Sustaining Advocates
Sustaining the People Who Sustain the Movement
The work to end sexual and domestic violence depends on people. Advocates, preventionists, and leaders support survivors and strengthen communities every day. Right now, that workforce is stretched thin.
Burnout, turnover, and chronic underinvestment are not just workforce challenges. They directly impact survivor safety, healing, and prevention.
Through Emergence and Restoryation, the Action Alliance is working with the field to support and sustain the people at the heart of this work.
What Workforce Development Looks Like in the Anti-Violence Movement
In this movement, workforce development includes more than skill-building. It also means supporting the whole person by creating space for reflection and healing, valuing lived experience and emotional labor, and building connection across the field.
Why It Matters
Retention is about more than keeping positions filled. It is about consistent, trusted support for survivors, stronger and more stable organizations, and a workforce that can grow, lead, and stay in the field. When we support people, we strengthen the entire movement.
Keep Going, Together
This work asks a lot of people. It always has. But together, we can work to lift each other up and provide those essential moments of healing that keep advocates whole, supported, and well for years to come.
Building Robust Practices for Sustained Wellness, Connection, and Power
Emergence centers a simple, powerful idea: If we want to sustain the work, we have to support the people doing it.
Right now, that means focusing on individual wellness. Not as a quick fix or a substitute for broader change, but as a necessary and essential starting point.
Through Emergence, we are creating spaces where advocates can:
- Slow down and reconnect with themselves
- Practice healing and restoration
- Build creativity, reflection, and resilience
- Experience care, not just provide it
Emergence is about making space for people to breathe in the middle of the work that rarely, if ever, pauses.
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Through Restoryation—a statewide storytelling and needs assessment initiative—we listened deeply to advocates across Virginia. What we heard was both powerful and urgent.
Advocates described a deep commitment to their work as well as significant challenges, including:
- High levels of burnout and secondary trauma
- Long hours paired with low compensation
- Workplace environments that struggle to support wellness
- The cumulative impact of crises like COVID-19, funding instability, and rising violence
Many advocates are working beyond full-time hours while earning wages that barely meet the cost of living.
And yet, the stories also revealed something else: resilience, connection, and a shared desire to build something better.
Restoryation named what many in the field have long known: to sustain the movement, we must invest in the people within it.
Read the ReStoryation report
Stay in Touch
Want to stay connected? The Action Alliance shares several newsletters that support the kind of connection, reflection, and collective care at the heart of Emergence — alongside updates on prevention work, policy action, trainings, and resources for sustaining ourselves and each other in the movement to end violence. Subscribe to one or all to stay grounded, inspired, and connected to communities creating change across Virginia.