Case study · Everyone’s Invited
How Everyone’s Invited found a model for survivor-led work in Chayn’s trauma-informed approach
Everyone’s Invited is a UK charity exposing and eradicating rape culture, providing an anonymous space where survivors can share their stories. They now have over 50,000 survivor submissions. When Soma Sara was at the beginning of her own journey, before the charity existed, she went looking for examples of others tackling this issue. What she found in Chayn was a model for embedding survivor expertise, and for how a safe space should feel.
Searching for examples, and finding nothing like it
In June 2020, Soma Sara, now Founder and CEO of Everyone’s Invited, began sharing her experiences of rape culture on Instagram. The response was overwhelming, and a mini-movement emerged as hundreds of people shared their stories with her. She wasn’t yet leading a charity. She was at the beginning of her own journey, with a growing number of survivors trusting her with difficult experiences.
She needed to build somewhere those stories could go. She was looking for a safe, anonymous platform, run by a small team, on a subject where getting the details wrong carries real cost. So she went searching for examples, other initiatives and organisations tackling this issue, and found little to work from. She also knew how hard the work would be to sustain, having experienced firsthand how difficult it is to maintain momentum with volunteers, people being interested for a time and then dropping off.
The sector itself wasn’t always an easy place to look for help.
Even though we’re all in social justice and trying to change the world, it often feels like there’s not a lot of collaboration, not a lot of, sometimes not a lot of kindness, sometimes a bit of gatekeeping. Sometimes it feels quite competitive.
A website, a volunteer model, and an open door
When she found Chayn, something struck her immediately. “I was really inspired by multiple aspects,” Soma recalls. “Number one, that it was survivor led, survivor focused and created by and for. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. I hadn’t seen anything with that survivor expertise embedded to that level.”
What made Chayn different wasn’t just the work itself, but how deeply survivor voices informed every aspect of it. “I know that Chayn is very much about support and supporting and healing,” she explains. “Leaning on what survivors need and want in their own words.”
Before Soma ever spoke to anyone at Chayn, she spent time exploring the website. What struck her wasn’t only the information, it was how it felt. It showed her that small design choices like colour, spacing, tone, and navigation, could help determine whether a survivor felt cared for or was overwhelmed.
I felt a sense of calm and peace when I was on the website. I just felt supported in that space. You just want it to feel like you’re somewhere where someone’s going to give you a hug.
The volunteer model stood out too. “It is so impressive to have run an organisation off the back of the work of volunteers,” she says. “Those people must be so committed and so passionate and aligned with the mission.” Chayn is now a hybrid, with a majority survivor-led team alongside volunteers from around the globe, but the belief in the unrivalled value of survivor and volunteer input has stayed constant.
Then she met Hera. “She was so open in sharing the work,” Soma recalls. “My understanding is that there is a practice at Chayn of like, everything is for everyone. All the content that you create is to be used by any and every organisation, every survivor, whatever.” Everything at Chayn is open-source and published under a Creative Commons licence, and we actively share our challenges and failings so that other organisations may learn from our mistakes.
A safe space, and over 50,000 stories
The anonymous space Soma set out to build has now collected over 50,000 survivor submissions, and those stories become data that drives the charity’s educational content and advocacy work, ensuring everything they do is deeply informed by lived experience.
At the heart of everything, it’s really the safe space.
Everyone’s Invited now runs an education programme working with young people from primary school through university, as well as parents, teachers, journalists and politicians, and has launched a national project on sexual abuse in primary schools. What Soma took from Chayn is the conviction underneath all of it: that those who’ve experienced these harms are not just beneficiaries of support, but the experts who should be designing it.
That’s actually quite against the grain. I really did not feel that way with her. I felt like she really was generous and wanted to support and wanted the sort of success of everyone in the sector.
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