Dear Survivor,
Thank you for sharing your story on Our Wave or one of our partner sites (Survivor Spaces, The Body a Home for Love, Unapologetically Surviving, or another). You are a valued part of our community. From the start, it has been our aim to amplify voices like yours safely and anonymously to help you feel less alone, connect you with resources as you navigate your healing journey, and allow others to learn from your experiences. To date, we have collected hundreds of stories with tens of thousands of views from survivors, supporters, and advocates across over 20 different countries. We are so proud to see our community grow, but witnessing the aftermath of our collective trauma makes us realize there is much more work to do.
We are a small, but mighty non-profit organization that hopes to build connections and share resources within the survivor community to create a wave of change. In doing so, we are always seeking to improve our website to provide more features for connection and healing. With this in mind, we are writing to share some exciting updates we made to our platform and outline a few things that we are working on in the future that may be of interest to you.
New Features:
In the last few months we have launched a few new features for the platform.
- Share artwork and imagery. We believe that all survivors should be able to share their story in the format they prefer. Some survivors prefer to share with words while others prefer to create visual representations of their story and healing journey. As a result, our platform now has the capacity for survivors to upload images and artwork. We welcome any additional submissions from folks that would like to share this form of content. Please note, these submissions are still intended to be anonymous (although you can credit an artist if you want to repost something that inspires you). We will continue to de-identify shared content regardless of the format as your safety and confidentiality are our top priority.
- Updating stories on our website: Healing is not linear and our perspectives of our circumstances, experiences, and needs can change over time. As such we wanted to provide survivors with the ability to add an update to their story if they choose. These updates can be about anything–new discoveries, healing actions that have worked for you, or even new challenges that may have arisen since you last posted. These updates will appear below your original story. If you would like to add an update to your story, please follow this link.
- Story impact alerts: Many survivors have voiced wanting to share their stories on our platform to help others who may be in similar situations. With our new impact alerts, survivors who submitted a story can now see an estimation of how many users have viewed and reacted to their story via email notifications. We hope this will provide encouragement that your story matters, people are listening, and that you are not alone. As always, survivors will be able to opt out of receiving these email updates when they submit their story or when they access their story settings. To edit your email notifications, follow this link.
Future Improvements:
There are also some other platform improvements we are working on in the next few months to support you and our community:
- Connection with other survivor users: We are working on creating the option for online profiles to allow survivors to follow the healing journeys of stories that resonate with them and share words of encouragement or solidarity with other users. Our aim with this is to build connections between survivors and respond to our community’s desire to interact and learn from each other in a more personal and direct manner.
- Customized resources: We hope to provide more customization in the online resources and healing content that we provide to survivors. We think that sharing your story is an important step in the healing process, but hope to facilitate more connections to local and online resources for survivors who are looking for additional opportunities for healing engagement.
- Language translation: We recognize that sexual violence is a pervasive problem no matter what language you speak or country you reside in. Our current platform supports story submission from all countries and in a variety of languages, but our core site is currently only accessible in English. We are working on changing that.
There are many other ways we hope to improve the Our Wave platform. Got an idea? Drop us a line at [email protected]. Your feedback matters. We cannot thank you enough for sharing your stories with us and we hope to continue to build a place that is welcoming to all survivors. Healing is possible, but you do not need to do it all on your own.
All the best,
The Our Wave Team
