EmpowerHer Sexual Violence Conference 2026

You Are the Gift—Bigger Than the Box is a trauma-informed healing session designed to create a safe, affirming space for victims, survivors, and experiencers of sexual assault and violence to reconnect with their inner worth, resilience, and power. Through grounding breathwork, reflective dialogue, and collective affirmation, participants are guided to release limiting labels, shame, and “boxes” imposed by systems, society, and trauma. The session centers on the truth that healing is not about fixing what was broken, but remembering the sacredness and strength that has always existed within each person.
Participants engage in interactive exercises such as “If I Could Unbox Myself” and small-group reflections that encourage storytelling, gentle listening, and mutual support. These moments foster community connection while helping individuals identify the beliefs they have survived and begun to outgrow. By honoring lived experiences and centering choice, dignity, and voice, the session promotes emotional safety while empowering participants to imagine life beyond imposed limitations.
The experience concludes with a collective affirmation ritual that reinforces belonging, self-worth, and collective healing. Participants leave grounded in the understanding that they are not defined by trauma or societal expectations, but by their inherent value and truth. You Are the Gift—Bigger Than the Box is both a healing space and a call to liberation—reminding each participant that their existence is sacred, their voice matters, and their life holds immeasurable purpose.

This two-part series centers the experiences of Black women and offers a supportive space to understand trauma, its roots, and its impact on the brain, body, and spirit—while exploring practical paths toward healing.
Workshop One introduces the language and provides a foundation for naming harm, recognizing patterns, and understanding that trauma responses are rooted in both history and lived experience.
Participants will:  
- Define trauma and explore where it begins—in personal, familial, communal, and systemic contexts. 
- Learn how trauma affects the body, brain, mind, and spirit.  
- Take a brief look at Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and intergenerational trauma, including their genetic and behavioral impacts.  
- Reflect through guided journaling on how various forms of trauma may have shaped their own brain, body, and behavior.
 
Workshop Two builds on Workshop One, using the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) framework to connect early trauma to long-term health and behavior.
Participants will:  
- Examine how childhood adversity shapes belief systems, behavior, relationship patterns, and identity. 
- Explore how trauma impacts neurological development, brain chemistry, hormones, and overall health. 
- Learn about diverse healing modalities that can help mitigate long-term brain, body, and behavioral impacts—especially approaches that honor the experiences of Black women. 
- Close with guided journaling to identify personalized healing commitments and next steps.
This workshop moves participants from insight to intention, offering tools and pathways to support ongoing healing and restoration.

Youth Experiencers (survivors) of sexual violence are often expected to heal within systems and spaces that were not designed to protect or affirm them. For youth of color and gender-diverse youth, these challenges are compounded by cultural stigma, systemic inequities, and the erasure of lived experience. This 90-minute session centers culturally rooted, healing-centered approaches that restore voice, power, and safety to youth experiencers while honoring their identities, histories, and inherent strengths.


Participants will explore how sexual violence impacts youth development, trust, and self-determination, and how culturally responsive practices can interrupt harm while fostering resilience and collective care. Through education, reflection, and applied strategies, the session examines barriers to disclosure, the importance of survivor-defined safety, and the critical role of community healers and advocates in creating affirming pathways to healing. Particular attention is given to supporting trans and gender-expansive youth and challenging narratives that silence or marginalize survivor experiences.


Attendees will leave with practical tools, trauma-informed frameworks, and culturally grounded strategies they can apply immediately in their work. The session emphasizes survivor-led healing, community accountability, and sustainable approaches that strengthen safety, restore agency, and support youth not only in surviving harm but also in reclaiming their power and voice.

The session concludes by introducing healing modalities and culturally grounded practices that support restoration, resilience, and self-directed healing commitments. Learning Objectives Participants will: 1. Increase awareness of trauma’s impact on the whole self. Participants will describe how trauma affects the brain, body, mind, spirit, and overall health, including intergenerational and historical trauma. 2. Recognize patterns and connections between past harm and present life experiences. Participants will examine how adversity influences beliefs, behavior, relationships, and identity. 3. Understand the relationship between childhood adversity and long-term health outcomes. Participants will explore the impact of trauma on neurological development, brain chemistry, hormones, and emotional regulation. 4. Identify culturally grounded healing practices. Participants will learn about healing modalities and strategies that honor the lived experiences and resilience of Black women. 5. Move from awareness to intentional healing. Participants will identify personal healing commitments and practical next steps through guided journaling and reflection

Preventing sexual violence begins long before harm occurs. It requires courageous conversations, intentional education, and communities willing to take collective responsibility for youth safety and well-being. This interactive session explores how culturally responsive prevention strategies, healthy relationship education, and community accountability can disrupt cycles of silence and normalize consent, respect, and care. Participants will learn how education and prevention efforts can empower youth while strengthening community responses to violence. Attendees will leave inspired and equipped with tools to help build environments that protect, empower, and support youth in shaping safer futures. 

This culturally grounded keynote honors survivors while uplifting the lived experiences of Blackwomen, trans women, and gender-diverse people. The keynote weaves ancestral resilience,collective healing, and modern survivor courage into an experience that affirms strength ratherthan centers harm.Through grounding practices, storytelling, and empowerment reflection, the keynote invitesparticipants to reconnect with their bodies, their voices, and their inner strength in a spacerooted in compassion and cultural affirmation.The keynote reinforces that survivors are not broken, alone, or defined by trauma. It callsparticipants into community care, advocacy, and continued healing work grounded in dignityand belonging.4. Learning Objective

     Sexual violence impacts survivors not only physically and emotionally, but also spiritually, relationally, and culturally. For many African American survivors, healing is deeply intertwined with faith, spirituality, and culturally rooted meaning-making, yet these dimensions are often overlooked, misunderstood, or handled with caution in service settings. This session invites participants to explore how trauma-informed care can be expanded to include spiritual and cultural responsiveness while maintaining ethical boundaries, consent, and survivor autonomy.


     Building on a spiritual competency framework developed for service providers, this interactive 90-minute session will help participants examine how beliefs, values, and spiritual worldviews shape survivor experiences, coping, and healing. Participants will engage in guided self-reflection, small-group discussion, and case vignettes that highlight common clinical and advocacy dilemmas related to spirituality, power, and survivor safety. Emphasis will be placed on avoiding spiritual harm, recognizing spiritual resilience, and responding respectfully when survivors bring faith or spiritual language into the healing process.


     Through practical tools, discussion, and experiential learning, participants will strengthen their ability to support survivors as whole people, honoring dignity, cultural context, and choice. This session is designed for advocates, clinicians, educators, and service providers seeking to deepen their trauma-informed practice and ethically integrate spiritual awareness into survivor-centered care.

For my session I would like to bring awareness to survival performance and how it impacts our lives. That when we have so many people depending on us or we are not wanting to let anyone down, that we shift our exhaustion to keep pushing forward...even when we no longer have anything to pour out of our empty cup. I want to speak to them as someone who is in her survival honesty and wanting to share my journey and understanding of what has been learned about traumas. I want to help them understand that we have resources our there for us. One of the resources I would like to offer is grounding through creative process. Which means that I will offer coloring pages. They do not have to color them, they do not have to finish coloring them if they start. That these pages will meet them where they are. Allowing them to put in as little or as much effort as they would like to do. 


Often times we struggle with the understanding that staying is not enough and we must always be moving because if we don't everything will crumble beneath us. We have to know that our feelings are valid and we should be allowed to be who we are without pressure. That we can just stay. We have so much self-doubt within ourselves because of our traumas. We focus on being people pleasers and forgetting about ourselves because we don't want to cause waves or issues with other people. We need to understand that we don't have to shame ourselves on what we cannot complete because of how we have been wired. 


Rising is not required. 
Fixing ourselves is not require.
There is no pressure. 
Staying is enough. 
You are enough. 

The conference will conclude with a collective call to action led by Kingdom Builders Family Life Center, encouraging participants to continue advancing advocacy, healing, and community engagement to support survivors and strengthen culturally responsive care.