Donna Herula and Katherine Davis — this ongoing concert series spotlights musical storytelling as a medium for social change.
• We deepened our longstanding alliance with Justice for Migrant Women, bringing Our Stories are our Power: The Practice, Purpose, & Ethics of Storytelling, to their 2024 Rural Women Lead cohort, a community of grassroots activists fighting for violence free workplaces.
• We spent time in community with our allies, participating in the Skoll Global Forum (where Voices and Faces Project founder Anne K. Ream was a delegate); World Without Exploitation's National Convening (where we moderated a keynote discussion on the ethics of storytelling in the anti-trafficking movement); and Ford Foundation's Free Future Forum, among other gatherings.
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• We partnered with Virginia Stage Company and Freekind to bring Lived Through This: Listening to the Stories of Sexual Assault Survivors, to Virginia. A theatrical adaptation of Anne K. Ream's critically-praised book, each performance was followed by a moderated discussion that challenged the audience to rethink the causes and consequences of gender-based violence.
• We uplifted authors using fiction and creative non-fiction in the fight to end gender-based violence, bringing We Tell Stories — our literary conversation series — to World Without Exploitation, where Anne K. Ream moderated a keynote with authors Ruchira Gupta, Hannah Sward, and Rachel Moran; and Yale University, where R. Clifton Spargo and playwright Caity Shea-Violette engaged in a public dialogue about writing for the page, stage, and screen.
• And we collaborated with two inspired private sector partners — Bigmouth Creative and VML — to build a new and expanded website, and complete our rebranding process. The Voices and Faces Project will officially transition to our new identity as Center for Story & Witness in the coming days, so watch this space for your announcement!
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We've done a lot in our last year. And as Center for Story & Witness, we're poised to do even more in the year ahead. But we can't do it without you.
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Our stories are our power. At The Voices and Faces Project we’re using them to create change. |
Our mission at The Voices and Faces Project (which will soon be rebranded and expanded as Center for Story & Witness) is to cultivate and share stories that bear witness to gender- based violence and other human rights injustices in order to challenge and change minds, hearts, and public policies. Through our narrative advocacy trainings, performances, publications, and testimonial writing workshops, we're supporting a new generation of witnesses, writers, artists, and activists to use their stories to create social change. We are a registered 501c3 organization and have been named one of America's Best Charities by the board of Independent Charities of America.
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© 2024 The Voices and Faces Project
All rights reserved
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