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Our History

A Decade of Service

For over a decade, Black Women’s Blueprint has mobilized for our community. We are proud as a survivor led-organization to have implemented programs that promote gender justice, racial healing, reproductive health, and reconciliation.

Our work is rooted in the belief that our collective survival depends on our collective action.

We celebrate our milestones, each watershed moment of birth and tears, of witnessing ourselves as our ancestors wildest dreams. It’s been a decade of struggle, a decade of uplift, a decade “in defense of ourselves”, a decade of “words of fire” and a decade of “some of us are brave” with our eyes wide open and our feet deeply rooted in spells and magic and foretellings of liberation which leaves “no one behind enemy lines”.

Milestone Moments & Accomplishments

  • Convened the first-ever Black Women’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission (BWTRC) to focus on Black women and sexual violence

  • Created multimedia cultural productions, the Mother Tongue Monologues theater, that produced critical analysis in the years preceding the BWTRC and formed programs steeped in the mandates of Truth, Justice, Healing and Reconciliation

  • Developed powerful partnerships at federal and local levels, influencing key policy that shaped the national cultural gaze to one that centered Black women and girls, rather than pornified their bodies and identities.

  • Testified at the United Nations, demanding Black women be written into international human rights history offering testimony in front of the International Committee on the Eradication of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and International Committee to End Torture (CAT) and ratify the Convention on the Eradication of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

  • Created the Sista’s Van, a mobile healing unit to serve survivors of sexual violence, trafficking, reproductive violence, and physical abuse

  • Founded the Museum of Women’s Resistance, guiding visitors through the history of social justice movements led by women of the Global South and Diaspora

  • Developed the Sexual Abuse to Maternal Mortality Pipeline report and training series 

  • Designed trainings geared towards the prevention and intervention of gender violence in the workplace. Notable clients included the NFL, NYPD, HBCUs, and A+E Networks

  • Created the Liberatory Trauma-Healing model through an iterative cycle, which we as survivors used to liberate ourselves. Through our Liberatory Trauma Healing Model, we cultivated and built brave space, mobilized communities, truth councils and cohorts of fierce advocates, activists, and community leaders. 

  • Wrote think pieces, articles, critical responses and open letters as counter-narratives to the thinking at various times.

 

Our Tenth Anniversary Celebration

In this video, enjoy the opening and welcome ritual led by Shawnee Benton Gibson, followed by an in-depth conversation with Executive Director, Farah Tanis and Associate Director, Sevonna Brown about the founding and future of BWB.
The celebration continued with meaningful reflections from community members, clips from our decade of events, and live music and poetry created and played to specifically celebrate the joy and power of our 10th Anniversary.
Black Women's Blueprint 10 Years Celebration
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Reconciling 4(00) Years

In November 2020, when President Joseph R. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were elected, BWB shared our hope that their election would mark a move toward growth, reconciliation, restoration, and healing. Former President Trump was a symptom of a centuries-old tradition of racial terror we battle everyday, not its cause. We wanted to gain a sense of clarity and a firm understanding of this nation’s past so that we could envision what would be needed to heal going forward.

We convened a conversation that served as an opportunity for us to collectively re-imagine what accountability, truth and reconciliation could look like: not just for the previous four years, but the past four hundred years. ​

We invited folks to join us in a conversation where we:

  • Offered a brief analysis of how racism and violence have manifested in the last 400 years
  • Shared our expanded and holistic definition of reconciliation
  • Shared our experience of what’s possible when Black women have already laid a foundation for a truth and reconciliation commission in the United States
  • Engaged in a robust collective conversation about what is possible beyond the chaos if we were to harness hope and reconciliation together

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Recording of February 2023 event

Restore Forward Launch

We are happy to finally launch Restore Forward. We invite you to celebrate with us!