In recent years, you’ve seen SWOPLA consistently creating sex worker community spaces, delivering sex-worker-for-sex-worker programming, and changing how institutions relate to sex work. Our leadership consists of 100% of current and former sex workers. Reflective of the queerness and racial diversity of the LA sex workers we serve, the majority of our board members are people of color and transgender. We need YOUR support to sustain that work and expand on the infrastructure that LA sex workers built.
We’re 23% to our goal of $98,700 as of December 7, 2022!
We are surfing a giant wave of growth, and we need your help to ride this wave. Donating to SWOPLA helps: honor the labor of sex workers via small board member and volunteer stipends; redistribute wealth to our street-based peers; throw worker centered events that cultivates care through food and community. Meeting our fundraising goal means the ability to open a SWOPLA office/drop-in center!
It’s not easy to find institutional funding as a sex worker-led organization, but if a grant is sex-worker friendly, you bet we applied for it! Throughout the summer, we have worked hard on applications to support specific programs we want to launch. For example, 1) A workshop series and stroll expansion to lessen the impact of the Roe v. Wade reversal on LA sex workers, 2) A zine written by sex-working-parents for sex-working-parents, and 3) A joint research project with Unique Women’s Coalition, Translatina Coalition, the California HIV/AIDS Policy Center and Luskin School of Public Policy at UCLA, additional researchers at UCSF, and LA County Department of Public Health.
Sex Workers Transforming Society
Through research and policy work, we challenge outdated and whorephobic notions that sex workers cannot be the experts on issues that directly impact our lives.
Working with sex worker organizers and organizations across California, SWOPLA is a core part of the newly formed Decrim Sex Work California coalition. Together, and with the support of the ACLU, the LGBT Center, and other allies near and far, we were able to pass Senate Bill 357. Governor Newsom signed this bill on July 1st, repealing the law that makes it a crime to “loiter with for the purposes of committing prostitution,” and letting people have their existing charges dismissed or sealed.
Building on previous legislative success, SWOPLA is currently studying the effects of another bill we supported, SB 233. This bill disallows prosecutors from using condoms as evidence that someone committed a sex-work-related offense and provides protections from sex-work-related charges to someone reporting certain violent offenses. Carried out in partnership with UCLA/CHRPC, this research project was conceived, designed, and implemented by sex workers, and develops data for future advocacy work by centering the lived experience of LA sex workers. All sex workers who participated in the study got paid!
SWOPLA also challenges conventions of knowledge production through qualitative studies that are entirely sex worker-led, such as our Sex Working Parent Focus Group. By applying our expertise to initiate such innovative research projects, we make significant contributions to the all-too-small body of research that is entirely sex worker conceived, led, and implemented.
SWer 4 SWer
While we work hard to change the broader systems that affect sex workers, our beating heart can be felt in our more personal work. Making a direct impact in peoples’ day-to-day lives and fostering connections between sex workers is what truly gives us life. Whether in-person, online, or out on a stroll, at the end of the day, SWOPLA is a sex worker peer support organization that centers mutual aid.
We check in with each other at monthly general meetings and intimate community events, like potlucks, clothing swaps, skill shares and book club meetings. We organize bigger public-facing events like “Vision for LA,” the May forum where SWOPLA members asked questions to candidates running for office in LA. We celebrate together at events like Hump Day for the Hoes, the virtual Zine launch party and concert we threw for International Whore’s Day last year. You might also see us tabling all over LA, providing resources and asking for cash–or Venmo, or Cashapp–at events like the Kinkout International Whore’s Day party at the MOCA Geffen this year!
SWOPLA’s essential sex worker support services include: our bi-weekly support group, our resource list & bad date list, and our monthly outreach strolls. Since the shutdowns in response to COVID-19, SWOPLA has consistently distributed cash to sex workers as a core component of our mutual aid – originally online via the Emergency Relief Fund, and now on our street-based outreach strolls, where we also distribute supplies including condoms, Narcan, fentanyl strips, baby wipes, hygiene kits, and beauty supplies. Likewise, our resource list, bad date list, and support group aim to be immediately useful to the sex workers who access them.
In Conclusion
If you want to help build a world where people can make their own life choices,
If you want to help build a world based on abundant community care,
If you believe that people should have autonomy over their own sex lives,
If you think no one should be arrested because they are dressed a certain way,
If you think no one should be arrested because they trade sexual services for money or resources,
If you think no one should be arrested PERIOD,
Please donate, share, and help spread the word!