We’re so excited to share this update. It’s long and (at least we think so!) worth it. 🙂

In our last letter, we let you know about a big shift we are excited about in our day-to-day operations. While survivor advocacy will always be our north star, we are taking time in this season to focus on turning our experience from direct advocacy into a widely available course on how communities can effectively prevent sexualized violence and support survivors. 

Many of the communities that we relate to teach and value social justice—a commitment needed now more than ever. Simultaneously, the need for better systems of addressing sexual violence is desperately clear. Yet, these are rarely integrated. Efforts to resist sexual violence tend to be split off from broader efforts for social justice, which leaves both disempowered. We want to break that bifurcation down. 

We do social justice best when we address sexual violence as an integrated concern, and we resist sexual violence best when we remain mindful of the broader webs of injustice in which it occurs. Into Account is offering this course as an approach to both sexual violence and social justice that keeps them together, where they belong. In doing so, our intention is to support churches, organizations, and wider communities in the task of rebuilding themselves from the inside out to support survivors and transform the whole array of social injustices that lead to sexual violence in the first place.

The course will launch in 2027, and we want to start telling you about it. This course is for interested individuals, church or organizational representatives, discussion groups – anyone with an interest in the content can benefit from the course and help change cultures that (knowingly or unknowingly) foster sexual violence and the enabling of it, We hope you will plan to attend, share with others, and help spread the word. If you’d like more information about the course going forward and updates about its launch, be sure to add your name to the mailing list below.

What Is the Course About?

The course is called Good Ground: Cultivating Communities of Consent. It builds participants’ capacities to create and sustain consent-based communities in which solidarity with survivors makes it possible for everyone to thrive. 

What is a consent-based community, you ask? 

Consent isn’t just about sex. Consent is a basic practice of all healthy human relationships. At its core, consent is about our yeses and our nos — yes to having a meal with the new family in the neighborhood, no to working extra hours without pay. Of course, any yes or no we give falls along a spectrum from enthusiastically embodied to coerced or constrained.  A consent-based community is a group of people who make awareness of this spectrum conscious and prioritize practices that nurture members’ ability to stand behind their yes or no in all things with honesty, integrity, and enthusiasm. .

What kinds of practices build consent-based communities? Practices that:

• Develop tools for navigating conflict without debilitating fear.
• Help members learn to recognize and disrupt trauma cycles in ways that aren’t shame-reliant.
• Help members learn to build consent into pedagogy–how do we teach it?
• Help members negotiate the needs of others in relation to their own boundaries without a sense of competition arising between the two.

Like a patch of ground well-planted, we imagine communities in which practices like these are so deeply rooted that abuse, when it emerges, cannot take hold — because abuse is, fundamentally, a way of relating to others that catastrophically denies their right to consent. Getting good at the basics is essential for preventing violations that are extreme. 

Our course gives those who take it a taste of what the good ground of consent can grow, always relating everyday practices of consent to their importance for preventing and addressing sexual abuse.

The course is experiential. Its primary pedagogy is delight. We insist that abuse-free communities are possible, offer participants tours of the land, and supply tools they can use to rework their own community’s ground. 

Who is the Course for?

We are building this course for anyone who wants to take an active role in helping their community cultivate a culture of consent-based flourishing. (Note! Students need not have any formal community leadership role! Anyone can make change!) We imagine that it will be particularly well-suited for activists, organizers, religious leaders, educators, members of helping professions, survivors, and everyday people committed to their communities of belonging.

What Will Participants Learn?

We are organizing the course in five parts, each of which have a primary question and a primary learning goal.

Part One: Taking Stock

Question: What’s growing around you, and how does it impact your environment?

Goal: Students analyze their backgrounds, its relationship to the current social landscape, and its implications for consent.

Part Two: Learning the Ecosystem

Question: What are the components of a consent-based ecosystem? How does it work? 

Goal: Students learn the basics of a survivor-centered, consent-based system, including its relationship to dominance-based systems of social power.

Part Three: Assessing the Land

Question: Which components of the current social landscape need to be uprooted? Why? Which components of a consent-based ecosystem need to be introduced?

Goal: Students analyze the ways their own communities are already shaped by consent- and dominance-based social systems, using skills learned in parts one and two.

Part Four: Planning Transformation

Question: What are effective methods for increasing communities’ rootedness in consent as a foundational practice? What does this look like in students’ contexts specifically?

Goal: Students build an implementation plan designed for their communities and their specific role therein.

Part Five: Tending Ground

Question: Ecosystems are self-sustaining once they are fully established, but the process of establishment takes time, care, and consistency. What will that need to look like in students’ contexts specifically?

Goal: Students cast a vision for the work ahead and collect tools for seeing it through.