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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 

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Safe by Sadé is an interdisciplinary women's safety initiative founded by New York City Research Scientist Sade Eastmond and grounded in the convergent disciplines of cognitive behavioral neuroscience, sociocultural anthropology, public policy analysis, and urban health science (Eastmond, 2024). The initiative designs and delivers evidence-based programming across five dimensions (self-defense education, situational awareness training, life skills and boundary-setting, trauma-informed support, and community-centered safe spaces) serving women and girls in New York City's most underserved communities.

 

Sade Eastmond requests funding to support the expansion of Safe by Sadé's programming, community research, and policy advocacy infrastructure across New York City. Funding will directly strengthen the capacity to develop and deliver evidence-based safety curricula, expand accessible workshops and programming, produce online education and prevention resources, support survivor-centered healing initiatives, advance the community research informing future policy, and fund the ongoing ethnographic fieldwork and photojournalistic documentation that keeps this work grounded in the real and evolving conditions of the communities it serves (Eastmond, 2024).

 

STATEMENT OF NEED

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Women's safety in New York City is a documented, measurable, and urgent public health crisis. The data demand a response commensurate with their severity. New York City recorded 249,077 Domestic Incident Reports in 2024, 9,953 sex crimes, and 1,341 rapes (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). There were 66 domestic violence homicides in 2024 alone, and over the preceding decade, domestic violence homicides accounted for 16.5% of all murders in the city (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Black women, who constitute 13% of the city's population, represented 31.2% of intimate partner homicide victims (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). The Bronx, the city's poorest borough, recorded the highest per-capita rates of both rape at 24.0 per 100,000 and sex crimes at 130.6 per 100,000 (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Seventy-seven percent of rapes occurred in residential settings, the spaces women are supposed to be safest (NYC ENDGBV, 2024).

 

The neurological consequences of this violence compound its immediate harm. Over 75% of domestic violence survivors sustain traumatic brain injuries that go undiagnosed (Valera et al., 2019). The estimated 1.6 million brain injuries occurring annually among domestic abuse survivors in the United States represent eleven to twelve times more traumatic brain injuries than those sustained by military personnel and athletes combined (Valera et al., 2019). PTSD produces measurable neurobiological disruption and epigenetic changes capable of transmitting across generations (Yehuda et al., 2016). An ACE score of 4 increases depression risk by 460% and a score of 6 or more shortens lifespan by approximately 20 years (Felitti et al., 1998). Violence against women is not a social problem with biological consequences. It is a biological crisis with social causes, and it demands an intervention model that addresses both.

 

The structural conditions amplifying this crisis are equally documented. Domestic violence is the single leading cause of family homelessness in New York City, accounting for 41% of families entering the shelter system (NYC Comptroller, 2019). Brooklyn evictions increased from 62 in 2021 to 3,672 in 2024 (Gothamist, 2024), severing survivors from the community networks, service providers, and safety infrastructure that make sustained recovery possible. Ninety-four percent of survivors report economic abuse by perpetrators, and 21 to 60% lose their jobs due to abuse (NYC ENDGBV, 2024; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022).

 

Globally, one in three women worldwide (840 million) has experienced physical or sexual violence in her lifetime (World Health Organization, 2024). In the United States, the lifetime economic burden of intimate partner violence is estimated at $3.6 trillion (Peterson et al., 2018). These figures make one conclusion unavoidable: women's safety is not a peripheral social concern. It is one of the defining public health and human rights challenges of our time, and its resolution will not arrive without sustained, evidence-based, community-centered intervention of exactly the kind that Safe by Sadé is designed to provide.

 

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ORGANIZATIONAL OVERVIEW

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Safe by Sadé was founded by Sade Eastmond on the conviction that safety is not a privilege to be distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, geography, and access, but a right that education, research, and community have the power to protect and defend. The initiative operates at the intersection of scholarly rigor and community practice, translating Eastmond's research in cognitive behavioral neuroscience, anthropology, and urban health science into programming that meets women where they are and builds what they need to move forward.

 

The initiative is led by Sade Eastmond, a New York City Research Scientist and Master's Candidate at the City University of New York whose research has been recognized by Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honor Society. Eastmond holds multiple certifications in Clinical Research through the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative and brings a multimodal methodological apparatus (ethnographic fieldwork, autoethnographic inquiry, photojournalistic documentation, and clinical research frameworks) to every dimension of this work.

 

Safe by Sadé is not a response to a single event or a single community. It is the product of years of rigorous academic inquiry, independent research, and direct community engagement conducted across the urban landscape of New York City. Every framework it employs, every curriculum it develops, and every space it creates is rooted in evidence, informed by neuroscience, and built around the real, documented, and deeply human experiences of the women it exists to serve.

 

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PROGRAM DESIGN & EVIDENCE BASE

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Safe by Sadé's programming is designed in direct response to the documented evidence on what works. Every dimension of the initiative reflects rigorous alignment between the scholarly literature on effective prevention and the community realities uncovered through ethnographic fieldwork in New York City.

 

The self-defense and resistance education programming is grounded in the evidence base established by the Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act program, whose randomized controlled trial demonstrated a 46% reduction in completed rape, a 63% reduction in attempted rape, and sustained effects at two years, with a number needed to treat of just 22 women to prevent one additional rape (Senn et al., 2015). The situational awareness curriculum is informed by current scholarship in cognitive and social psychology, building the trained, deliberate capacity to read environments and recognize early behavioral indicators of danger before risk escalates. Life skills and boundary-setting programming draws upon evidence demonstrating that relational and emotional competence (including the capacity to identify and enforce personal boundaries) functions as fundamental safety infrastructure, not supplementary wellness programming (Hollander & Cunningham, 2020).

 

Trauma-informed methodology runs through every dimension of the programming, grounded in the neurobiological evidence that psychological restoration and physical preparedness are not separate processes (Yehuda et al., 2016). The community spaces component recognizes what the research consistently demonstrates: that safety is not only an individual practice but is produced in relationship, sustained in community, and most powerful when it is shared. The Green Dot bystander intervention model's demonstration of over 50% reduction in sexual violence perpetration at community scale confirms that collective safety practices produce population-level effects unavailable to individual-level interventions alone (Green Dot, 2024).

 

 

RESEARCH & DOCUMENTATION 

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A dimension of Safe by Sadé that distinguishes it from conventional community safety programs is its integration of original scholarly research with applied programming. Sade Eastmond's ongoing research, conducted through ethnographic fieldwork across New York City's five boroughs, autoethnographic inquiry into the structural conditions women navigate daily, and photojournalistic documentation of the material realities those conditions produce, generates primary data that continuously informs, refines, and advances the initiative's programming and policy advocacy.

 

This research enterprise interrogates four active areas of investigation: demographic composition and migration patterns and their neurological consequences; property values, ownership patterns, and displacement as determinants of women's safety infrastructure; public health policy and municipal legislation as architectural determinants of community safety conditions; and community health and wellbeing as synthesized outcomes of the preceding forces. The case study of New York City produced through this research (of which this proposal is a component) represents the first volume of a book series applying this analytical framework to the conditions of women in urban environments, advancing both academic knowledge and the public conversation required to achieve the systemic changes that the scale of this crisis demands.

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Funding supporting this research component will enable expanded ethnographic fieldwork, photojournalistic documentation, community-based participatory research partnerships, and the production and dissemination of scholarly outputs capable of informing municipal policy and future funding priorities.

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GOALS & OBJECTIVES 

 

The goals of this initiative are organized across the five pillars of Safe by Sadé's vision:

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Resilience, Autonomy, Awareness, Wellbeing, and Community

 

The first goal is to develop and deliver research-based safety curricula designed specifically for women and girls at every stage of life, from adolescence through adulthood, built on the most current evidence in behavioral science, neuroscience, and community health. Success will be measured through pre- and post-program assessments of safety knowledge, self-efficacy, and behavioral confidence, with a target of 30% improvement in composite safety competence scores among program participants.

 

The second goal is to expand accessible workshops and programming for underserved communities in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens (the boroughs where the data document the heaviest burden of gender-based violence) ensuring that the women who need this work most are not the women least able to access it. Success will be measured by the number of women served, with a target of reaching 500 community participants in the grant period.

 

The third goal is to produce online education and prevention resources that extend the reach of evidence-based safety training beyond the classroom and into the hands of women who may never have access to in-person programming without it. Success will be measured by digital reach, resource downloads, and engagement metrics.

 

The fourth goal is to support survivor-centered initiatives within a healing, empowering, and community-affirming framework that honors what women have survived while building what they need to move forward. Success will be measured through participant-reported wellbeing outcomes at three and six-month intervals.

 

The fifth goal is to advance the community research and scholarly documentation that informs future policy, prevention strategy, and systemic change, including the production of the New York City Case Study book series and its dissemination to academic, policy, and community audiences.​

 

 

CONCLUSION​

 

Safe by Sadé exists because women deserve to move through the world safely. Because girls deserve to grow up without learning to make themselves smaller to survive. Because the neurological record of violence against women is written into the architecture of the brain and the methylation of genes, and its reversal requires not patience but precision, not sympathy but investment (Yehuda et al., 2016; Valera et al., 2019). Because every dollar invested in evidence-based women's safety programming returns measurable reductions in violence, measurable improvements in neurological and psychological health, and measurable contributions to the communities whose safety determines the safety of us all.

 

Your funding makes that possible.

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REFERENCES

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). Intimate partner violence. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/index.html

Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8

Gothamist. (2024, January). Brooklyn sees dramatic spike in evictions as housing crisis worsens.

Green Dot. (2024). About the Green Dot model. https://www.greendotprogram.org

Hollander, J. A., & Cunningham, S. E. (2020). Life skills and boundary-setting as safety infrastructure. In P. A. Frazier & C. C. Ward (Eds.), Sexual violence against women and girls (pp. 149–171). American Psychological Association.

New York City Comptroller. (2019). The cost of homelessness: A report to the New York City Council. Office of the NYC Comptroller.

NYC End Gender-Based Violence (ENDGBV). (2024). 2024 data on domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender-based violence in New York City. New York City Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence.

Peterson, C., Kearns, M. C., McIntosh, W. L., Estefan, L. F., Nicolaidis, C., McCollister, K. E., Gordon, A., & Florence, C. (2018). Lifetime economic burden of intimate partner violence among U.S. adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 55(4), 433–444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2018.06.017

Senn, C. Y., Eliasziw, M., Barata, P. C., Thurston, W. E., Newby-Clark, I. R., Radtke, H. L., & Hobden, K. L. (2015). Efficacy of a sexual assault resistance program for university women. The New England Journal of Medicine, 372(24), 2326–2335. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1411131

Senn, C. Y., Eliasziw, M., Hobden, K. L., Newby-Clark, I. R., Barata, P. C., Radtke, H. L., & Thurston, W. E. (2017). Secondary and 2-year outcomes of a sexual assault resistance program for university women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 41(2), 147–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684317690119

Senn, C. Y., Eliasziw, M., Barata, P. C., Thurston, W. E., Newby-Clark, I. R., Radtke, H. L., Edwards, K., & Hobden, K. L. (2021). Testing a model of how a sexual assault resistance education program for women reduces sexual assaults. Psychology of Violence, 11(2), 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1037/vio0000351

Valera, E. M., Cao, Z., Pasternak, O., Shenton, M. E., Kubicki, M., Makris, N., & Adra, N. (2019). White matter correlates of mild traumatic brain injuries in women subjected to intimate-partner violence: A preliminary study. Journal of Neurotrauma, 36(5), 661–668. https://doi.org/10.1089/neu.2018.5734

Valera, E. M., Campbell, J., Gill, J., & Iverson, K. M. (2019). Correlates of brain injuries in women subjected to intimate partner violence: Identifying the dangers and raising awareness. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 28(6), 695–713. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2019.1581864

World Health Organization. (2024). Violence against women: Data and figures. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women

Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Bierer, L. M., Bader, H. N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., & Binder, E. B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry, 80(5), 372–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.08.005