BREATHE NETWORK INC
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Mission Statement
The Breathe Network supports survivors of sexual violence with trauma-informed, sliding-scale, healthcare and healing practitioners. We provide professional training on sexual trauma and trauma-informed care to make healing more accessible and sustainable. We are creating a movement to transform the way our society responds to trauma: enhancing care, reducing stigma, and increasing options that will meet the body, mind, and soul needs of survivors across the United States, Canada, and beyond.
About This Cause
The Breathe Network is the only national nonprofit organization with a central focus on developing the capacity to ensure that all survivors of sexual violence have access to sliding-scale, trauma-informed, holistic health and healing care. We are innovators in the movement to end sexual violence and our approach is both unconventional and necessary. We consider the immediate and long-term health, wellness, and resilience of survivors to be a vital component of the work currently being done in this field. We conduct trainings, provide educational resources and are committed to uniting the anti-violence advocacy and trauma healing fields in order to create a truly holistic framework for how we collectively address the epidemic of sexual violence. The Breathe Network's understanding of sexual violence and our approach to this work reflects what current research tells us about the physiology of both trauma and resilience: *Trauma is stored in the body. *Unresolved traumatic experiences and responses can become encoded within our nervous system, causing physical and mental health disruptions and disease across the lifespan. *Language-based methods alone do not necessarily resolve trauma's imprint. *Healing is nonlinear. *Healing is not one-size-fits-all. *Healing is a form of interpersonal and intrapersonal harm prevention. The Breathe Network acknowledges the complexities that survivors face in the aftermath of sexual violence and we have designed our work to hold survivors throughout their nonlinear journey. We created an intentionally curated and vetted network of professionals who have in-depth training in understanding the impacts of sexual violence and best practices in trauma-informed care to reduce the likelihood of triggers, flashbacks, or acute harm when survivors seek support. We recognized that many survivors simply cannot afford healing, whether psychological, physiological, physical, spiritual, or communal, which combined with the need for consistent support over weeks, months, and sometimes much longer, lead us to our decision to make all of our healthcare, healing, and educational resources sliding-scale. We believe that the existing resources did not yet prioritize the lived experiences of our survivor community who needed solutions outside of the medical, legal, and educational system, and therefore, we embarked on a multi-year research study to learn directly from survivors - who we recognize as experts - about the practices, approaches, and resources that most contributed to their recovery. The insights we garnered from survivors in this study have been disseminated throughout our courses and contribute to educating practitioners about how to best care for survivors (and themselves) while also informing the healing resources we offer to survivors. We are working both downstream and upstream to transform the way society responds to the trauma of sexual violence. Our downstream work is delivered through the web of resources we offer for people who’ve already survived harm. Simultaneously, we are working upstream by better ensuring that survivors’ encounters with healers and healthcare providers will be positive, that survivors will have an array of accessible options, and that the staff and professionals will be adequately resourced themselves versus burnt out by the nature of the work. By connecting survivors with a trusted and multi-disciplinary team of trauma-informed practitioners, we can reduce the likelihood that the many physical and psychological symptoms of post-traumatic stress will take a hold of the survivor’s body, psyche, and life. This in and of itself is a way to reduce the economic weight placed upon survivors who when not adequately met with support, may struggle with a multitude of physical and psychological health conditions. We are working towards dismantling cultural, social, and generational cycles of interpersonal and intrapersonal harm by centering access to healing and resilience for every survivor of sexual trauma.