our origin story

Our collective has been through multiple iterations. In 2020, the Safer Movements Collective (SMC) began as an informal virtual gathering space where prison abolitionist organizers who experienced intimate partner abuse and sexual violence within movement spaces provided each other with peer mental health support and mutual aid while engaging in political education around these issues. Through intragroup conflicts and harms, collective members recognized that we needed to expand our political education to focus on interpersonal violence that also took the forms of ableism, anti-Blackness, misogynoir, and colorism. We deepened our understanding of these issues in our movement spaces and in ourselves. We deepened our practice of conflict transformation and disability justice. We reaffirmed our commitment to transformative justice.

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Our resources page offers many of the resources we engaged with through our political education and peer mental health support work.

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Our current iteration seeks to bring an analysis of the ways our experiences of trauma, disability, and oppression impact the ways we understand and experience harm, engage in conflict, and relate to each other. We chose the symbolism of the coconut palm tree because of its significance in the ancestral cultures of our collective members who trace their roots back to the U.S. South and the Caribbean.  We recognize that, for Black folks and people of color, our healing work must be rooted in our own histories, traditions, and connection to land. We collaborated on the art for this symbol with Cristy Road, the artist who created art for Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology and The Revolution Starts at Home, as a way to honor the movement lineages from which we have developed our analysis as prison abolitionists working to create safety from state and interpersonal violence.

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We have learned from the work of many organizers and collectives who came before us and who are growing alongside us. We know we are still always learning.