How
did Creative Interventions start?
About the Board
About the National Advisory Board
About the Local Advisory Board
About the Founder
After
taking hundreds of crisis calls from survivors of domestic violence,
I realized that I always asked the questions, "Have you thought
of leaving? Have you called the police?" |
How Did Creative Interventions Start?
For years, Mimi Kim, the founder of Creative Interventions, along with
many others committed to the safety and integrity of women and children,
asked these important and urgent questions. Through her 15 years of work
in domestic violence and sexual assault, Mimi came to realize the limitations
of the narrow options offered to women and children seeking solutions
to violence. She witnessed how many women among her own community refused
the very options she offered: shelter for survivors, the criminal justice
system for abusers.
She saw how many people wanted to stop the violence -- but did not know
how or where to start.
Why
wasn’t there a space for the people closest to and most impacted
by violence to envision and create ways to make it stop? Why weren’t
violence intervention resources offering education, skills and support
useful within the very spaces where violence occurs? |
Established in 2004 with the support from a 2004
Echoing Green Fellowship, Creative Interventions seeks to shift education
and resources back to families and communities. It places knowledge and
power within the spaces where violence occurs, making support and safety
accessible, stopping violence at early and multiple points of abuse, and
creating possibilities for once abusive individuals and communities to
evolve towards healthy change and transformation.
About the Board
Susun Kim, President, is a long-time family
law attorney championing the rights of battered women and children. She
is currently Managing Attorney of the Contra Costa County Office of Bay
Area Legal Aid. She is also a founding member of Korean American Coalition
to End Domestic Abuse and helped to establish Shimtuh: Korean Domestic
Violence Program in Oakland. Susun is the proud mother of three beautiful
boys.
Crystal Baik, Secretary/Treasurer, is a 1.5
generation Korean American born in Seoul, raised in southern California
and based in Oakland, CA. She is a member of the Korean American Coalition
to End Domestic Abuse and the Korea Solidarity Committee. Currently, she
is working as the Grants Development Coordinator at San Francisco’s
Asian Women's Shelter, a battered women’s shelter targeting Asian
and Pacific Islander women and children. Crystal also serves on the funding
board of Korean Immigrant Worker’s Association (KIWA), based in
Los Angeles.
Mimi Kim is Founder and Executive Director of Creative Interventions.
See brief bio below.
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About
the National Advisory Board
Trishala Deb is Program Coordinator: Training and Resource Center
for Audre Lorde Project, a community organizing center for Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Two Spirit and Transgender People of Color in New York City.
Prior to her position at the Audre Lorde Project, she worked as a service
provider and community organizer in North Carolina and Georgia focusing on
welfare rights, domestic violence, immigrant/women’s/lgbt rights, and
building progressive spaces within the South Asian Community. She is
currently a member of the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA), and
a member of the community funding board for the North Star Fund. back
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The National Advisory Board consists of individuals with long-term work
and personal commitment to innovative and social justice approaches to
ending family, intimate partner, and other forms of interpersonal violence.
They are advising the larger vision of Creative Interventions and are
ensuring national relevance, scope and impact.
Staci Haines is the Founder and Executive Director of
Generation FIVE, a San Francisco-based organization that brings together
diverse community leaders working to end child sexual abuse within five
generations. Staci has been organizing and educating in the area of child
sexual abuse since 1985. She is the author of The Survivor's Guide
to Sex (San Francisco: Cleis, 1999), a how-to book offering a somatic
approach to recovery from sexual trauma and to developing healthy sexual
and intimate relationships. She is a trainer in the field of Somatics,
specializing in working with trauma, and leads courses training practitioners,
therapists and social change activists in this work. She has a private
practice working somatically with social leaders. Staci also has a background
in diversity training and facilitation. She has lectured at numerous institutions
including Oberlin College, Smith College, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University
on issues of child sexual abuse and social change, the impact and healing
of trauma, somatics and trauma recovery, and sexual health in addition
to presenting at national and international conferences.
Valli Kalei Kanuha is Associate Professor at the University
of Hawaii at Manoa, School of Social Work in Honolulu, Hawaii. Kalei has
worked as an activist, clinician, administrator, and consultant with community
agencies, domestic violence programs, HIV/AIDS organizations, and other
social service settings in the continental U.S. and Hawaii for 30 years.
Her professional interests include violence against women of color, with
a focus on Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Island women and lesbians;
lesbian, gay and transgender issues; and multicultural practice, all areas
in which she has published and trained extensively. Kalei has been involved
with numerous community and national organizations in Minnesota, New York
and Hawai`i, including Praxis, Inc., Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
and the Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence.
Kalei’s current research includes development and evaluation of
a Native Hawaiian cultural intervention with Native Hawaiian batterers
and battered women, and exploring indigenous, community-based alternatives
to the criminal-legal system that address violence against women and children.
Sue Osthoff is Director of the National Clearinghouse
for the Defense of Battered Women, a Philadelphia-based organization designed
to enhance the quality of legal representation and personal support to
battered women facing trial and to incarcerated battered women. Sue began
work with the National Clearinghouse in 1987 when she co-founded the organization.
Sue has been working in the battered women's movement since 1979 when
she was a counselor/advocate in Massachusetts.
Beth E. Richie is Associate Professor and Chairperson
in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois
at Chicago. Her research interests center on battered African American
women and the relationship between violence against women and women’s
participation in crime. Beth is the Senior Research Consultant with the
Institute to Research and Respond to Violence in the Lives of African
American Women. She also serves as a consultant to various organizations,
including The Social Science Research Council, and The National Institute
of Corrections. Beth is a founding member of Incite! Women of Color Against
Violence and serves on the Steering Committee of the Institute on Domestic
Violence in the African American Community.
Beth is author of several publications on domestic violence in the African
American community including Compelled to Crime: The gender entrapment
of Battered Black Women (New York: Routledge Press, 1996) and “Gender
Entrapment: The Link Between Gender Identity, Race/Ethnicity, Violence
and Crime,” In Reframing women’s health (Newbury
Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1994).
Proshat Shekarloo is an Iranian immigrant who has worked
in the field of domestic violence for the past 8 years. She is currently
the Community Development Coordinator for the Asian & Pacific Islander
Institute on Domestic Violence, a national organization representing and
promoting policies benefiting Asian & Pacific Islander domestic violence
advocates and survivors. Before joining the Institute, she worked on mental
health impacts of domestic violence on women, HIV/AIDS intervention prevention,
substance abuse and community organizing. She trains and provides technical
assistance on community based interventions to domestic violence, and
serves on the board of Coalition of Women from Asian and the Middle East.
She most recently founded the Iranian Women's Project whose main objective
is to provide education and outreach to Iranian women and girls in Iran
on issues pertaining to healthy sexuality.
About the Local Advisory Board
The San Francisco Bay Area-based Local Advisory Board consists of 12 individuals
including adult survivors of violence, youth who have grown up with violence,
and people with experience in the treatment of trauma, substance abuse,
and violence intervention. It is a mixed-gender, multiracial group primarily
consisting of survivors, women, and people of color. The Local Advisory
Board is a group with rotating terms whose role is to advise the projects
of Creative Interventions.
About the Founder
Mimi Kim is a second-generation Korean woman committed to the
safety and integrity of women through her work against domestic violence,
racism, and imperialism. Mimi worked at Asian Women's Shelter in
San Francisco from 1991 to 2001, most recently as Project Coordinator
of the Multilingual Access Model Program. She is co-founder of Shimtuh:
Korean Domestic Violence Program of the Korean Community Center of the
East Bay in Oakland.
Mimi currently serves on the National Steering Committee of the Asian
& Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic VIolence. She is also
a founding member of Incite! Women of Color against Violence where she
served on the National Coordinating Committee from 2000 to 2004.
Mimi is author of The Community Engagement Continuum: Outreach,
Mobilization, Organizing, and Accountability to Address Violence Against
Women in the Asian and Pacific Islander Communities (San Francisco:
Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence, 2004) and
Innovative Strategies to Address Domestic Violence in Asian and Pacific
Islander Communities: Examining Themes, Models, and Interventions
(San Francisco: Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic
Violence, 2002). Her other organizational affiliations include Korea
Solidarity Committee and Jamaesori, a Korean women's drumming (pung'mul)
group, both based in Oakland.
Mimi is recipient of the 2004 Echoing Green Fellowship which supported
the establishment of Creative Interventions.
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