VAWnet Event Calendar

The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence's Storytelling Institute is a free live two-day, virtual training set to take place on August 14 and August 15, 12:00pm – 4:00pm (ET). This will be an amazing opportunity for individuals who seek to move their target audiences from facts and numbers to taking action, utilizing storytelling as a tool for social transformation. This interactive training will provide participants with a digital companion guide, along with strategies and frameworks to identify storytelling goals, build a story bank, develop storytellers within your organization and nurture a sustainable culture of powerful storytelling.

“Walls keep everybody out. Boundaries teach people where the door is.” This discussion will focus on the importance of boundaries as a fundamental tool for building healthy and productive relationships with clients, colleagues, and partners. Panelists will explore how to uncover your boundaries, tools for communicating your boundaries, the reasons we sometimes struggle with enforcing our boundaries, and how our boundaries change and evolve over time.

This Fireside session from the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center will share how Tribes and Tribal organizations can develop their sustainable responses, including responding to challenges to best meet the needs of survivors and Tribal communities by pooling together different federal funds and maximizing impact.

Stalking is a prevalent, dangerous and often misunderstood crime that often results in lethal violence. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) reports that about 1 in 6 women and 1 in 17 men have been stalked at some point in their lives, many of these as minors. Stalking is also a high risk indicator in domestic violence cases. And yet, taken without context, many individual incidents of stalking are made up of perfectly legal actions.

Abusers are often experts at manipulating peers, at presenting a charismatic facade that hides the abuse they may perpetrate against their victims on a regular basis. Often, serious and tragic incidents of domestic violence are portrayed in the media as anomalies, wherein an otherwise 'lovely person' just 'snapped'. Entertainment can still be seen portraying control, jealousy, and abuse as romance. The ways society speaks about domestic violence leaves victims at risk, hampers prevention efforts, and removed responsibility from perpetrators.

How do we balance our mission to provide safety and empowerment for victims of interpersonal violence, with the knowledge that our staff absorb the stories of those that they serve and over time may exhibit the same trauma symptoms we see in our clients? What does it mean to make our supervision with staff as trauma-informed as our work with victims? Is it possible to preserve our duty to victims while weighing our concern for staff?