Survivors to the Front is a zine that commemorates Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) and provides our UMBC community members--especially survivors and victims of sexual and/or power-based violence--a way to grab the megaphone. Albeit, voices will be heard through a zine in a much different way, we are committed to building the platform by which survivor testimony can be amplified throughout our campus community.
The finished product (set to debut around April 24th) will be posted on social media and available for digital download. Print copies will be made available when campus reopens.
Thank you for your participation in this project. Although we will still miss all of the greatness and power that Take Back the Night and other SAAM programs bring to our campus, we know that stories still need to be shared and voices heard. Just so, we hope that you can submit your work to be celebrated, acknowledged, and felt by the UMBC community.
Questions or concerns? Please direct correspondence to Amelia Meman at meman1@umbc.edu.
Join Retriever Essentials team as the CCMA AmeriCorps VISTA/Program Coordinator for 2020-2021.Apply online here.Member Duties: The CCMA AmeriCorps VISTA will implement the operation manual to continue institutionalizing all Retriever Essentials programming, while updating the manual to ensure needs are met in the most efficiently. They will coordinate volunteers for daily operations of the food pantry, including donation collection, inventory, bag packing/delivery, and client shopping. The VISTA will also develop a fundraising plan to raise money to support the new permanent pantry space on campus and to fund a staff member. They will work to develop partnerships with departments and student groups and on and off campus partners to provide programming and events around food justice and healthy eating on a budget. Additionally, the VISTA will coordinate the student leadership board to help institutionalize Retriever Essentials. They will train students in researching and advocating for food and housing insecure students. The VISTA will create and update promotional content and develop marketing strategies. |
Program Benefits: Childcare assistance if eligible, Gym Membership, Relocation Allowance, Choice of Education Award or End of Service Stipend, Training, Living Allowance, Health Coverage.For best consideration please apply by April 10th, 2020.https://my.americorps.gov/mp/listing/viewListing.do?id=94195&fromSearch=true |
UMBC is a community that celebrates our great moments together. We also rise together in times of need to meet urgent social collective challenges. Over the last few weeks, the global health crisis caused by COVID-19 has hit close to home for all of us. On a daily basis we are hearing from students who have gone from preparing for exams to struggling to meet their basic daily needs.
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To donate directly to Retriever Essentials please click the link above or below and select the drop down menu that indicate "Retriever Essentials" The Stay Black and Gold Emergency Fund acknowledges that sometimes we are faced with circumstances we could not have predicted ... circumstances which require us to seek help from others. Please support us in doing all we can to help students continue their education in the face of challenges they could not have anticipated.
In the midst of challenging times, the UMBC community always finds ways to support each other. Please consider making a donation to the Stay Black and Gold Emergency Fund.
Thank you, |
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Greg Simmons, M.P.P. '04 For the most updated information and more information on actions to reduce COVID-19 risks in our community, please visit COVID19.umbc.edu.
All contributions raised are administered by the UMBC Foundation for the benefit of UMBC. |
Sexual Assault Awareness Month brings people together to create and generate discussion and skill-building on how to prevent sexual violence in our schools, workplaces, and communities. While providing support and care to survivors of sexual violence is an everyday action, this awareness month also carves out intentional moments to honor and believe survivors’ stories and experiences. As we all do our part to flatten the curve during this public health crisis, we won’t be able to physically come together this April to do this critical work. The Women’s Center and all of our campus partners including the Office of Equity and Inclusion, University Health Services, the Counseling Center, Green Dot, We Believe You, and Retriever Courage, and more will nonetheless continue to promote awareness and prevention this month.
We are inviting our UMBC community to join our efforts.
Learn - Each week during April, the Women’s Center will be focusing on various topics and issues related to sexual violence awareness and prevention (see attached flyer). Follow us on social media (Facebook,Twitter, and Instagram) to watch videos, read articles, and engage in other content for learning and skill-building. Leave us comments or ask questions. We also hope to offer some virtual discussions over the month to engage as a community in this learning. Stay tuned to the Women’s Center’s myUMBC for more details.
Create - We are redesigning the Clothesline Project and parts of Take Back the Night for a virtual setting that honors survivors’ stories and creates space for community members to hold and validate these stories. Survivors of sexual violence/power-based violence are invited to share their stories so others in our community may still bear witness. The Women’s Center will share these stories in a virtual Clothesline Project and zine project: “Survivors to the Front: A Call to Witness”.
--To submit a virtual Clothesline T-Shirt Project, visit our myUMBC post for more details.
--To submit artwork, poetry, stories to our zine by 4/15, visit our myUMBC post for more details.
Come Together - The We Believe You discussion groupwill still be meeting weekly. Survivors of power-based violence are welcomed to join this virtual community hosted by the Women’s Center with support from the We Believe You student org. Email womenscenter@umbc.edu for more details on how you can join this virtual discussion.
The events, activism, discussions, support, and stories that stem from Sexual Assault Awareness Month are some of the Women’s Center’s most significant and special. As we make adjustments to our calendar and move programming online, we want students to know that it is okay to grieve Take Back the Night and our other annual traditions. We are alongside you in that grieving process, and we hope that in these extraordinary times, we can continue to act with extraordinary compassion and conscientiousness to prevent sexual violence at UMBC and beyond.
And, remember, no matter where you are, dear survivors, we see you. We believe you. You matter. Always.
Additionally, throughout this time of distance learning, campus staff are still here and available for support. Do not hesitate to reach out for questions, concerns, or care.
On-Campus Resources Available for Virtual Support:
Visit Retriever Courage for a full list of campus resources and support to include resources for USG students, faculty, and staff
For up-to-date details on how to access these resources during this time of distance learning visit UMBC’s COVID-19 resources page.
To report a complaint of sexual misconduct or discrimination, please submit this online form.
Off-Campus Resources:
TurnAround, Inc. Helpline (Available 24/7): 443-279-0379; Office: 410-377-8111
MCASA is still open and supporting survivors.
The National Sexual Assault Hotline is 24/7, confidential and free: 800-656-HOPE (4673) and through chat.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 24/7, confidential and free: 1-800-799-7233 and through chat.
Visit Retriever Courage for a more extensive list of off-campus resources and support
Nandi is a student staff member in the Women’s Center and a Junior English major.
Mutual aid, as a concept, is based in anarchism and the work of Petr Kropotkin. His work, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution”, is a foundational text for anarchists and other communist movements. But really, you don’t have to be an anarchist or a communist, or know anything about these ideologies to practice mutual aid because it’s an extremely simple concept.
Basically, the theory supposes that people (and other creatures) are FAR more inclined to taking care of each other than they are to individualism, no matter how much our capitalist ruling class argues to the contrary. The Seattle-based collective Big Door Brigade defines the practical application of mutual aid as “when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW!” They also make the point that it is a separate and distinct practice from charity and charitable organizations.
Image by Seth Tobocman
Historically, mutual aid looks a lot of different ways. The Free African Society in 1787 was an organization meant to provide aid amongst free Black people. In the 20th century, there were Italian-American organizations called Societa di Mutuo Soccorso and Mexican-American societies called Sociedad Mutualistas. Larger worker movements and labor unions are also a part of this tradition as they necessitate collaboration and care work as a means to stay afloat while struggling for rights. Labor organizing in the US is at its lowest point in decades, but that doesn’t mean that we still can’t connect to our communities right now in the present to help everyone survive.
In feminist movements, mutual aid is a thread that runs throughout as an ongoing necessity among those who are oppressed under patriarchy. It’s not hard to see why; power-based violence, hiring discrimination, and wage gaps all team up to make people of oppressed genders dependent on one another rather than the institutions that their oppressors control.
Anarchist Feminist flag
The Association for Women’s Rights in Development has mutual aid as a key piece of their “Solidarity Economy”, an economy in which people’s relationship to goods and services is more sustainable and cooperative. To go along with that, anarchist feminism interprets the labeling of actions like sharing, compassion, and sensitivity as “feminine” to mean that these are direct challenges to the “masculine” hierarchy.
Maybe you’ve seen mutual aid mentioned on social media in the past few weeks, or maybe you haven’t. Right now, due to COVID-19, we’re all in a position to rely on one another for safety and survival. We usually think of networking as a means to further ourselves towards our own goals and ambitions. Now is a time to network with the people in our neighborhoods and communities for our common good. Practicing mutual aid doesn’t mean that everyone has to gather and social distancing has to go out the window because those are important things to do for our communities as well.
If in reaching out you find a need that you can fill, then do so! If someone in your network has access to resources that you can’t find, then make your own needs known! As capable and resourceful as we are, self-reliance is not the order of the day. Lean into your human inclinations towards care and comradeship to make it through.
Hundreds of mutual aid groups have popped up all over the country in the past month to address the dire straits we now find ourselves in, with most of them being led by the organizers who dedicate their lives to this work every day.
To find one near you, you can go to the interactive map on mutualaidhub.org, or this list posted on the Its Going Down digital community center. Its Going Down also has organizing guides and resources so that you don’t have to go into this unlearned. I’ve put in for the Baltimore Maroon Movement! Who in YOUR community needs your help?
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