Volunteer Spotlight: Ember Bradbury
Volunteer Ember Bradbury
The Rape Recovery Center volunteer team consists of nearly 150 incredible individuals who give their time, talents, and passion to furthering our mission of serving survivors and educating the community about sexual violence. This month we are spotlighting our talented Crisis Line Volunteer, Ember Bradbury
Ember has been volunteering for the crisis line since 2017. She is an extremely kind and caring individual. We recently had an experience were Ember had to hold the crisis line for over 24 hours and she did it with such grace and kindness. We are so grateful for her hard work and collaboration. Thank you, Ember!
What motivated you to become a volunteer at the Rape Recovery Center?
Holding space for survivors and victims in my community is incredibly fulfilling. I wanted to be able to take an active role in helping people connect with the resources and support, instead of just passively advocating for change. Utah’s 1 in 3 sexual violence experience rates in womxn is absolutely horrifying and being a part of the RRC community is a great way to help to support survivors and prevent perpetration.
What have you enjoyed most about your time as an RRC volunteer?
I love talking to the people that call into the crisis line. It is an incredible honor to be trusted with the most difficult and vulnerable parts of an individual’s lives and I have learned and grown so much from being given that trust.
What is most challenging about your volunteer work at the RRC?
It is hard to balance being totally empathetic and emotionally invested in every client interaction with maintaining enough distance that the heavy things we hear don’t dramatically impact our lives. The most demanding part of the work is really after we hang-up the phone or leave the interaction because you are left with processing and feeling through how awful the world can be without the armoring of being there for another person. Even though we don’t experience the events first-hand, we have to emotionally invest in the clients to be good at talking with them about their experiences, and it can be tricky to just cut-off that investment once the call ends.
Tell us a little more about how you spend your time outside of volunteering for the RRC - hobbies, passions, work, school?
I am attending graduate school in the fall at the University of Michigan for my M.S. in Conservation Ecology. I have a degree in Biology with a Chemistry minor from Westminster College and will be focusing on Ornithology in my graduate studies. I absolutely love being a scientist and am beyond excited to continue pursuing this work. Right now, I’m working for my local domestic violence shelter and humane society. In my free time, I hike and climb, play lots of music, and sit in the sunshine with friends and family.
You have immersed yourself in the very difficult work of addressing sexual violence. What gives you hope as you approach this work?
When I first started this work, it was easy to dismiss all perpetrators as genuinely evil people, and I still think that in some cases that is true. However, the sheer number of individuals who experience sexual violence points to the fact that this is a systemic issue and a public health crisis more than anything else. I think working from that view has helped me have hope because we know that like any other public health crisis, there are things we can do as a community to prevent sexual violence and to stand together with a clear message that perpetration will not be tolerated. Working with survivors is also a big place of hope for me. It takes so much energy, time, and strength to survive a sexual assault, but so many people demonstrate this immense resilience every day. No matter what gender, sex, race, orientation, or point in the metabolizing the experience, processing and coping with trauma is an incredible feat and it gives me so much hope to be a part of being there for folks who are doing it.
What is your message to others looking to get involved in this work, or considering volunteer work at the RRC?
Preventing sexual violence and advocating for survivors is the responsibility of every community member and in every space. Advocates should be the norm, not the exception. No matter who you are or what your profession is, take training, get involved in a justice organization, speak up when you see something happening. Getting involved in this work will allow you to be an active part of changing the culture and will likely be one of the most fulfilling and challenging things you will experience. Don’t be worried that you won’t be good at it or that it will take too much time because everyone who wants to say: “survivors deserves humanizing support and care and perpetration is not welcome here” can do it and you get to choose how much time it takes up. The important part is that we get people engaged and educated to make us more empathetic and move us in a better direction as a whole.