Sonya Passi is the Founder & CEO of FreeFrom, a national organization transforming our society’s response to gender-based violence. She joins to discuss her new documentary SURVIVOR MADE and her advocacy work, creating a community where survivors of intimate partner violence can heal, thrive, and drive change together.
Debbie Millman:
Sonia Passi is the founder and CEO of a national organization named FreeFrom. Free from what you might ask? Well free from what our society and the whole world is not very good at talking about. Free from gender-based violence, free from intimate partner violence, and free from violence against women and children. FreeFrom is the organization that has helped tens of thousands of survivors and is also helping to change the conversation about how survivors can heal and thrive. Sonia Passi is a veteran activist who’s been at it since high school, and part of activism is getting the word out, and one way to get the word out is to make a movie. So Sonia recently produced the documentary Survivor Made about women who have turned their pain into possibility. We’re going to talk about the film and a whole lot more in today’s episode. Sonia Passi, welcome to Design Matters.
Sonia Passi:
Thank you for having me, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Sonia, I understand that when you were five years old, you started an illustrated bookmark-making business. That is rather entrepreneurial for a very little girl.
Sonia Passi:
Yeah, my parents are entrepreneurs and for as long as I can remember, every year on Diwali and on New Year’s Eve, they would take us on a tour of our hometown, Manchester in England. And the first stop would be the studio apartment in which they both lived with 2 sewing machines that they ran 24 hours a day manufacturing sweaters. And one of them was always awake to make sure that the thread didn’t catch. And then the next place we’d go was the one-bedroom apartment where they had my brother. And then we’d go to the first Cash & Carry they had and then the first warehouse. And so I think at a very, very young age, entrepreneurship was not just told to me, but shown to me. It’s the only explanation I have for my bookmark business at the age of five.
Debbie Millman:
I’m so intrigued by this. First of all, what kinds of illustrations were you making on the bookmarks?
Sonia Passi:
They were pretty exclusively Disney characters. Simba and the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.
Debbie Millman:
And how much did you charge? And what do you anticipate doing with your profits?
Sonia Passi:
Well, one of my biggest regrets as an adult is that I would charge more for my bookmarks than my little sister’s because, at five years old, I’d deemed mine to be better and worth more than hers. But we used the money that we made to buy plastic food from our pretend restaurant that we had.
Debbie Millman:
Wonderful.
Sonia Passi:
And so it was very much like a full cycle of, in our little world, we were using the money to live and pay rent and feed ourselves.
Debbie Millman:
But I love the idea that you were using your profits to fund yet another business.
Sonia Passi:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
I believe you still have a passion for paper products and collect stationery.
Sonia Passi:
Very, very strong.
Debbie Millman:
Paper. Actual paper. Do you still handwrite letters?
Sonia Passi:
Yeah, I’m still a fountain pen gal.
Debbie Millman:
Oh wow. So OG.
Sonia Passi:
Yeah, fountain pen, the wax seals that you stamp on to seal your envelopes, personalized stationery. I handwrite all my notes. I’m very analog in the way that I think and I work.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned you were raised in Manchester, England, I believe you were also born there. And aside from your fascination with paper products, what kind of little girl were you?
Sonia Passi:
I was always very confident. The stories I’ve heard from when I was young are that I used to stare intensely for long periods of time at all of my dad’s friends. And these older men would get very nervous by my stare and my dad would always tell them, “She’s trying to figure out if she can trust you.”
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Sonia Passi:
So I definitely had a capacity at a young age to make grown men feel very nervous.
Debbie Millman:
I did not think you were going there with that statement. Very good.
Sonia Passi:
But I was full of life as a kid. My mom used to describe me as the bubbles of champagne.
Debbie Millman:
Where do you think that early confidence came from? Usually that comes from good parenting, but I’m not sure in your case if that’s accurate.
Sonia Passi:
I think part of it is who I am, and I think part of it is that I have the very good fortune of having gotten the best of both of my parents. My mom really is a force to be reckoned with, a manifesto of all of her dreams. My father is too. And so I got that. I witnessed it and I modeled it. And certainly in my younger years I was very much raised with the idea that I could do and be anything that I wanted to be. And that’s a great blessing as a little girl.
Debbie Millman:
I read that from a very early age you wanted to be a police officer.
Sonia Passi:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
But in a complete about-face by the time you were 16, you created an anti-violence Amnesty International community group in your high school. What inspired your interest in social justice and human rights at such a young age?
Sonia Passi:
When I was a teenager, Tony Blair was the Prime Minister of England and his wife, Cherie Blair was a very famous and successful human rights lawyer. I think it was the first time, it was sort of like the equivalent of Hillary Clinton here in the US, but it was the first time that a Prime Minister’s wife was a powerhouse in her own right. And it was a very public and prominent display of a woman with power and leadership. And so it was a model I think for a lot of young women in the UK at the time. And so 12 years old, I am learning about what a human rights lawyer is and therefore what human rights are. And the through line between wanting to be a police officer, I think it was a police officer, and then it became a teacher, and then it became a pediatrician, and then it became a human rights lawyer was I have known my entire life that my life is in service of others. And so it was just sort of finding what that looked like for me.
Debbie Millman:
You went to the University of Cambridge for your undergrad degree and then went on to get a master’s of philosophy. What made you decide to go back to school to pursue a law degree at UC Berkeley at that time? Was it that realization that yes, I want to be a lawyer? What happened in that timeframe between the master’s of philosophy and then wanting to go on for the law degree?
Sonia Passi:
So at 16 when I started this Amnesty International group, the very first pamphlet that they sent me in the mail was around their campaign that year, which was Global Violence Against Women. And I remember reading, “One in three women globally will experience gender-based violence.” And I was so utterly shocked, not by the statistic, but why this was the first time that I was reading it and the first time I was reading it was on page two of a pamphlet that I sent away for in the mail. Because it was very clear to me that this was a global crisis and should be breaking news every single day, front page of every newspaper. And in that moment without having any consciousnesses to my own experience. But in that moment, it crystallized for me that this was my life’s work. At that age, I started hosting domestic violence awareness weeks at my high school that were intended both to educate people about the issue, but also to raise money for local shelters.
I then went on to do similar work at Cambridge, and by that point I knew this was my life’s work. I had absolutely no idea what contribution I had to make to it. But because it had been introduced to me as a human rights issue, not as a domestic issue, not as a personal issue, but a human rights issue, I felt clear that understanding law and how you create laws and change laws and policy was going to be critical to my future. And so I actually chose to go to law school and I had the good fortune to go to law school and be able to afford to go to law school knowing that I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but there was a certain piece of education that I needed in order to enact the kind of change that I wanted to.
Debbie Millman:
During your studies, you were also a JD Fellow, which meant you were 1 in 12 women law students selected nationally based on leadership potential. You also worked as an intern for the US House of Representatives and were a volunteer for Obama for America before he became President. So at that point, were you considering a career in politics?
Sonia Passi:
I actually was. I had previously interned for a parliamentary member in the UK. At that age, I felt very strongly that politics was a way to create change and certainly that was a different time politically than it is now, and there was a lot more hope and potential when I was younger. And then I spent time in DC interning with the House of Representatives for a member of Congress and volunteering nights and weekends for the Obama campaign in Virginia. And what I learned in that time was that the real innovation, the real systems change doesn’t actually happen in DC. It happens outside of DC. And then I went to California to go to UC Berkeley and I saw some of the most groundbreaking organizing and community work and systems change work happening there. And I understood better that there’s a lot more that I could do with the skill set and the vantage point and perspective that I have outside of DC than in DC.
Debbie Millman:
When did you work at Morgan Stanley? I know you were an associate at Morgan Stanley and I was trying to, as I was doing my research in prep for the show, try to fit in exactly when that was and I was having some difficulty.
Sonia Passi:
Yeah. So, during law school, I started my first non-profit organization in the domestic violence space. It’s called the Family Violence Appellate Project. It’s still a thriving organization out of-
Debbie Millman:
Oh yeah, I want to talk to you about it. I have that. That’s next.
Sonia Passi:
And got really clear in that time period that where my skills and my passion connected was around filling in the gaps in the work that is being done to address gender violence. But when I graduated law school, I was not a citizen and I needed a visa, which meant I needed to work for a big corporation or company of sorts to sponsor that visa. And my options were banking, consulting, or law. And as much as I had loved law school, there was nothing more boring to me than the practice of law.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that? Why is that?
Sonia Passi:
Because at least at a junior level, I have no clue what it’s like at a senior level, but it’s very much research and writing. And one of the hardest things for me in my education and I had a long education was feeling so unhelpful because I was sitting in these halls of higher learning thinking and there was no doing. All this skill and all this talent and no one was doing, everyone was just thinking. And the practice of law as an intern at least felt very much the same.
Debbie Millman:
So the choice to go to Morgan Stanley, did you want to understand money and the business of money better or was it just visa-based?
Sonia Passi:
Yeah, it was two things. It was one thing I learned starting my first nonprofit is that nonprofits are businesses and you need the same business rigor to run them well, to be financially responsible, to have healthy reserves, to understand budgets and forecasting and all the other sides of running a business. And I didn’t have that in my toolbox. And then the other thing that I had learned during law school was gender-based violence is an economic issue.
Debbie Millman:
In what way?
Sonia Passi:
So the Family Violence Appellate Project, what we were doing was we were appealing domestic violence cases. So I was talking to potential clients, all of whom had left the abuse and all of whom had lost custody of their children. And the reason they had lost custody of their children was because they didn’t have the means to support their children. And these were women who were sometimes 3, 4, 5 years out of the abuse, but they were still homeless and they were living in their car or they were living on someone’s couch. And this was a pattern. It wasn’t just a one-off.
And what I was learning through this was gender-based violence is so economically devastating. It is not only extremely expensive, but economic abuse is so insidious and pervasive. Not having access to your own cash, having debt in your name that you don’t know about that destroys your credit score, having your bank account stolen from or monitored, being forced to sign documents that take away your financial autonomy. It became very clear to me that this is an economic issue. It is not something that we are addressing as an economic issue, and I needed to have a better understanding of economics in order to better address it.
Debbie Millman:
The Family Violence Appellate Project was the first nonprofit organization in California to provide pro bono appellate legal services to survivors of domestic violence and worked to overturn dangerous trial court decisions. And it also set legal precedents that protect survivors rights. And you did this at 23 years old. Can you talk a little bit about some of the cases that you worked on at that time?
Sonia Passi:
Yeah, and I should be clear, I was not a lawyer and therefore I never worked on cases. But I hired an extraordinary executive director at the time who had a lot of appellate experience and led that work. And I was supported by my mentor and law professor who had created one of the most rigorous domestic violence law programs at Berkeley Law around the world, one of the first and one of the best. So there were experts around me that were doing the work. I was setting up the infrastructure to be able to do the work, hiring our board, raising the money, crafting our vision and mission and strategy. But these early cases, the thing that started all of this was I was sitting in my domestic violence law class and my professor, her name is Nancy Lemon, said there is a presumption in California codified in law. “There is a presumption that the non-abusive parent gets custody of the children, and yet survivors are more likely to get custody of their children if they do not mention the abuse in court.”
Debbie Millman:
What? What?
Sonia Passi:
And of course you and I know very well Debbie the link between domestic violence and child abuse. And so it was acutely apparent to me what was happening here. Survivors were losing custody of their children. They didn’t have the financial means to appeal those cases because it’s incredibly expensive. And then those children were experiencing ongoing abuse and there was nobody to interrupt it. So my professor said off the cuff, “Would be really great if we could find someone to appeal these cases for free.” So I went up to her at the end of class and I said, “We should appeal those cases for free.” And she said, “Okay.” And I think she had absolutely no idea what she was saying okay to, but I think it was maybe 8 weeks later, we had filed our 501(c)(3) paperwork and we were off to the races. And so in those early cases, we really prioritized cases that would require that this presumption that the non-abusive parent get custody be enforced and it worked.
Debbie Millman:
Good for you. Good for us. Good for everyone. How did that experience shape your approach to supporting survivors of family violence overall?
Sonia Passi:
It helped me see a couple of things. It helped me see first of all, just how you start an organization and that organization was statewide in focus and FreeFrom’s work is national in focus. I think it helped me dream bigger. It helped me see what was possible. It helped me see what I was capable of doing, but it really, really honed me into this massive gap. We think in our society, we think of gender-based violence as beginning at a moment of acute crisis, a moment of life and death and ending shortly thereafter. So all of our resources and support for survivors is short-term, temporary band-aid relief. What I was seeing because I was working with survivors who were many years out of the abuse was this is a lifetime problem and that it has both economic causes and it has economic consequences, but nothing is being done to address those economic consequences, which means survivors are always in that moment of acute crisis. They can never move past it.
Debbie Millman:
4 years later, 2016, you founded FreeFrom, how did the Family Violence Appellate Project lead you or motivate you to start your own nonprofit? And what is your involvement now with Family Violence Appellate Project?
Sonia Passi:
I am an extremely big and fervent champion of the Family Violence Appellate Project, and I am so proud of … You have a vision for something and then it far exceeds your vision and that’s so powerful to witness and we can’t do anything alone. I stepped away from the organization about a year and a half after I started at Morgan Stanley. I continued to do a lot of fundraising for the organization while I was at Morgan Stanley and then I went through my own personal life crisis and something had to give at that time. And at that time it was the Family Violence Appellate Project, but it didn’t need me at that point either. So it wasn’t a detrimental moving on.
But it taught me everything that I needed to know about what existed and what didn’t exist for survivors. And while I was still involved with the Family Violence Appellate Project, I was starting to form FreeFrom in my mind. It was percolating, I was starting to write out what I imagined it could be. Again, I was not a citizen. I couldn’t work on it full-time, but it was there. And when the opportunity arose for me to get it off the ground I did.
Debbie Millman:
FreeFrom is unique in its focus on the intersection of economic justice and intimate partner violence. What led you to address financial security as a core solution?
Sonia Passi:
So, one in three women, one in two trans folks in the US is going to be subjected to gender violence in their lifetime. And the number one obstacle to safety for survivors is economic insecurity. So as I was thinking big and lofty about how we move towards a world in which there is no gender violence, I felt like I couldn’t do that without addressing the number one obstacle to safety. And my initial vision for how FreeFrom would do that was one thing. And now FreeFrom has far expanded beyond that, but I firmly, firmly believe that everything begins with first investing in survivors. All of our solutions require us to first invest in survivors. Prevention work doesn’t work if we don’t invest in survivors. And so FreeFrom takes the approach of one, this is an economic issue that has to be addressed as such. And two, we have to stop thinking about this problem as existing in this short timeframe and understand it as a generational problem, a lifetime problem that requires support and resources at every step of the way.
Debbie Millman:
FreeFrom focuses on creating financial security for survivors of domestic violence. You do this to ensure that they can move forward by being able to thrive on their own.
Sonia Passi:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Can you talk about the ways in which you do this? How does FreeFrom help support survivors for the rest of their lives essentially in helping them create new pathways of independence?
Sonia Passi:
We do a lot of different things, and this is very intentional because this problem in our society is of such great magnitude that there is no one solution that will fix it. So, taking this economic lens, we work directly with survivors, providing them with emergency cash, and this is no-strings-attached cash. They can spend it how they need it. Most people are spending this money on food, rent and utilities. But to date, we have been able to offer grants to over 9,000 survivors in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. We have a savings matching program where we are matching survivor’s savings dollar for dollar until they get to $1,500 in savings so that they have a cushion, a financial safety net to fall back on. We have our social enterprise gifted by FreeFrom, which is an online store that is both exclusively selling products made by survivor entrepreneurs, but also providing living wage work for survivors to run the store. We have a peer-to-peer resource-sharing network called My Next Steps, where survivors are coming together to build financial confidence and financial autonomy together.
Those are the ways in which we work with survivors directly, but then we’re a systems change organization, so we believe this is a systemic problem. Everyone in our society has a part to play. So we work at a federal level to change laws. We work with financial institutions to do more to support survivors. With employers, to do more to support survivors who they employ. We’ve been able to get a number of big corporations to adopt a paid and protected gender-based violence leave policy so that if survivors are in a life or death situation or they need time off work to relocate or God forbid, need to get a rape kit done or go to the hospital, they’re not going to lose their job because they have to take time off that they don’t have or they don’t have to deplete their sick days to deal with what is not a sickness but a societal problem. A couple of years ago, we categorized the laws of every single state and determined whether they supported or hurt survivors’ economic security, and we graded every state.
Debbie Millman:
Is that the map and scorecard?
Sonia Passi:
That’s the map and scorecard. And what we found was most states are really working against survivors’ economic security, and we gave every state suggestions on how they could do better. And since we launched that map and scorecard 3 years ago, there have been over 600 pieces of legislation introduced across all 50 states that would create more supportive environments for survivors and their finances. So we’re really pushing everyone to do their part. Our states, our federal governments, our local governments, our employers, our banks, credit card companies. At a future date, we want to start to focus on health insurance companies and educational institutions. But everything that we do is to end gender violence and continues by getting every single person to do their part to invest in survivors.
Debbie Millman:
How do you go about getting our system to change policies, whether it be insurance companies or healthcare companies or corporations or the legal system?
Sonia Passi:
In a lot of ways, I think FreeFrom has been so successful in its first eight years because this is an idea that was a long time coming. And so even after eight years, there is still so much low-hanging fruit that we’re picking and there’s still so much momentum there and so much to do there. So I always approach this in two ways. The first is I focus on the lowest hanging fruit.
Debbie Millman:
What’s an example of that? What’s an example of lowest hanging fruit in your field?
Sonia Passi:
Great question. Low-hanging fruit is the employers or the state legislatures that really want to do something about this issue, but they just had no idea that they could. To me, that’s low-hanging fruit and it’s part of why we’ve been so successful is there’s so many people that actually want to do something about this. It’s just that our narrative and our framework wasn’t talking about this as an economic issue. So it wasn’t top of mind. FreeFrom does not have time to convince anybody who doesn’t believe we should be ending gender violence, that we should be ending gender violence. That’s not where we want to put our energy.
But then the other way that I look at this is there’s the low-hanging fruit. There’s the people that really want to do something. And then for the people that can be influenced to do something, what influences them? What are their levers? Is it public pressure? We figure out how to put public pressure on them. Is it government interference? We figure out how to get the government to interfere. Is it FOMO? We figure out how to create FOMO.
So for example, with employers, employers were getting a lot of pressure from women’s resource groups internally or other employee resource groups to do more to address this issue. And they wanted to appease employee desire. They wanted to listen to their employees and do something. And we had the policy written for them to adopt. Or with banks, banks said to us, “We agree with everything asking us to do, but we’re a heavily regulated industry. We need the regulators to tell us what to do.” So we said, okay. And we went to the regulators. With states, so often if a neighboring state passes a policy, they get competitive. New York doesn’t want to not have what New Jersey has if it’s good. And so then we had played to that desire to keep up. So I think not trying to control or change hearts and minds that we can’t, and focusing where we can and truly understanding what motivates and drives people is the way to do it.
Debbie Millman:
You talked about being able to provide a living wage for everybody that is employed by FreeFrom. Talk about how you do that. You are also the CEO of CHANI Inc. which is an extraordinary empire now of an app.
Sonia Passi:
Non-colonial empire. Non-supremacist empire.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Women-run. Where you’ve helped create a platform for self-awareness through astrology. Several years ago, one of your job descriptions went viral because it was quite a generous opportunity that you then responded and said, “This is what everybody should be able to do.” Talk about both financial models and how you are able to not only provide what is a living wage, but also a very generous package of paid time off and insurance and several other really generous perks.
Sonia Passi:
So CHANI is a for-profit company, and FreeFrom is a non-profit company. They both have the exact same benefits. Both have a salary floor of $80,000 base salary, which means nobody makes less than that as a starting salary. On top of that, we have about $5,000 in stipends that everybody gets, personal and professional development, wealth building. FreeFrom offers eight weeks of office closures a year, which means the entire office is closed for that time period. We have paid and protected gender-based violence leave, we have unlimited menstrual leave and a bunch of other benefits. We cover full medical, dental, vision for you and your family. That medical, dental and vision begins on day one of employment. There is no probation period, and both CHANI and FreeFrom are thriving.
My whole life’s work is basically about power. Gender-based violence is about abuses of power. I hold tremendous power as a CEO, and so I’m in a constant conversation with myself about power and how to hold it wisely. One of the most important lessons I learned early on at FreeFrom was I might be unconscious about my power. I might choose to downplay my power. I might choose to ignore my power. But the fact of the matter is it still exists. And so the wisest thing I can do is hold it with tremendous consciousness. And as employers, we hold an extraordinary amount of power and we have a responsibility to not extract from the people that work from us and to not impede their ability to live well. And it has to be a fair exchange. And I believe also that paying well and having good benefits is good economics. Capitalism is actually bad math.
Debbie Millman:
In what way?
Sonia Passi:
When you underpay, when you treat your employees poorly, when you have to wait 90 days for health insurance, when you don’t get enough time off, a couple of things happen. You burn out. You aren’t actually even in a place physically, mentally, emotionally, structurally to bring your most creative self to work, which means the work isn’t getting the best it could. And then as an employer, you’re either paying people upfront or you’re paying the cost of burnout, turnover, legal fees and everything on the other side of it. And capitalism is paying on the back end. We’re extracting from the earth and then we’re already paying for it as an earth. We extract from humans and then we pay for it in sickness and pandemic and disease and poverty and pain and we are paying for it. We are pretending that we’re not paying for it, but we are paying for it. And we can ignore that as long as we want, but it doesn’t make any sense.
Whereas I don’t pay legal fees, I don’t pay turnover costs. I’m able to build expertise on my team and maintain that expertise over years. I’m able to go to sleep at night knowing that my employees are also able to go to sleep at night and not stay up worrying about my knee. And I am confident that my employees are in a position to bring their best, most creative ideas to the job because they’re not panicked about how they’re going to pay rent or how they’re going to pay a medical bill. That just seems like a better mathematical equation to me than the other way around.
Debbie Millman:
One of the really interesting and provocative things that I read in preparing for today’s show was your opinion that if organizations can only pay their employees minimum wage, they shouldn’t be in business. Talk about how you formed that opinion.
Sonia Passi:
Everybody on this earth deserves a basic standard of living and safety. And in our world, that costs money. And if a job cannot pay you what it costs you to live and it’s a full-time job, then there’s something wrong with the job. And when I made that statement, I am really talking about corporate America. I’m not talking about small businesses that don’t get nearly the subsidies or support that large corporations do. But as a large corporation or a venture-funded endeavor, if you are not paying a living wage, you don’t have a viable business model. I don’t believe that there is a corporation in America that cannot afford to pay a living wage.
Debbie Millman:
You pay your hourly employees that you have about $38 an hour.
Sonia Passi:
$38.46.
Debbie Millman:
How did you come up with that particular number?
Sonia Passi:
We use this incredible resource called the Living Wage Calculator that comes out of MIT and they calculate based on county what are living wage is. And so that is what they calculated a living wage in LA County to be.
Debbie Millman:
Sonia, in the eight years that you have been running FreeFrom, you’ve served over 30,000 survivors, you’ve successfully influenced policies benefiting more than, at last count, 5.3 million survivors across the United States. And now you are on the precipice of releasing your first documentary. Why a documentary?
Sonia Passi:
So, so much of FreeFrom’s work is to get everybody to play their part. But the problem is that gender-based violence is an issue that nobody wants to even look at. It is too painful, it is too traumatizing. One in three women, one in two trans folks, we are all impacted by it, whether that is conscious for us or unconscious, whether it’s immediate or it’s familial, we are all negatively impacted by gender-based violence. And because it is so personal, it is so hard to acknowledge and address and all of our media representations, media and visual representations of gender-based violence are pain and hopelessness and tragedy. This is my life’s work and I don’t want to watch something about the issue because I don’t want to see any more violence. I don’t want to see any more tragedy.
And so as we were sitting there thinking about, well, if we want everyone to play our part, but no one even wants to turn towards the issue, how do we get people to turn towards the issue? And the answer to me lies in showing people how survivors can thrive. Showing people survivors in their joy, showing people the solutions that we need. And to me, a documentary, the documentary that we made, Survivor Made about the survivors who are a part of Gifted, our online store, was such a powerful first step in this narrative change we need in our culture because this is a community of survivors who are thriving and they are thriving because they’re in community with each other and they have the financial means to support themselves and their safety.
Debbie Millman:
How would you describe the narrative arc of your film, which is titled Survivor Made?
Sonia Passi:
It’s the holiday season, the most stressful, busiest time for the team at Gifted. They’ve got a goal. They want to break even this year. They want this to be the year that they prove that their business model paying $38.46 an hour in retail can work and be profitable. And the film begins with them committed to giving it their all. And that’s the arc of the film is the will they, won’t they meet their goal? How are they going to get there? What tricks are they going to pull out of the bag? But it’s a beautiful journey through their individual lives, their growth, their healing, their joy.
Debbie Millman:
Their resilience.
Sonia Passi:
Their resilience.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Sonia Passi:
I have watched this film probably about 85 times now, and still when I’m done watching it, I feel my most human. It’s like it puts me back together. In a world where everything we watch is so startling and alarming, I watch this and I feel like a human being again.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned that the narrative centers around the efforts of the group that you have working at Gifted to achieve this sales goal. So I have a couple of questions about that. The sales goal is for a marketplace of survivor-made goods that was founded by FreeFrom called Gifted. So tell us more about Gifted.
Sonia Passi:
Yeah. So one of the very first things that FreeFrom ever did was we ran an entrepreneurship program for survivors. And we did this across three different shelters, one in Oakland, one in San Francisco and one in LA. And we supported survivors in starting their own businesses. And we worked with them over about six months, we met with each person once a week and whatever it was that they wanted to work on that week we did, whether it was getting their LLC or working on their logo or product development. And at the end of the six months, everyone has started their businesses, everyone’s businesses were starting to turn a profit and the quality of products they were making was so incredible.
But the biggest hurdle that they had was building an audience. For many of them being publicly online wasn’t safe. And we all know how hard it is to build an audience, how long it takes to build an audience. And they didn’t, quite frankly, have that time. They needed to make money quickly. And we hosted a marketplace in Santa Monica and invited all of these entrepreneurs to sell their products and all of them sold out. And I was like, “Okay, it’s not just me. Other people think these products are great.”
And so I decided to start Gifted. I was like, well FreeFrom can be that buffer. FreeFrom has an incredible community, an incredible audience that is ready to roll up their sleeves and support survivors however they can. We can build the marketplace through which they can sell their products. And again, it’s always important to me to think about how we can have the maximum impact. So I was like, “Okay, I don’t just want a marketplace that’s selling survivors products. It should also be employing survivors and it should be paying survivors well and creating a different way for survivors to build income beyond entrepreneurship.”
And so April, 2017 for Mother’s Day, we launched Gifted. It launched out of my house, what is now my wife’s office used to be the Gifted warehouse. One of the entrepreneurs who makes greeting cards came on as the first employee and we just kind of made it up as we went along and grew the entrepreneur base and grew the employee base. And Gifted is really the very best of humanity. And you’ve seen the film, Debbie, the camaraderie, and the love and the respect that these survivors have for each other. It’s so palpable.
Debbie Millman:
You worked with some extraordinary people making this film. The documentary was directed by Drew Denny, a Sundance fellow, and MacArthur grantee known for her work in the LGBTQ+ community regarding around rights, around climate change. How did you and Drew work to capture the resilience and the diverse experiences of the survivors in the documentary in the way that you did? And I don’t want to give away too much so people can see the movie and feel like there weren’t spoilers from the show today. But I’d love to get a sense of how you worked with the individual stars of the documentary, the survivors of the documentary to create the film that you did.
Sonia Passi:
It is very important to me that everything that we do, everything that we create is done with such a high level of care and intention. And so as we’re making this documentary about survivors, I wanted the film to be made by survivors. I wanted an entirely survivor-made crew. I wanted us to be really intentional about who we brought on board. And so I can only take credit for hiring Drew and letting Drew know my vision. And we were very clear with our producers. We wanted everyone who worked on this film to be paid a living wage as well. We wanted the way this film was made to model all of FreeFrom’s values.
Drew is really the person that deserves all the credit for the way in which this film captured survivors resilience, was not extractive, does not show you pain and trauma and violence and really is groundbreaking I think in its portrayal of survivors. And what I think that comes back to besides her talent and her heart, is her own life experience. And I think this is why it is so important that we have more diversity in who tells stories because it’s the only way that we will get truly diverse stories told.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that struck me as I was watching the film, it’s how as the women share their personal stories, they don’t focus on the violence they were subjected to, but you are aware of it. And in all the work that I do in trying to eradicate, for example, the rape kit backlog and child abuse, it’s very hard to balance the storytelling and the violence.
Sonia Passi:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
The women in the film share how they made their way out from under the violence as opposed to reliving the violence. Talk about how you were able to achieve that and that narrative choice.
Sonia Passi:
One of FreeFrom’s mottos is trust survivors. And we say it a lot and we ask others to do it, and we are always focused on doing it ourselves. And I think built into this film implicitly was we as the people making the film, Drew as the director, we don’t need to be convinced that violence happened. So we’re not even going to interview you in a way that requires you to demonstrate or prove that violence happened. And I think when I think about so much of our mainstream storytelling around gender violence, it always begins by showing you the violence. No matter what happens next, Hollywood needs to show you the violence. And I’ve thought a lot about why that is. And the only thing I can think is there’s a fear that you might not believe it really happened or that it was bad enough. So the story has to begin by showing you how bad it is.
But as survivors, we don’t need to be convinced. And so nobody who was part of this film, nobody in the cast ever had to explain, justify, corroborate how bad it really was. Everybody believed it, everybody trusted it, and that meant that they could just focus on their journey, their resilience, their decisions, their choices, instead of having to relive this thing over and over again. Tarana Burke once said, she was being asked about … Tarana Burke is the founder of Me Too, and she was asked on stage about why she doesn’t talk about her story as a sexual assault survivor more. And she said, “Everybody only wants to know me for the absolute worst thing that ever happened to me.” That was so resonant. I think of so many survivors’ experience. Everywhere you go for help, you have to tell the story of the violence again and again and again so that people believe you and so that you get what you need. And at FreeFrom we skipped that first step and we just get to what’s needed.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting, listening to you talk, it occurred to me nobody really ever questions the believability of somebody having a stomach ache or cancer.
Sonia Passi:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
But yet there’s this underlying suspicion when it comes to gender-based violence. I wonder why that is.
Sonia Passi:
And it’s at the root of so much harm that happens in this world. We believe people who haven’t harmed when they say they haven’t harmed, but we don’t believe survivors when they say they’ve been harmed unless they have more proof than anyone could have because that’s not how abuse works.
Debbie Millman:
Right. And sometimes that isn’t even enough.
Sonia Passi:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
Based on your experiences with making this movie, Survivor Made, and FreeFrom what policies or societal changes do you believe are most urgently needed today and moving forward in what I anticipate is going to be a bumpy couple of years for those of us in this community and those that advocate for change?
Sonia Passi:
I think there’s a couple of norms that need to be reset. The first being we have to understand and believe that we can end gender violence and that it is not something that is so intractable in our society because if we don’t believe we can end it, we will get to futility too quickly. And we have to reorient ourselves to, this won’t take 5 years or 10 years or four presidential terms, or 5, it’s going to take a minimum of 100 years. And so we have to work step by step, day by day, year by year knowing that we will not see the full fruits of our labor in our lifetime. And if we try to, we will shortcut our strategies and it won’t end well.
I think for many of us right now, it’s crystal clear that what we have and must support and treasure and protect is our community. And to understand that that includes supporting survivors in our community and to really understand our responsibility as community members, to not turn away, to not lack the courage to name and address this issue in our communities. That’s imperative. And then we have to be as strategic as the other side. And the other side, that’s whomever you want it to be in this moment. It’s the person causing harm. It’s the governments causing harm. It’s the whoever the other side is. Anyone who is against ending gender violence is the other side. We have to be as strategic as the other side, which means breaking down this problem into a million different pieces and going one by one and starting with the low-hanging fruit.
FreeFrom our strategy is incredibly diverse. So I don’t expect anything to happen at a federal level for the next two to four years.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Sonia Passi:
But I foresee a lot of momentum and exciting progress at a state level. And there are a lot of laws that need to change that are bipartisan and to get really creative and really sneaky and strategic to do what you can do now while working through the frustration about the things that you can’t do now. And then the last thing is we all have to change our orientation to trusting survivors. And if we operate from that place, no matter who holds power in this country, if we operate from a place of trusting survivors, there’s so much we can do. And the worst thing that we can do in this moment is feel powerless because we are not. And in our powerlessness, we will betray each other.
Debbie Millman:
It’s a very necessary thought right now, Sonia. In February of this year, you helped introduce the Survivor Financial Safety and Inclusion Working Group Act to Congress. Tell us more about the act and where things stand.
Sonia Passi:
So what we have learned from survivors is that 58% of survivors have their bank account monitored, stolen from, or controlled. As we know, our bank account is where we keep our money. It’s how we keep our money safe. So that’s 58% of survivors that are either not able to keep their money safe or are not even able to keep their money. The only people that can really act here to do anything about this are banks. And banks in many other countries have done so and have done so successfully. So we went to all of the big banks and small banks and we said, “Here are some guidelines for what you can do to protect survivor customers.” And they pretty much all said, “We need clarity from the regulators on what we can do.” So we said, “Okay, we’ll go to the regulators,” and that is what this bill is.
This bill would do two things. First, it would require all of the federal regulatory agencies to be part of a working group, focused on how do we address survivors economic abuse within banks.
And the second thing it would do is it would require banks to track data on the prevalence of this issue. And so it’s very unexciting when I describe it, but what it is the first and most necessary step to get banks to protect survivors’ bank accounts. It was introduced by two Democrats, Representative Nydia Velázquez in the House, and Senator Tina Smith in the Senate. We have Republicans who are interested in reintroducing the bill next year as the lead authors of it, the lead sponsors of it. And also what I would imagine is that the Trump administration is absolutely uninterested in regulating banks. So I don’t hold out a ton of hope. If there’s a window of opportunity, we’ll take it, but I don’t hold out much hope.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I will try to hold on to some. So I have two last questions for you. In the epilogue of Survivor Made you reveal that you’re working on a credit union for survivors. How is that work going?
Sonia Passi:
One way to do this work is to get the banks to do better. Another way is to build it ourselves.
Debbie Millman:
Yup.
Sonia Passi:
And I am really excited about building the credit union because not only will it actually be something that is supportive of the ways in which survivors need to be able to bank and keep their money safe, so it has the direct benefit to the people who are members, but it also creates a gold standard for how to support survivor customers. What I know is that people don’t believe that survivors are valuable customers. People don’t believe that they will make more money if they protect survivors’ bank accounts. This is seen as charity work, and I cannot wait to disrupt that narrative and I cannot wait-
Debbie Millman:
I can’t wait to see it.
Sonia Passi:
… To disrupt the banking industry because we have so many survivors that are thriving, that have become members of this credit union. So it works on all levels for me. It has the direct and immediate impact, it’s the model, and it’s disrupting misconceptions that are standing in the way of progress.
Debbie Millman:
If anybody can do this, Sonia, it is you. My last question is, you’re giving this film away for free. You’re letting anybody that wants to see it, see it. How can people watch your movie?
Sonia Passi:
The film is available online for anyone to watch. Go to survivormadedoc.com and you can stream the movie there. It’s $12 if you can afford the $12. It’s free if you can’t. There is no judgment either way. We are grateful that people watch it, and we wanted to go direct to audiences with this film, not just because we wanted to make it free and accessible, but it also has a huge privacy benefit for people. No one’s going to see your streaming history and saw that you watched this film, so we wanted to do it in a way that was most supportive to survivors. Please tell everyone you know about the film and watch it yourself and share any feedback you have with us. We are really excited to share the film with you and start to change our misconceptions of what a survivor looks like.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I also want to let our audience know that I am a proud supporter of this film and am doing as much as I possibly can to get the message out. It’s one of the most important films I’ve seen in a very long time. Sonia Passi, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. Thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Sonia Passi:
Thank you Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
To see Sonia’s film, Survivor Made, go to survivormadedoc.com. To read more about FreeFrom, you can go to freefrom.org. I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.