EmpowerHer Sexual Violence Conference 2026

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. 

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.