SAAM 2025: State of our Movements

April 17, 2025 @ 4:00PM — 5:30PM Pacific Time (US & Canada) Add to Calendar

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In this moment of shifting policies and increased threats to LGBTQ+ and BIPOC survivors, how are mainstream anti-violence groups responding? What can we learn from community-based organizations centering marginalized survivors? This panel will explore the state of the movements to end child abuse and domestic/ violence - the challenges, the opportunities, and the path forward. We cannot wait to see you there!

About Our Panelists

Meg Stone


Meg Stone is the Executive Director of IMPACT Boston, an abuse prevention and empowerment self-defense organization and the author of THE COST OF FEAR: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-based violence, a deeply researched, gender-inclusive, anti-racist nonfiction book that offers practical tools for resisting interpersonal and political violence. Her writing has been published in Huffington Post, Newsweek, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Dame, Ms. and other publications.

Jaden Cervantes-Fields

Jaden Fields is a Los Angeles-based organizer, cultural worker, and educator dedicated to cultivating healing-centered spaces for marginalized communities. He joined the staff as Co-Director in December 2020, but as a survivor storyteller in the archive since 2017, has played a pivotal role in co-designing Mirror Memoirs’ strategic vision, programs, and structure. Jaden’s work as a board and staff member of several grassroots and nonprofit organizations has included designing and leading programs for trans folks to access health services, training government agencies to better serve transgender people, participatory action research, and policy advocacy at the city and county level. Jaden was an inaugural member of the Los Angeles Transgender Advisory Council, a 2017 California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Fellow, a 2019 Echoing Green finalist, a 2021 Solis Policy Institute Fellow at the Women’s Foundation of California and a 2021 John W. Mack Movement Building Fellow at the Weingart Foundation. He is also the Equity Director and a Board member for the Association for Size Diversity and Health. Jaden is a performance poet and frequent keynote speaker, including 2020 talks at the #MeTooLGBTQ conference by San Diego Pride, at the #MeToo Movement Survivor Summit, and at Lambda LitFest. In 2019, he self-published his first chapbook, Intentional Musings on Staying Alive When I Want To Die, an honest depiction of navigating mental health disabilities and systemic oppression. He holds a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Southern California.

Hema Sarang-Sieminski

Hema Sarang-Sieminski is the Policy Director at Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence. They work closely with JDI members to assess and improve how policies and systems respond to survivors and their communities across Massachusetts. Hema has worked with survivors of partner abuse and sexual violence for twenty years in a variety of capacities including their work providing training and technical assistance at the Victim Rights Law Center, private immigration practice, community engagement in LGBTQ communities with The Network/La Red, and as a Staff Attorney at the Immigration Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services. She has dedicated her career to creating opportunities for wholeness and dignity for survivors and to approaches that challenge and reduce systemic harm for survivors of intimate violence at the intersections of various forms of oppression. Hema is a Steering Committee member of the Massachusetts Women of Color Network and the Sharon Racial Equity Alliance and was named Best LGBTQ Lawyers Under 40 by the LGBT Bar Association. Hema received their BA from the University of Pennsylvania and their JD from Northeastern University School of Law.

Luna Merbruja

Luna Merbruja is an author and multimedia artist living in Seattle. They're a survivor services manager at a local DV nonprofit and held various leadership and Board positions at Mirror Memoirs, Heartspark Press, biyuti publishing, Peacock Rebellion, and more. They wrote Heal Your Love, Trauma Queen, and published writings in the 2nd edition of Colonize This!, The Resilience Anthology, Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic, and was the editor and producer of 99% Chance of Magic, the first illustrated chapbook for transgender children. They are also a co-writer of Transmutation: A Ceremony with Mirror Memoirs, and wrote DEVOTED, a 10 minute musical for the Sleep is for the Weak VII play festival with Theater Battery.

They are currently working on a collection of fiction titled Tales from the Pomegranate Forest. Stay up to date by following them on IG and Bluesky @LunaMerbruja.

About Our Host

Amita Swadhin

Amita Swadhin is the Founding Co-Director of Mirror Memoirs, and a lifelong organizer, educator, storyteller, and strategist working to end interpersonal and institutional violence against young people. Their work stems from their experiences as a non-binary queer femme of color, daughter of immigrants from India, and a survivor of years of childhood abuse by their parents, including eight years of rape by their father, and violent state intervention at the age of 13. In 2016, Amita received a Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellowship, allowing them to launch Mirror Memoirs. From 2016-2018, they assembled a national advisory board and recorded 60 stories from survivors across 15 states in the US. In January 2017, they testified on behalf of survivors of sexual violence and LGBTQI+ Americans as a witness for the Democratic Party against Jeff Sessions’ nomination as the US Attorney General. From 2009 to 2012, Amita was the Project Coordinator and a cast member of Secret Survivors, an off-off-Broadway production they co-created with the award-winning Ping Chong & Company, featuring adult survivors of child sexual abuse telling their stories through theater. Amita is also a published writer whose work has appeared in the anthologies Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence, Queering Sexual Violence, Pleasure Activism, and Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement. Over the past twenty years, they have been an executive director, board chair, youth organizer, faculty member and consultant at organizations serving low-income, immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities of color. They are also a frequent keynote speaker, delivering over 100 talks from a TEDx conference to the National Sexual Assault Conference and National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence to colleges, conferences and nonprofits nationwide. They hold a Master’s in Public Administration from NYU, where they were a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship, and a Bachelor’s in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.

About Mirror Memoirs

Mirror Memoirs is a national storytelling and organizing project offering a community of belonging for anyone who wants to end child sexual abuse (CSA) without leaving any survivor behind and without enacting institutional violence. Our foundation is shaped by uplifting the stories, healing, and leadership of Black, Indigenous and of color queer, trans, nonbinary and intersex child sexual abuse survivors in the US.

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