about us
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
- bell hooks
our mission
At The Center builds power with criminalized survivors of gender-based violence and sex workers to dismantle the sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline and disrupt intergenerational cycles of violence. Through leadership development, embodied practice, creative expression, and cultural change, we advance sex worker- and survivor-led visions of safety, healing, and justice.
our story
At The Center emerged from a transformative justice process, one that did what TJ does at its best: held harm without punishment or abandonment. And from that holding, possibility grew.
What emerged was a deep truth: criminalized survivors and sex workers have consistently been exploited and minimized in movements to end violence. Our wisdom and stories are treated as peripheral, or worse, as problems to be managed. When we are, in fact, essential. In this time of escalating state violence, we recognized that we needed to build our own infrastructure for healing, for leadership development, and for building collective power.
We were also confronted with something harder to name. Even with the best intentions, survival does not automatically teach us how to stay together through harm. That takes practice, skill, and spaces designed to hold us through that process. The oppressive systems we're confronting live in our bodies and relational dynamics as much as they do in institutions and policies. Without spaces to disrupt old patterns and practice new ways of being, humans inevitably replicate what is familiar.
At The Center exists because our communities needed a space that had never been made for us. One where healing, belonging and organizing intertwine. Where survival is understood, not pathologized. Where the people most impacted by criminalization and gender-based violence are not the recipients of someone else's vision, but the architects of our own.
We are early-stage and growing. Everything we are building — our Somatic Support Circles, our leadership cohort, our advocacy and cultural change work — grows from that original circle and the commitment of a community that continues to choose each other.
our founder
Samara Sevush (she/they) is an ecosomatic practitioner, healing-centered consultant, community herbalist, writer, and Liberation seeker with over a decade of experience supporting communities at the intersections of interpersonal and systemic violence—centering sex workers, criminalized survivors, folks impacted by incarceration, and those most often excluded from dominant systems of care.
Like far too many survivors, Samara was criminalized in the midst of experiencing child sexual abuse, charged as an adult for surviving. These lived experiences not only shaped their path, but rooted them deeply in the belief that healing and justice must be (re)defined by those most impacted.
Their work is grounded in the wisdom of the body and the resilience of the land, cultivating spaces where healing fuels revolution and where our interconnection is not just remembered, but practiced.
Samara founded At The Center after also experiencing—and witnessing in community—the harm that so often occurs in mainstream gender-based violence movements, especially toward sex workers, criminalized and otherwise marginalized survivors. What emerged was a vision rooted in the persistent belief that healing and justice can look radically different when led by those who’ve been most impacted.
Her approach integrates politicized somatics with healing justice, harm reduction and liberation frameworks equipping individuals and communities to not only survive our current circumstances, but to grow toward the world we all deserve: one where dignity, safety, and belonging are honored as our universal & nonnegotiable birthrights.
our approach
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our name is our praxis
We believe care should be at the center of everything - of community, of justice, of healing, of how we build & sustain new worlds.
We believe criminalized survivors and sex workers, who know the deepest harms of these systems, hold the clearest vision for how to transform them. Their wisdom, their leadership, their wellbeing belong at the center of the fight against violence - not as an afterthought, but as the guiding force.
We practice centering as both a somatic skill and a promise of remembrance. A return to our bodies, to one another, to the land, to the interconnectedness that has always been ours. We are deeply rooted in Indigenous wisdom traditions that remind us that at the center of all things is that which is sacred - that which is always whole, that which is worth nurturing.
We refuse to accept the margins as our place. We find our journey reflected in our beloved ancestor Toni Morrison’s words:
"I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was."
We are doing just that. Reclaiming the center. Redefining power. And building a world that no longer asks us to fight to survive at the edges.
Contact us
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