Vision and Mission
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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.
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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.
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Principles
- CAN is trauma-informed. We pay attention to how trauma stemming from all forms of violence shapes survivors’ responses and thought processes.
- CAN is survivor-centered. We privilege survivors’ perspectives and experiences in our advocacy and educational work.
- CAN is needs-based. We prioritize survivors’ needs and wants as we empower them to make informed decisions on their case and process of healing.
- CAN foregrounds restorative justice as one of our central frameworks for solutions to justice issues in gender-based violence. We create communities of support for survivors and seek to establish just measures to address harm.
- CAN is change-focused and community-engaged. We believe work done by individuals and communities is part of a push toward achieving broader social justice goals–a step toward ending gender-based violence.
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Divisions
- Advocacy, through which we provide confidential support, safety planning, crisis intervention, resources, and advocacy for survivors and their loved ones in the UIC community.
- Education and Outreach, through which we develop and facilitate programs that engage the entire spectrum of the UIC community, as well as build alliances and solidarities across differences and borders both within and beyond UIC.