Rooted and Reimagined at the 2026 Statewide Conference

by VALOR
on September 3, 2026

Four hundred survivors and advocates from across California connected in community to share knowledge at VALOR’s 2026 Statewide Conference! This year’s theme, Rooted and Reimagined, was a call to action for attendees to connect with their communities and to join us in reimagining the future of our movement to prevent and end sexual assault. Powerful plenaries and evocative sessions provided space for attendees to answer VALOR’s call to action, and empowering performances and demonstrations energized all of us to take the work back with us after the conference.

Lilia García-Brower, Juana Chavez, and Sandra Henriquez
Alexandria Taylor, Sandra Henriquez, and Pablo Alvarado

Two days of empowering plenary sessions and performances by Le Ballet Dembaya provided space for attendees to connect with their community roots and reimagine the change that each of us can create individually, organizationally, communally, and together as a movement. Plenaries speakers included Sandra Henriquez, CEO of VALOR, Lilia García-Brower, California Labor Commissioner, and Juana Chavez, civil rights and environmental activist for her mother Dolores Huerta, Alexandria Taylor, Executive Director of the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs, and Pablo Alvarado, Co-Executive Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. While each plenary focused on different specifics, they all highlighted that staying rooted in our commitment to justice and ending sexual violence gives us a solid foundation to reimagine our work. Another message that the plenaries incorporated is that expanding community doesn’t mean just within the movement. We need to move out of our silos and work with other civil rights and justice movements because sexual assault doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so we shouldn’t exist in one, either. 

In an ongoing effort to move beyond land acknowledgements and connect with native communities and survivors, Strong Hearted Native Women’s Coalition’s Tim Ruise performed a shawl ceremony with advocates at the conference. The ceremony honored lives, stories, resilience, and spirits of all attendees relatives and communities, representing how we are all connected through compassion, healing, and shared humanity. 

Session’s were just as engaging as ever, as topics included using culture as an approach to preventing sexual violence, communicating effectively, retaining staff, diversifying funding, empowering laborer, migrant, and rural communities, and increasing accessible services. In the theme of reimagining our movement, a handful of presenters hosted sessions on how engaging with people who have harmed in the past and incorporating restorative practices into our services can create more opportunities for healing and stronger communities.

Two parts of Statewide looked slightly different than previous years. On the pre-conference day,  VALOR tapped into being rooted in community and reimagining the future of our movement by hosting consecutive events alongside the California Chapter of the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Assault’s (CalATSA) Inagural Conference! As long time partners, our two organizations are moving to increase how our members work together to strengthen preventing sexual violence across California. Then, to close out the conference, the advocates at the Ya Basta! Center and attendees at the conference joined together with a powerful demonstration of “Un Violador En Tu Camino” that advocates performed at this year’s California Denim Day Rally in Sacramento, CA. 

Together, survivors and advocates at the 2026 Statewide Conference explored the power that comes with opening our movement to others to create a larger, more rounded community, while reimagining how we can be change makers to end sexual assault and violence.