Help Support Sexual Violence Survivors in NoCo

Why do I support SAVA and why am I asking you to join me in supporting them this year?

SAVA provides support and education that I personally needed in my developmental years and, later, in my child-raising years. I lacked my own bodily autonomy, self-esteem and the ability to impart those principles to my children. 

In addition, for reasons I won’t go into, as a young adult I did not have basic knowledge of grooming behavior and other warning signs of extended family members and friends.

As a young mother, I thought I was doing everything right to protect my children. We didn’t do sleepovers, and we were otherwise very careful how our kids spent time with “other” people - the ones we were supposed to be wary of, right?

SAVA provides this and other important Prevention Education such as the SART program in our Middle and High Schools where teens teach and support each other in preventing sexual assault, and the SOAR program which teaches these principles to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and Superworld which is a summer program for children ages 8-12 where they learn how to have healthy relationships with themselves, their own bodies and how to hold boundaries, etc.

I love all of the efforts and passion that SAVA pours into prevention and hope to see those programs grow beyond our wildest dreams in the coming years.

Just before the Soirée in October this year, I attended a Survivor Panel, my first Survivor Panel. I had finished the required sensitivity training course as a board member, and was invited to attend.

These evenings are when volunteers who are at the end of their required hours of training to work the 24-hour hotline attend a Q&A panel to listen to survivors of sexual assault tell their stories and then answer any questions the future volunteers have as they prepare to serve other survivors.

This Survivor Panel was life-changing for me. I understood the mission of SAVA - of course I did. But I don’t think I really felt it. 

Not until I listened to the brave and funny voice of the survivor and witnessed her vulnerability in answering the volunteers’ earnest questions. The give and take; the delicate, but somehow tough, egg toss of information being offered and requested. All for the sake of future survivors who will someday, some awful day, reach for the 24-hour hotline number and ask for help. It is up to us to make sure that the help will be there. In this day and age of losing funding, it’s up to us.

These pure forms of advocacy and prevention that SAVA strives for is why I am a part of this organization. It’s why I give my time and what money I can. 

It’s why I ask you to join me in setting up a recurring donation right now through Colorado Gives.

Here is an example of what our money can do to help. All of SAVA's services are at no-cost to survivors and their families.

$150 – 1 child’s therapy session

$100 – 1 Prevention Ed session

$75 – Forensic exam advocacy

$50 – Walk-in crisis support

All my love and best wishes,

Brenda