This is how the NW Network described its approach and work during the time many of the materials archived here were being developed:

The Northwest Network increases our communities’ ability to support the self-determination and safety of bisexual, transgendered, lesbian, & gay survivors of abuse through education, organizing and advocacy.  We work within a broad liberation movement dedicated to social & economic justice, equality and respect for all people and the creation of loving, inclusive and accountable communities.

In 1987, lesbian survivors of battering created our organization as a grassroots response to domestic violence.   Today, through The NW Network, survivors organize community-level social change projects as well as supportive services for LGBTQ people experiencing abuse.  Our staff provide training and technical assistance to advocates, activists, and others working against violence throughout the Puget Sound region and the United States.  Through community organizing and education, we work within LGBTQ communities to eliminate the conditions and attitudes that perpetuate battering, racism, classism, heterosexism and misogyny. 

We continually center the experiences and thinking of marginalized communities—in particular LBTG survivors from diverse backgrounds and cultures of origin—in all our activities.  We lend local, regional and national leadership to organizing within the anti-violence movement, and support other advocates to bring a transformative vision of social change while centering LGBTQ experience. 

Across the country, advocates and activists find that our survivor-conceived and implemented analysis and our practical approach to prioritizing self-determination has deep resonance for their work with people from diverse communities.  We talk with programs throughout North America about how to expand their vision and transform their work.

Our work prioritizes violence prevention by utilizing each level of the “Spectrum of Prevention” (Injury Prevention, May 1999) model of violence prevention.  We activate the five following interconnected approaches:

• Individual Knowledge and Skills: Organizing queer-centered services to support survivors of abuse to reclaim subjectivity in their own lives and reduce the likelihood that we will experience abuse again in the future.  (Some activities in this approach include F.A.R. OUT and the NW Network Living Room)

• Community Level Education and Strategies for Change:  Organizing community level strategies that address the root causes of domestic violence while building the conditions necessary to support loving, equitable and accountable relationships.  Some projects in this approach include: Queer Youth Community Engagement Project, Community Advisory Action Teams (CA/AT), Relationship Skills Class and our Relationship Skills Booster Seminars, Community Forums and Teach-Ins, & Intentional Masculinities.

• Educating Advocates and Activists: Informing advocates of LBTG centered anti-violence analysis and effective strategies to engage LBTG people in anti-violence work.  (An example of this approach is our annual Q&A For Advocates National Institute on Domestic Violence in the LBTG Community.)

• Coalitions and Networks: We conceptualize our entire framework as a “network”—building interconnected webs of people with the skills to build loving, equitable relationships in liberated communities.  We work in coalition with other anti-violence and LBTG community organizers, such as our on-going collaboration with Communities Against Rape & Abuse, Chaya, and Asian Pacific Islander Women & Family Safety Center.

• Influencing Public Policy and Organizational Practices: We work collaboratively with “sister” organizations to implement organizational changes that promote violence prevention.  This approach includes our work to successfully codify violence prevention and community organizing in the King County regional domestic violence coordinated response priorities, as well as developing a critical analysis of the anti-violence movement’s over-reliance on the criminal legal system.  Our Community Advisory Action Teams (CAATs) also participate in direct actions for social justice. Further, we ensure that the WSCADV legislative agenda is informed by the needs of LBTG survivors and communities.

As survivors of domestic violence, we have built a prevention analysis that prioritizes self-determination.  In the mainstream anti-violence movement, safety for survivors has often been prioritized at the expense of the self-determination of survivors.  We suspect that this inversion of priorities is a holdover from paternalistic ideas that women must be protected from others and, more often than not, from themselves.  The overemphasis on service delivery creates the mistaken idea that social workers and advocates can “empower survivors and make them safe”.  By contrast, we maintain that women and all people are entitled to the free exercise of inalienable rights—including the right of self-determination—through which people increase their own safety and empower themselves.  This does not mean a de-politicized emphasis on “self-help” or that people must act as rugged individuals—we assert that people must be active agents in their own lives while engaging the needs of their community.  It does mean that the movement must understand and be active in the social change work necessary to support self-determination; including manifesting racial, social, economic, gender, and environmental justice in our communities and in the world.

Our constituents are diverse lesbian, bisexual, trans, gay, questioning, and queer people.  Many LGBTQ people are active participants of LGBTQ community and maintain ties with their cultural, ethnic, and religious communities, while many more are desperately isolated from other LGBTQ people as well as from their families of origin, their home communities, and other social institutions (faith communities, neighborhoods, health care, etc).  This isolation occurs as a consequence of heterosexism and homophobia in interaction with racism, classism, ableism, and other forms of oppression. 

The decision-makers of our project on every level are members of our constituency.  Our diverse staff, board, volunteers, and CAAT members are all LGBTQ people. Most are survivors of abuse and most have participated in our programs before becoming involved as staff, volunteers, or board members.

—NW Network to the MS Foundation