The Peer Organizers Program: A Community-Led Model of Addressing Gender and Power-Based Violence in Asian/Pacific Islander Communities

Survivor-led abolitionist movements challenge the mainstream system’s insufficiencies in providing safety or healing. As an experiment in deepening survivor-led abolitionist spaces, the Asian/Pacific Islander (A/PI) Domestic Violence Resource Project has created the Peer Organizers program. The Peer Organizers are a cohort of 10 A/PI survivors and community members who will come together over two years to co-build networks of care and safety. Grounded in Freire’s principles of political education and the Power Analysis Framework by the Institute of Development Studies, this program takes a community-centered approach to root down and strengthen systems of care outside of carceral responses to violence. The Peer Organizers program at its core is a survivor and community-led movement, which centers long-term relationship building, peer support, raising critical consciousness, and disrupting hierarchical power. This article introduces the background of the emerging program and discusses this intentional experiment in building power with survivors and community members in the Asian and Pacific Islander community in the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area.