Vision and Mission

Vision Heading link

CAN’s vision is to provide the knowledge and tools for understanding and eliminating gender-based violence; and empower the UIC community and our allies to build spaces and relationships for healing, resistance, and social change.

Mission Heading link

CAN engages UIC students, staff, and faculty around gender-based violence through advocacy (individual, group, and institutional), education, outreach, and activism.

By gender-based violence, we include sexual assault, intimate partner violence, family violence, stalking, and sexual harassment.

We believe gender-based violence is rooted in structural inequities created by racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, etc. As such, we see ourselves in conversations with multiple social justice movements and communities, including the feminist anti-violence movement.

At the core of CAN’s work lies our concern for the safety of all community members at UIC, as collectively defined. The word “safety” means different things for different people and groups. For some, safety means freedom from interpersonal violence at home, at school, or in the larger society. For others, safety means the absence of institutional violence and/or proactive development, adoption, and implementation of a survivor-centered approach to violence institutionally and socially. We seek to reimagine and reshape institutional practices, definitions, and perspectives on violence, especially as experienced by survivors from marginalized communities.