Dear Community,
In the spirit of resistance and joy, we bring you our first major update of 2026.
This moment asks a lot of us. But it also reminds us of our power, our creativity, and the deep fulfillment we find in building together.
Our community faces ongoing challenges—exposure to violence, marginalization, and legal and societal barriers to care. As these and other challenges intensify with the arrival of new technologies and a continued cultural slide into open fascism. A dying empire continues to show its true colors all around us. Violence, exploitation, and white supremacy are all horrors our communities have long faced, and now we see them front and center as collapse continues.
And still, we are here. Creating, caring, imagining, and finding one another. With this acceleration comes change, and we find it essential to work toward changes that lift us into a better world.
When BAWS was founded in 2018, we gathered in living rooms, we held signs and shut down the streets, we built community power to resist FOSTA/SESTA. We’ve built relationships and coalitions, thrown parties, potlucks, and memorials, laughed and cried, met the moments and burned out, fumbled, and dusted ourselves off to try again. All of this evolved into BAWS becoming one of the leading mutual aid funds in the Bay Area over nearly a decade. This was no small feat, and your support made it possible all along the way. To honor that support with sustainability, we must continue to evolve.
We took the past year to slow down our programming and focus on changes that would make our work fluid and sustainable. That pause was intentional and generative. This time helped us re-identify the scope of BAWS’ work and the values we are anchoring ourselves to.
We developed 4 pillars to reimagine our goals, rooted in our values, and charted with the seasons:
SPRING / AUTONOMY
Advocacy & Research
Our advocacy and research create space for skill-building workshops. We nurture growth and prepare to emerge anew.
SUMMER / PLEASURE
Amplifying SW Narratives
Standing strong in the fulfillment of our work, we celebrate and gather to amplify our community’s narratives. We remember joy and togetherness keep us fortified.
FALL / SUSTAINABILITY
Resources + Information Sharing
We begin to save and strengthen, amassing resources and support through community fairs. We reap and collect so that we may stay steady in lean times.
WINTER / CONNECTION
Building Community
When the light is at its dimmest and gathering becomes harder, we build extended community through mutual aid. We exchange resources and services to meet shared needs, operating on principles of solidarity, not charity.
From these pillars and values came something else—with excitement, we are introducing our new Cosmogram with our new priorities and seasonal roadmap.
A Cosmogram is a spiritual and navigational map to a worldview, a compass for our spirits and dreams. It’s both practical and imaginative. A portal to envision and embody the world we want to create for ourselves and for SWers everywhere. Cosmograms have been used for centuries throughout the non-Western and pre-Columbian world to connect people with the divine, the universe, and their ancestral roots. They have mapped sacred cities and modes of thought. They provide a simple visual flow for complex systems of relating to and understanding the world.
The design of our Cosmogram, created by BAWS Co-director Jiji Jade, is rooted in Daoism, ancient Chinese schools of thought, and Black feminist theory, and combines these foundations with their study of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and their lived experiences as a sex worker and sex worker organizer.
For our purposes, we intend to use this Cosmogram as a way to clarify the work we do here in the Bay Area, using it as a guide to our ultimate goal in the present and in the future: LIBERATION. LIBERATION is an ongoing practice rather than a final destination. It is the work of imagining otherwise, tending to one another, and building conditions where we can thrive.
Each of the 4 orbiting pillars of the cosmogram model, aligned with a corresponding season, work in harmony to lead us to this ultimate goal.
Beginning this year, all of our programming and offerings will align and flow from this new worldview, starting with a Spring workshop and skill sharing series that we can’t wait to share with you!
We’ve grown our team, strengthened our foundation, and are stepping into this year with more clarity and excitement for what’s ahead. We will continue to honor our roots and provide this beloved community–a community we are a part of and are accountable to–with as many resources, and as many opportunities to strengthen and elevate itself as we can muster.
In Love and Solidarity,
BAWS