How Love is Learned

by Carolyn Mock

One Love Foundation

Mission: One Love is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission to eradicate relationship abuse by empowering young people to assess healthy and unhealthy relationships through their educational workshops and online content. It is nation-wide with offices in six regions.

Train-the-Trainer Model: One Love gives free access to its relationship health curiculum. Anyone can access its content, and anyone can undergo the process to be certified to teach its workshops, and then ideally return to their own communities to teach (with complete freedom to involve staff or not to).

Origin: One Love was started in 2010 by the family of Yeardley Love after she was killed at 22 by her ex-boyfriend.

My Field Study: While doing my research, I worked with the California Region to facilitate workshops and create video pieces.

Research Question

Can a non-profit organization that must remain politically non-partisan actually have the impact it hopes to on relationship violence when that is a politicized issue?

Thesis

Because One Love's curriculum about healthy and unhealthy relationships stems from foundational lessons on love, it can therefore be applied to any type of relationship. This means that love will be informing young people’s politics, not the other way around, undoing the very fabric of our current society faster than it can be sewn. The train-the-trainer model and leaving community members in charge of their own spaces de-centralize the non-proft org in this case. With this ability to skirt around the restrictions of the current poltical landscape, One Love is able to have a huge positive impact without compromising its mission whilst following the legalities of being a 501(c)(3). It gets to use all of the resources given to it by its non-profit status and donors, and effectively combat the restrictions set upon it.

Background: Statistics Around Abuse

Background: Politicization

Non-Profit Industrial Complex

The NPIC refers to the relationship between the non-profit sector, governments, and the business sector. Because of the constraints of capitalism and 501(c)(3) status, the non-profit must operate with a business-like structure in order to exist and pay its staff. It is born out of the need to fill in the gaps left by government neglect/failings, all while being legally unable to speak out in any politically partisan way they might address those failings.

Criminalization of Abuse

External factors like socio-economic stress exacerbate cultures of relationship violence . Language in domestic violence cases often also splits those involved into the abuser and the victim, greatly dehumanizing and infantilizing, respectively, both parties. When violence is painted as inherent to certain groups of people, they are further isolated and demonized, and easier to control.

“Violence is deemed a natural phenomenon by imperial and corporate powers [because] the interest of the state and economy are served when violence becomes a crime (Durazo, 2017, p. 113)."

Laws put into place by the oppressive state only further control and separate the groups the state does not favor. For example, mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence lead to a “decrease in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defense, but not to a decrease in the number of batterers who killed her partners, [protecting] batters more than it protects survivors (Durazo, 2017, p. 120).

Isolation Tactics

One of the greatest tools in an abuser's toolkit is isolation. When we are isolated we are easier to control. This happens on the individual level, and the societal level as people in power sew arbitrary xenophobia among communities. All people experience harm from unhealthy relationships, but are divided so that their experiences and consequences differ. Even the groups valued most by white heteropatriarchies are deeply affected and isolated by it (think "toxic masculinity").

Because relationships end up being tied to all of these systemic issues, they become inextricably politicized. LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, mass incarceration, gun laws, and sex/relationship education (SRE) all end up being about how to control people’s experience of relationships depending on their community.

Ways to Make an Impact

Social Services are provided in an attempt to treat an issue that has already taken hold. In the case of relationship violence, it might look like providing legal services, financial services, safe houses, therapy, childcare, and medical care.

Social Change tackles the roots of an issue, hoping to eventually render social services less necessary. It can be thought of as being in the realm of prevention work. In the case of relationship violence, it might look like unlearning abusive behaviors, education, reproductive healthcare and STI testing, therapy, and work in other fields of social justice that can exacerbate domestic violence incidents (food insecurity, alchol and drug abuse, gun control, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice).

(Kivel, 2017)

Currently, both of these approaches are needed to address relationship violence and many other social justice issues. Non-profit organizations often work in the realm of social services, as creating social change would mean taking a politcal stance on an issue and/or discussing the systemic issues that antagonize the problem, both of which a 501(c)(3) is unable to do. Because One Love works in education, a method which is usually engaged in social change, I wondered how it could it could do truly impactful prevention work if it didn't explicitly address the political frameworks that have created such an epidemic of relationship violence and the socio-economic disparties within it. Even if one is aware of the fact that different groups vary in their experience of relationship violence, without the knowledge that there is a purposeful exercise of control by the state through certain systems, solutions will remain incomplete.

Background: How We Talk About Love

Valuing All Types of Love

When we say the word relationship in this context, we are more likely to think of romantic and/or sexual relationships. But "relationship" also refers to those with friends, family, co-workers, and even our relationship with ourself. By this definition, everyone has a relationship, and so the need to practice healthy love is imperative to all of our lives.

Taught from a young age that relationships involving romance and sex are of paramount importance, there is a tendency for people to value them over other types, and feel heightened insecurity and shame around lacking romantic and sexual partnership.

One Love's curiculum teaches foundational lessons that can be applied to any type of relationship, allowing love to be felt in abundance, and difficult situations to feel less daunting. Imagine the empowerment a young person might feel leaving an unhealthy romantic relationship if they had practiced making hard decisions in other areas, and had healthy friendships they knew they could go to for support. Imagine how celebrated and intimate a romantic relationship would feel if your partnership felt like a good choice, not something you couldn’t bear to step away from even if you tried.

Findings

Solution Frameworks: Community Leaders in Charge

Pre-Prevention Work

Pre-prevention work goes a step further than solutions limited to social services and social change frameworks. It lays the foundation for how we understand love and relationships. It not only enables people to look for red-flags in others, but teaches them to self-reflect on their own behaviors, as well as how to spot green flags. Pre-prevention work gets around the politicization of love and relationshops because it teaches healthy behavior in the first place, meaning less energy has to go towards unlearning. It completes the picture.

One Love's Role: "We are the back-up dancers"

Organizations who serve their intended community have definitions of success that are rerouted to "focus on liberation, not longevity" of the organization

(Gilmore, 2017).

"The beauty about their train-the-trainer model is that we're developing an army of people who do this work on their own. The way that we've developed the model with the Education Center as the primary resource, we’re the backup plan, we're the backup dancers...and then I have that flexibility to bring the coffee too." -One Love Staff Member

Usually, there is a natural power imbalance between the staff of an org and a removed community because the staff is being paid to do the work and has a resource that a community does not. In One Love's case, that power is distributed by the train-the-trainer model and de-centering of the organization. This creates a make-up similar to that of a mutual-aid organization.

One Love creates the content and compiles the resources for free, then volunteers step up to take those back to their community. One Love staff is there to be of assistance in any way that's needed because they're the ones being paid to do this, while community members are taking extra time and energy to teach, so staff relieves much of the burden.

Because organizations rely on grant money they may “shift their sense of accountability from [those they intend to serve] to their funders (Durazo, 2017, p. 117).

Relationship violence is a "zero-degrees of separation issue," meaning that everyone has experienced or knows someone who has experienced an unhealthy relationship. By this reason the funders of One Love are all deeply invested in the work, giving the organization more freedom to stay accountable to the communties they serve.

At times, the organization partners with large companies to fund the creation of educational films or raise brand awareness. For the same reasons stated throuhout the rest of this report, this really only gets their content to more people who need it, and the partneships they've made haven't affected their messaging.

Findings

Solutions in Action: Serving At-Risk Communities

The communities most at risk for relationship violence are also likely to be the hardest for the organization to reach. However, a community can be "hard to reach" for different reasons.

chelsea.mov

"Sometimes you have to sleep with the devil."

For schools whose conservative politics or religion make them wary of One Love’s education, staff admitted to having to “sometimes sleep with the devil.” They’d rather only show that school their content involving friendships and hope that the students would check out the rest of the website on their own later on, than be shut out by admin completely for insisting they show their content on sexual relationships and LGBTQ+ relationships.

tracey.mov

"We are on a five year march to build trust."

When speaking about other communities who might be hesitant because of a history of harm, my supervisor explained that when working with Indigenous communities for example, “it’s often a five or seven year march in which trust is being built. We offer ourselves and our content but they are in charge so that they can choose what content, if any, they might want to use but within the frameworks of health and education systems they already have.”

In both cases, the community leaders are in left charge, regardless of their allignment with One Love's mission. In actuality, this allows One Love to access more communties. De-centering the politics of the organization ultimately brings the education to a greater number of students, which will in turn positively affect their relationships and likely inform their politics for the better.

Conclusion

Research Question: Can a non-profit organization that must remain politically non-partisan actually have the impact it hopes to on relationship violence when that is a politicized issue?

Conclusions: Despite it being unable to comment directly on the politics surrounding the politicized issue of relationship violence, One Love does have a successful impact on our understanding and practice of love. Its pre-preventative approach enables it to maneuver a polarized and oppressive political landscape more effectively than other 501(c)(3) organizations, because it takes root before anything else can, before the introduction of politics. One Love's curriculum creates a foundational understanding of healthy love, leading young people to likely have love-informed politics as opposed to being controlled by the lovelessness of the current political landscape. The organization de-centers itself in its work, which creates a network resembling that of a mutual-aid organization, ultimately letting communities receive this education in the way that will be most helpful and best digested.

Page updated

Report abuse