Mission Statement
We believe that all sex workers have a right to self-determination; to choose how we make a living and what we do with our bodies.

We aim to empower our diverse community by building the capacity of sex worker-serving and sex worker member-based institutions as well as the skills and resources of sex workers themselves.

We also conduct research about sex workers and the sex industry in order to better understand it, develop public education initiatives, and advocate for the rights of sex workers.

History

Eliyanna Kaiser, Audacia Ray, Susan Rohwer, and Kevicha Echols are the founders of  Sex Work Awareness. The four women  were originally editors and staff at $pread, a magazine by and for sex workers that was founded in 2004 and has been publishing on a quarterly basis since March 2005. $pread was originally conceptualized as a non-profit magazine modeled after Bitch and the B-Word, the non-profit organization that runs Bitch magazine and related programs. However, after being guided through the 501(c)3  process for the magazine by a student clinic at Columbia Law School and being rejected partly on the grounds of having what the New York State Regents deemed an obscene name, $pread staff and partners regrouped and reconceptualized the work. Though advocacy, organizing, and activism had been a very big and present part of the foundation of $pread magazine, we realized that editing and publishing a magazine and running an advocacy and outreach organization are two different functions. The organization’s effectiveness was reduced by trying to do all these functions under the same umbrella. As a result, Sex Work Awareness (SWA) was established as a non-profit while $pread has continued as a for-profit business.

On March 13, 2008 SWA had its first fundraiser, which was well-attended by a group of very supportive people. In the above video, three of the founders of the organization step forward to talk about what we hope to accomplish and what is driving us to do it. We also hear from elected officials NYS Senator Thomas K. Duane and NYS Assembly Member Richard N. Gottfried, who were in attendance.

Since its official debut in March 2008, SWA has launched a handful of projects that fulfill its mission. The first project, which launched at the end of March 2008, was inspired by the expressed need for basic information about the sex industry in conversations at the Women, Action, and the Media  feminist conference held annually in Boston and organized by the Center for New Words. The result of these conversations is the website Sex Work 101, which serves as a resource for basic information about sex work and people who work in the sex industry. The site is accessible and is designed as a public education tool for curious people as well as members of the press.  SWA also successfully funded, created, and implemented a media training workshop for sex workers called Speak Up with the support of the women behind the 2009 Sex Blogger Calendar.