COMMUNITY
The Virginia Anti-Violence Project joins our community in building experiences of acceptance and universal connection. We long to feel engaged with each other, to show up, to be seen and heard, and to feel valued. As a grassroots organization, we strive to collaborate with the community to recognize and address issues together.
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
The Virginia Anti-Violence Project joins our community in celebrating families and relationships in all of their queer/trans and beautiful variations. We support our chosen and biological families, our pets, our children, our friends, and harbor appreciative and nurturing relationships. We recognize the importance of having complex and fun conversations about how sex, sexuality, intimacy, gender identity, and consent are indeed central and crucial to our lives.
INTERSECTIONALITY/RACIAL JUSTICE
The Virginia Anti-Violence Project challenges our community to honor the wholeness of our individual and collective identities, not singularly our sexual orientation or gender identity. We must acknowledge our shared oppression, while also acknowledging some members of our community are disproportionately impacted by multiple forms of oppression. We commit individually and organizationally to joining our community in addressing and dismantling white supremacy through an intersectional approach.
LGBTQ+ LIBERATION/EQUITY
The Virginia Anti-Violence Project recognizes that in order to end violence against and within LGBTQ communities we must work toward full LGBTQ+ liberation. We recognize that individual, community, and cultural change are inextricably linked and our community must engage in diverse mainstream spaces in order to ensure that all our people have access to equitable resources.
TRUST/ACCESSIBILITY
The Virginia Anti-Violence Project trusts that people in our communities know what’s best for us. We follow the fierce leadership that already exists within our communities, particularly centering people who are most affected by oppression and violence.
FUN/CREATIVITY
The Virginia Anti-Violence Project believes that creativity builds resiliency and fosters hope. We commit to singing with you, dancing with you, and celebrating our joint successes, while acknowledging and battling the challenges we face as a community. We believe creativity is essential to problem-solving and will manifest this belief into action.
INTEGRITY/TRANSPARENCY
The Virginia Anti-Violence Project depends on our community to hold us accountable in aligning our collective and individual actions and decisions with our stated values and commitments. We recognize that we will fall short of our community’s expectations at times and we commit to being open, honest, and consistently communicating as we learn and grow in community.
LANGUAGE JUSTICE
We center our anti-violence work in the experiences and lives of LGBTQ+ communities and cultures that are often not visible and left out of conversations. We aim to provide access to resources, tools, education, and language for those of us that have been silenced, because it is healing to be heard and spoken to as our full and authentic selves. Our communities need to be able to communicate in order to be safe, and our unique voices deserve justice and freedom as part of our holistic liberation. The world we want to live in is multilingual, because we believe that language is power.
DISABILITY JUSTICE
VAVP is working to evolve our services and website to better meet the needs of people with disabilities. In doing so we acknowledge that ableism intersects, and is uniquely informed by, other forms of oppression. We promise to move past mere accessibility and into the framework of reformative justice, and center those with disabilities in our work.