After four years with CASS, and three years in the role of Executive Director, I am stepping out of my role to make space for exciting new leadership!

I am so grateful for all that CASS has given me. When I first joined CASS’s Board of Directors in 2014, I was a new mom and a recent survivor of domestic violence. I was experiencing street harassment through a new lens: I had seen the ways that abusive language could become normalized when we brush it off as something that’s not that serious. I started to understand how words could create a context where violence was more likely to happen.

Through collective action, we broadened the definition of street harassment to better encompass the experiences of Black trans women who are misgendered in public spaces, Muslim women harassed for wearing hijab, people in the sex trades and people experiencing homelessness harassed by police for their survival strategies. We built programs to support masculine people in building healthier relationships and trans folks in accessing resources. We used our public roundtable on street harassment to listen and learn from the experiences of diverse groups of trans, queer, nonbinary people, women, and girls ― and we codified our definition into law in order to collect citywide data that will help us understand the full scope of the problem and guide non-criminal, public health solutions.

Now, in a time when we’re seeing an increase in white supremacists carrying out heinous acts of violence against marginalized communities and the state passing and enforcing laws that ban, detain, erase, and inflict violence upon our communities, it is more important than ever for us to respond to harmful language that perpetuates hate and violence. We know how this language can translate into violent actions, and it is all of our responsibility to demonstrate that sexism, racism, heterosexism, cissexism, classism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and all forms of hate won’t be tolerated in our communities.

Under new leadership, CASS will continue its important work ― leading advocacy to implement the Street Harassment Prevention Act and advance a broader policy platform that addresses the myriad ways that our different communities are impacted by harassment; facilitating trainings that support nightlife, community groups, and workplaces of all kinds to root out microaggressions and sexual harassment in their microcosms; supporting masculine people on their journeys to better understand consent, boundaries, and emotional labor; and uplifting and centering and prioritizing the needs of trans sex workers of color. I am excited to announce that I’ll be leaving you in the very capable, passionate, innovative, afrolatinx queer feminist hands of alicia sanchez gill who will be CASS’s Interim Executive Director.

alicia joins CASS most recently from YWCA USA, where she engaged in federal legislative advocacy to reauthorize and improve the Violence Against Women Act, and from her role as CASS’s Board Treasurer. As a Board member, Alicia was pivotal in helping CASS fundraise, conduct community workshops, and shore up internal policies and procedures that reflect our values of intersectionality, shared leadership, and creating survivor-centered responses to harassment and violence.

alicia is a queer, afrolatinx survivor who has called DC home for almost 20 years. She previously managed sexaul assault crisis services for the District at the DC Rape Crisis Center, volunteered on the outreach van at HIPS, helped create a grassroots campaign about LGBTQ intimate partner violence called “Show Me Love DC”, and was a long-time member of INCITE! DC. alicia believes in the beauty of building connections, community safety outside of carcerality and prison systems, dismantling anti-blackness, and bringing the margins into the center.  

As for me, I’ll keep fighting this battle on a different front as the new Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project in my hometown, New York City, where I’ll continue to struggle alongside trans, queer, and nonbinary people of color to build safety, community wellness, and economic justice.

Onwards and upwards!