People in the sex trades organizing for labor and human rights face multiple and overlapping barriers. Sex worker and survivor organizers face categorical criminalization and stigmatization that dramatically impede access to funding, digital platforms, and physical space. Worker-survivor organizers often organize under surveillance by police, by clients and other members of the public, and by private corporations and institutions, making secrecy and identity-obscuring tactics a requirement of the work. These tactics in turn make base building and information-sharing difficult and sometimes even impossible. Added to that difficulty is the difficulty of organizing with a cohort that is chronically deprived of financial and social support, making precarity and trauma the norm. Nonetheless, sex workers persist, as they have for at least a century in the United States, in building movements, pursuing policy goals, and advocating against our own marginalization and exclusion. 

Informal, Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers brings organizers together in a space that simultaneously support their work and increase public understanding of a rarely-understood set of issues. Organizers will have the opportunities to share tactics with each other in both public-facing and closed community events, and will have access to an institutional platform that acknowledges the significance of their struggle, how it is interlocked with all struggles for social justice, and how sex worker movements have contributed to movement-building at large.