Our Values
CSAJ grounds its work in a number of core values and approaches. These values put the principles of survivor centered advocacy into our own practice.
We believe in:
Survivor Centered Advocacy: Survivors’ lived experiences and self-expressed priorities should guide our work
Margins to Center: Our work must center the needs of marginalized survivors, follow their expertise, and confront systems of white supremacy
Agency: Survivors have the power to direct their own lives; interventions and systems must recognize and support the complexity of survivors’ lives
Economic Agency: Survivors should have meaningful access to economic resources and opportunities; our task is to help navigate and change inequitable systems
Civil legal advocacy: Civil legal advocacy has the power to remedy economic harms and offer economic relief needed for safety and restoration
Multi-level advocacy: Targeting the roots of violence means working at multiple levels of advocacy – leveraging individual advocacy toward organizational and systems change
Intersectional Approaches: Advocacy should examine problems and forge solutions that attend to the ways an individual’s intersecting identities shape their experiences
Partnership and Collaboration: Powerful, transformative advocacy requires that we build partnerships between disciplines and across movements
Praxis: We are constantly learning and adapting, and our advocacy should add-to our collective understanding of critical questions
Our Approach
CSAJ’s Theory of Change guides what we do and how we do it. It helps us ensure that our actions today will create the changes we seek.
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We ensure that advocates and attorneys can meet survivors’ economic needs: We provide training, develop tools and resources, and co-create strategies to increase knowledge, skills, and strategies on consumer and economic advocacy
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research icon We strengthen organizations’ capacity and approach: We assess gaps and opportunities, develop and pilot solutions, foster partnership building, and disseminate best practices to increase their capacity to meet and address economic challenges in their communities
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We influence more equitable policies and systems: We take a stand on economic issues, mobilize coalitions, build public awareness, and conduct research and impact litigation to expand lawmaker and judicial awareness and create meaningful policy change
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Consumer rights icon Through these strategies, we can realize and see evidence of our vision: That all survivors of domestic and sexual violence have equal access to economic security, physical safety, and human dignity
