After taking hundreds of crisis calls from survivors of domestic violence, I realized that I always asked the questions, “Have you thought of leaving?” “Did you call the police?”
“Why did my solutions assume that leaving was the only option?
“Why did they assume that the best way to achieve safety was to call the police?”
“Why weren’t there any other options?”
Mimi Kim, the founder of Creative Interventions, asked these urgent questions. Through her years of work in domestic violence and sexual assault, Mimi came to realize the limitations of the narrow options offered to those seeking solutions to violence.
Mimi witnessed how many survivors in her own community refused the very options she offered. She saw how many people wanted to stop the violence but did not know how or where to start.
Why wasn’t there a space for the people closest to and most impacted by violence to envision and create ways to make it stop? Why weren’t violence intervention resources offering education, skills and support useful to everyday people wanting to stop violence among those they care about? Why did community education teach how to recognize intimate forms of violence but not how to stop it?
Creative Interventions was founded to shift education and resources back to families and communities. Established in 2004, the project aimed to place knowledge and power among those most impacted by violence. Creative Interventions sought to make support and safety more accessible, stop violence at early stages of abuse, and create possibilities for once abusive individuals and communities to evolve towards healthy change and transformation.