Rethink Resources

I’ve talked a bit about having started an organization and directed it for years - Young Women’s Empowerment Project. When asked I’ve often explained that I returned to my hometown Chicago, after having lived in different cities and worked in different ways on the issue of prostitution, and finding no efforts in Chicago at that time clearly for youth involved in the sex trade - I decided to start one.

But what seems like a simple description is also not really accurate and a complete underestimation of what it actually took. But sometimes I’ve been pressed for time, I wasn’t sure that people really wanted to know or the grant application was only so long. And grant applications really like simple answers and concrete dates.

And while there are dates I can refer to, I find they hide the real work behind starting something as big as a nonprofit organization. So when I think of the work I did to start what became the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, I date it around early 1996. The official start date of YWEP is January 2002. But that consciously organized, collectively-run, already with a first grant, soon to be official nonprofit organization could not have happened without a lot of work before that.

I was living in Milwaukee in 1996 and planned on starting a project here for youth in the sex trade. I had developed the idea, started to make contacts with local youth services, and was a few weeks away from sending out an initial brochure when I lost my life partner to suicide. As you can imagine I had a lot to deal with as I grieved her death and had my life turned upside down. So the idea for a youth project was pushed aside.

I moved a lot that first year and felt so unanchored I decided to move back to my hometown of Chicago, after having been gone for six years.

I did a lot of healing work. I also started to make local connections to see what I could do and eventually to start the organization that I had wanted to start in Milwaukee. I became trained as a rape crisis counselor with Rape Victim Advocates and met survivors of sexual assault at hospital emergency rooms. I worked with an all volunteer library for women detained at the Cook County Jail called Windows to Freedom (read a hilarious article about a social worker’s effort to visit someone at the jail here). I became certified as a HIV prevention educator through the Red Cross. I learned more about a practice I had heard about called harm reduction through reading and finding people who did harm reduction work.

All this made me more prepared to start an organization. I developed a lot of local contacts and became known for having a lot of information about prostitution issues. Organizations started to ask me to speak to new domestic violence and sexual assault advocates.

In mid-1999, I was almost ready to start up this new project. That summer another wave of murders rocked the Englewood neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago. The murdered women, found in abandoned buildings and alleys, were reported by the media to be involved in “high-risk lifestyles” of drugs and prostitution. The police had the nerve to suggest that women stay off the streets and not go out at night. I wrote a letter to the editor (which was published in the Chicago Tribune) offering that women weren’t the source of the problem, shouldn’t have to contain our lives even more because of violence and shared my sadness about the murders.

I figured they’d be more likely to print the letter if I could also add a name for the organization I was about to start. I thought for a bit that night and came up with Advocates for Prostituted Women and Girls.

More soon…