Meet Soma Sara, the founder of Everyone’s Invited
In honor of Women's History Month, MAKERS partnered with Be Bold for Change, a nonprofit organization that inspires and activates changemakers today and tomorrow, to showcase women from around the world leveraging their talents to support women and girls to reduce the gender gap.
Women leaders shared their stories during a March 14th celebration event in London, aptly named Be Bold Now x MAKERS. Soma Sara, award-winning activist, author, and founder of Everybody's Invited, the United Kingdom charity dedicated to exposing and ending rape culture, spoke about the dehumanization of sexual violence in society today. “It's this incremental culture where everything is interconnected. And when things like the non-consensual sharing of intimate images or being groped at a house party, when those experiences are normalized, this acts as a gateway to the more extreme experiences of rape and sexual assault.”
Sara grew a community of storytellers and advocates from her bedroom. Following her Instagram story in June 2020 describing her experience of rape culture, many people connected with her experience, which led her to create and now serve as CEO of Everyone's Invited. Moreover, the charity advocates for sexual education to promote healthy relationships in universities and offers survivors an anonymous space to tell their stories. Within the first three months, the website received over 50,000 stories.
“And the anonymity was really important because it was allowing survivors to, for the first time in so many cases, actually openly speak out and share experiences that were incredibly stigmatized and really difficult to talk about.” - Soma Sara
She’s been a recipient of many awards, including Harper's Bazaar 2021 Activist of the Year, Stylist Magazine's 2022 Activist of the Year, and on the BBC 100 global list of inspiring and influential women of 2021. Her experience doesn't end there – she has also written for ELLE Magazine and Glamour UK. Through a collection of essays, Soma's first book (named after the charity) examines modern sexuality and how it allows harassment, exploitation, and violence to flourish.
Sara is making the future a better place through her activism and her lens of courage. Still, she can’t do it alone: “...because of the age that we're living in, because of the mainstreaming of hardcore pornography, because of the digital world - it's a very different landscape that young people are growing up in. Rape culture is universal, it's everywhere, and we all have a responsibility in this conversation and in tackling it and in challenging it.”
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Written by Rhonisha Ridgeway, MAKERS Social Media Coordinator
