Listen to former PAVE Chair Eli Tsarovsky discuss the importance of activism and community care.

Trancript:

Hi! My name is Eli Tsarovsky. I was the Chair of PAVE-UW in 2021 and have been a student activist on campus in various capacities. As an activist working in sexual violence prevention, it was important to ground myself in the story and solutions created by survivors and be intentional by creating a truthful narrative of the data campus to compel institutional action while furthering our student-led movement. Being a part of activism on campus for issues that are close to you can be daunting. The moral and best next step can be hard especially when it involves money and robust institutional response. What is grounding as a student activist is the people and community of students.  

When you are in a movement against violence on campus, it is important to ground yourself in collective power of the people. We talked of our actions as a movement because it involved everyone in our community and not just about individual change but cultural change. Our messaging centered care and support because we believed in the hearts and minds of all of people on campus to do better and we aimed to show what community care looked like. We advocated our shared message of supporting survivors and ending violence through peer education, collaborative events, social media, student journalism, and marching in the streets of campus. We knew our community needed to learn the true facts about violence on campus and hear different ways of approaching community solutions by honoring the great Black, Brown, and indigenous scholars and activists through our education and events. We grounded our education and events in an Anti-Violence Framework that honored and was grounded in Black Abolitionist Feminism. We provided people ways to learn about all sides of violence from supporting survivors, educating others, and bystander intervention, to the legal landscape. Education was power and with the power of our community we acted.